CHICOPEE — Jobs making golf balls at Callaway Golf Ball Operations Inc. in Chicopee come with all the usual benefits plus one unique perk: Company-paid visits to Annie’s Driving Range.
If you are going to make golf balls, you must know about golf.
“It’s all part of our on-boarding,” said Vincent J. Simonds, senior director, global golf ball operations for Callaway. “I want people to think about the quality and consistency of each ball they make. Is this a ball they would want to put into play on a golf course with a tournament on the line?”
Because at least a few of the balls made at a plant — where capacity is 240,000 balls a day or 5 million to 6 million dozen a year — end up in the hands of one of the 30 PGA tour pros who use Callaway balls, a list that includes Phil Mickelson.
“Our employees make a ball that they can see on television on Sunday afternoon,” Simonds said.
The attitude has filtered down to the factory floor, a space where Simonds seems to know most of the worker’s names.
One man left his work station in the shipping department at the end of his shift jokingly bidding farewell to all his “beautiful babies” as they waited in barrels for packaging in three-ball sleeves and dozen-ball boxes.
After that, he knew they’d be headed off to sporting goods stores, pro-shops, golf bags and, yes, golf course water hazards — all over the world.
Callaway is wrapping up more than $40 million in improvements and equipment upgrades at its factory at 425 Meadow St. in the Willimansett section of the city. Spalding moved to Chicopee in 1905.
Callaway bought Top-Flite and the Chicopee plant in 2003 for $125 million.
The Callaway Plant, previously part of Spalding and manufacturer of its Top-Flite brand of golf equipment, has the longest tenure of any golf ball manufacturing facility in the world and was the place were dimples were first added by machine.
In the old days, the dimples necessary to stabilize a ball in flight were carved out by hand, Simonds said.
Employment now stands at 403 up from just 125 workers in 2012.
The workforce at Callaway has gone up 60% in just the last three years, the company said.
The reason is that the golf balls Callaway makes in Chicopee — the Chrome Soft ball with or without Triple Track or Truvis markings and the Supersoft brand — have gained in market share, said Jason Finley, global director of product strategy for Callaway.
Today the brands are 17.8 percent of the U.S. market in terms of dollars spent. Put another way, two of every five golf balls sold in the United States comes from the factory, Finley said.
In an August presentation to investors, Callaway said it’s the number two golf ball company in the world in terms of market share.
In its most recent earnings report and that golf ball sales of the six months that ended Sept. 30 were 6% ahead of where they were a year ago during the same period at $172 million.
Callaway also has manufacturing partners in Taiwan, Simonds said, but the tooling comes from Chicopee.
Callaway bought the Chicopee plant in 2003 for $125 million. A high-end manufacturer of golf equipment founded by Ely Callaway and initially known for the Big Bertha driver; Callaway no longer owns the Top-Flite brand.
And Findlay said that golf is making a comeback. The total number of rounds played is up, and that’s what matters most in golf ball business. It means more than the total number of golfers.
“Because if people are playing rounds, then they are losing balls,” he said.
All that demand meant Callaway had to innovate in Chicopee, Simonds said.
“We did it because there is no eighth day,” he said. “And we tried to run seven days a week. There really isn’t the workforce to support that.”
The whole reason Callaway, and before it Top-Flite, are here in Chicopee is because of the region’s continuing excellence in machining and precision manufacturing, Simonds said.
“I like to say our golf balls go back to the American Revolution, when George Washington established the armory,” he said.
Today, hiring and recruiting more of those workers is critical to the success of the factory.
“It’s our single biggest challenge,” Simonds said.
Employees start $17 an hour but skilled tradespeople are in the $30 or more an hour range.
He and his Callaway staff have relationships with area vocational schools, especially Roger L. Putnam Vocational Technical Academy in Springfield.
That’s where students lean the mechanical and measuring skills the need to set up and operate machinery and monitor to make sure each ball comes off the assembly line identical to all the other balls.
Callaway works with Springfield Technical Community College and Holyoke Community College through their TWO Training and Workforce Options to provide continuing education to workers.
Out on the floor, Springfield resident Xzander Chapman, a championship wrestler at the high school, is preparing to move up from a job setting up machinery to a maintenance job. He’s worked there for about a year.
“There are a lot of opportunities,” he said. “It’s a great place to work.”
The new mixing equipment takes rubber and makes a marshmallow-shaped slug. Workers take the cores and put them into molds. A robot takes molds, matches a top half to a bottom half and puts them in a press.
Under heat and pressure the rubber forms into a core.
Golf balls, Simonds said, are like the earth: a core surrounded by layers.
From there, workers move the cores to other machines, building up layers and eventually putting on a cover.
Callaway works then add decorations. The Truvis pattern is pentagons, think of the pattern on a soccer ball, meant to help a golfer focus on a shot and spot a ball more easily in the air. Callaway prints them with custom pentagon-shaped logos honoring golf courses or corporate sponsors
Triple Track is another aiming aid, three parallel lines carefully painted on the ball’s cover so golfers can line up a put.
Like Simonds said, “with the tournament on the line”.
