David Bach is sitting in his office at Whistling Straits, looking out at a golf course that has hosted three PGA Championships and the 2021 Ryder Cup. It is one of the most celebrated golf destinations in the world and David has worked here for eight years. He still has to remind himself how he got here.
“I’m sitting here right now looking out at the course through my office,” he said. “This is my office now. It’s the best office in the world.”
It is a long way from where the story started. But the way Bach tells it, the two places are not as far apart as they might seem.
The Trailer at Noyes Park
Bach grew up as the oldest of four siblings in Brown Deer, a few minutes north of Milwaukee. His parents were intentional about keeping their kids active with sports, instruments, summer camps, whatever opened a door. His parents enrolled him in First Tee — Southeast Wisconsin, and he never wanted to leave.
“My parents kept me in the program because I kept going back, year after year after year,” he said. “It was just something I really enjoyed as a kid.”
Noyes Park Golf Course was only a five minute drive away, and Bach treated it like a second home. Morning First Tee camps flowed into afternoons on the par-3 course. But what really kept pulling him back was not the scorecard. It was the trailer.
The First Tee staff kept their equipment there: clubs hanging on the walls, gear filling every shelf, the accumulated clutter of a place where golf was always being talked about and worked on. For a kid who described himself as a natural tinkerer, it was magnetic.
“In the golf industry, there are just these areas where you tend to gravitate and talk about golf and just be around golf,” he said. “That trailer was one of my spots.”
He was a regular visitor between rounds and after camp, stopping in to talk shop with First Tee staff and whoever else was around. Years later, he still tells stories about that trailer to the junior instructors he works with at Kohler. It was not just a place. It was where his identity as a golfer began to take shape.
Moments That Never Left
Those years at Noyes left Bach with a handful of memories that have never faded. These memories are the kind that only come from a place where someone invested real time and care into a kid who could not get enough.
There was the day a PGA Tour player came out to Noyes for a clinic. The kids gathered near the chipping green by the trailer, and the visitor, Skip Kendall, a 13-year PGA Tour veteran, was going through some things, answering questions, keeping it light. Then, almost as an aside, he lofted a flop shot directly into a trash can ten yards away. First try.
“It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen,” Bach said. “And it was his first try. That was kind of my first peak into golf at such a high competitive level.”
There was the range ball contest, where one of the instructors drew a mark on a ball, launched it as far down the range as he could, and challenged the junior campers to find it. Bach found it. Standing there in the grass holding that ball, he understood for the first time just how far a skilled adult could hit a golf ball. It sounds like a small thing. It was not.
And there was a coach, a left-handed player who had taught himself to swing right-handed just so he could better demonstrate to his junior students. Bach still tells that story today. Not as a fun fact, but as a lesson about what it looks like when someone is truly committed to the kids in front of them.
“I still tell instructors at our academy about that,” he said. “It has stuck with me all these years.”
These were not accidents. They were the product of coaches who showed up, got creative, and made the game feel like the most exciting thing in the world for a group of kids at a public par-3 course in Milwaukee.
Making It Fun
When Bach reflects on what First Tee gave him, he does not lead with swing mechanics or competitive development. He leads with something that sounds simple but is harder to teach than almost anything else.
“That’s what I remember most from my days at First Tee,” he said. “Just how enjoyable this game can be.”
It is a principle he now carries into every lesson he gives at the Kohler Golf Academy, whether he is working with a junior camper who just picked up a club for the first time or a seasoned golfer from across the country who has been fighting the same slice for twenty years.
“Even for the seasoned vet trying to correct the big slice,” he said, “it’s just: how do we get that game back to being fun?”
The values side of the game is equally present in his instruction. Golf, he tells every student, has no referee. There is no official standing behind you when your ball lands in a divot in the middle of the fairway. You call it yourself.
“It’s a game built on integrity and honesty,” he said. “And you can really relate it to some of the challenges you experience in life. Sometimes you get bad breaks. That’s all part of it. It’s just how you adapt and overcome, in both golf and in life.”
The Moment It Became More Than a Game
At age 12, Bach got his first job as a caddie at Ozaukee Country Club. It was also the first time he had ever set foot on an 18-hole golf course.
What struck him was not the course itself. It was watching the golf professionals move through their day, from the shop to the range to the first tee: running games, giving lessons, chatting with members, doing it all with what looked like effortless joy.
“This doesn’t even seem like a job,” he remembered thinking. “It seems like the most fun thing in the world to possibly do.”
That was the moment. From there, the path began to form.
He played high school golf at Brown Deer, a program that came close to being cut during his time there, but survived, and developed enough to compete in junior events around the Milwaukee area, including the Pepsi Par-3 Tour. He was not a high-profile recruit. He was a kid who loved the game and kept working.
After high school, he enrolled in the Golf Enterprise Management program at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, combining competitive golf with the business side of the industry. His first internship was at Erin Hills during his freshman year. For his second, the extended six-month internship, he had a job offer from Bandon Dunes essentially ready to sign.
Then a friend mentioned Whistling Straits.
It was 2015, and the course was preparing to host its third PGA Championship. He got a call from Whistling Straits and couldn’t pass down the opportunity. The chance to work a major championship would set him apart. He turned down Bandon Dunes and headed to Kohler.
“It was a great choice,” he said simply.
He finished his college career at UW-Stout and in Eau Claire, working at a local course to complete his PGA associate hours. When he graduated, Whistling Straits hired him as an entry-level assistant and he has been there ever since.
The First Time He Heard of Whistling Straits
There is a moment Bach shared that captures the distance he has traveled better than any resume could.
He was a kid, maybe 12 or 13, chipping on the practice green at Brown Deer Park when a group of older golfers nearby started talking about thick rough and how hard it was to escape. He assumed they were talking about a tournament he knew: the Greater Milwaukee Open, which had been held at Brown Deer Park Golf Course.
They were not.
“They said, no, there’s a PGA Championship happening up there, about an hour north of here,” Bach recalled. “And that was Whistling Straits.”
He went home and watched it on television. He had never known the course existed.
Now he arrives there every morning. He walks the same fairways he once watched on TV as a kid sitting in Brown Deer. He looks out at Lake Michigan from his desk. And every once in a while, he has to stop and take it in.
“It’s a pinch-me, surreal moment,” he said. “To be where I started, not even stepping foot on an 18-hole course until I was 12, and now to be here. It’s pretty amazing.”
Eight Years at Kohler, and Counting
Bach’s rise at Whistling Straits has been steady and, by his own description, faster than he expected. In under eight years, he has worked from entry-level assistant to 1st Assistant Golf Professional, a role that puts him in one of the most storied golf operations in the country.
A significant part of that role is leading junior programming. As the head instructor for the Kohler Golf Academy, Bach runs junior camps, gives individual instruction to players at every level, and has coached a PGA Jr. League team for five consecutive seasons. He also served as the on-site lead for the PGA Works Youth Day at Whistling Straits, organizing an event that brought Milwaukee-area junior golfers to Kohler for a day.
He does not treat youth instruction as a side element of the job. He treats it as a priority.
“There are going to be kids that are sent there by their parents,” he said. “But there are the kids that are really invested in it, that have that excitement, and it resonates with me because it’s that same excitement that I have.”
He thinks often about what First Tee gave him, and what it means to be on the other side of that equation now. The answer keeps coming back to the same thing it always has.
“It’s my way of giving back to the game that has given so much to me,” he said. “Just trying to help inspire kids to explore this game, not only competitively, but the business side of it as well.”
A Player at the Top of His Game
While building his career in instruction and operations, Bach has quietly become one of the top competitive players in the Wisconsin PGA Section.
He won his first WPGA Assistant Player of the Year award in 2019, just his second year as a PGA associate. He has now claimed that award four times, joining a short list of Wisconsin PGA assistants to win it three or more times. Along the way, he added back-to-back Wisconsin State Assistant Professionals Championships in 2022 and 2023, two Wisconsin State Assistant Match Play Championships, and the 2024 WPGA Member Match Play Championship.
Then came September 2025.
At Ozaukee Country Club, the same club where he caddied at age 12 and got his first glimpse of what a career in golf could look like, Bach shot back-to-back rounds of 66 to win the Wisconsin PGA Professional Championship by five strokes. The victory earned him a berth in the national PGA Professional Championship and established him as one of the premier playing professionals in the state.
He described his competitive philosophy this way: “It’s this constant, unattainable pursuit of perfection. That’s what we’re all chasing. No matter if you’re Scottie Scheffler or a club pro, we’re never going to achieve that, but we’re going to continue to chase it.”
The mental side of the game has become his real focus in recent years, something he is equally intentional about passing on to the competitive junior players he coaches at Kohler.
“As I’ve gotten older, it’s much more about managing yourself around the course, particularly in big tournaments, than the physical side,” he said. “There have been so many repetitions on the physical side. Now it’s about how you manage the stress.”
His advice to the kids chasing college golf opportunities through his instruction, “Not going out there trying to make birdies. Just doing your thing, and hopefully letting the scores come.”
What He Would Tell a Kid at Noyes
Bach does not have a complicated message for the kids going through First Tee — Southeast Wisconsin right now at Noyes Park. He has the message of someone who lived it.
“Keep at this game, and you’ll never know where it can take you,” he said. “You could have told me at the age of 8 or 10 that I was going to be in the role I’m in here and I wouldn’t believe you.”
He believes programs like First Tee, rooted in public spaces, built around values, committed to kids who might not have any other entry point into the game, are essential to producing stories like his. Not because every participant is going to win a state championship or work at a world-class resort, but because the lessons travel, and they last.
“It’s a game that can provide so much more than just a score or physical activity,” he said. “It teaches honesty, integrity, and so many different values that kids can apply to the rest of their lives and how they carry themselves as people. I don’t think any other game does that quite to the same level.”
From a trailer full of clubs at a public par-3 in Milwaukee to the best office in the world on the shores of Lake Michigan: David Bach is proof of what is possible when someone invests in a kid who can’t get enough of the game.
First Tee — Southeast Wisconsin programming takes place at Noyes Park Golf Course in Milwaukee. To support the work that creates stories like David’s, visit firstteesew.org/donate.