Kathryn Jemsik grew up in a golf family, and loved the game, but stopped playing after high school and planned to become an elementary school teacher.
“My mom used to say they didn’t know who was going to run the business but they knew it wasn’t going to be Katherine,” she said recently at Cog Hill Golf & Country Club in the southwest Chicago suburb of Palos Park. “I didn’t have much interest in golf. As a kid, I’d golf for ice cream. We’d go to the Apple Orchard[a course in suburban Bartlett]but only if my dad bribed us with ice cream. So we went to Baskin Robbins after that.” If we weren’t, I wouldn’t go.”
So who is the boss of Jemsek Golf, which oversees Cog Hill as well as Pine Meadow in the northern suburbs of Mundelein and Summer Grove in suburban Atlanta? Yes. Kathryn James.
An educational major she switched to business while at the University of Central Florida, and decided that the retail side of the business would be her forte.
“I worked at the pro shop when I was in college,” Jemsek said. When I graduated at 19…