Ashley Derry, Assistant Food & Beverage Manager at Danville (Ky.) Country Club, was featured in the local newspaper for her enthusiastic approach to showing how the club “offers so much more here for kids and families” than people might think when just driving by and seeing the golf course. Her long-term goal is to show how the club can be “a great place with great people to surround yourself with.”
Ashley Derry, Assistant Food & Beverage Manager at Danville (Ky.) Country Club, was featured in the local newspaper, The Advocate Messenger, in a profile that carried the headline, “Danville Woman Serves Up Fun at Country Club.”
“Making people happy is a big part of the job for Ashley Derry,” The Advocate Messenger’s profile began.
“I love my job,” Derry told The Advocate Messenger, which then described how the 2001 graduate of the local high school (Boyle County High School) began working at Danville CC in 2009 as an hourly employee and has worked her way up to her current position.
“I like working with people, I like to make people happy,” Derry said, adding that she can do that and still be herself at the club. “I like coming up with new ideas and creating new things.”
One of Derry’s favorite aspects of her job is the freedom to create, The Advocate Messenger reported. She works diligently with the club’s Food & Beverage Director, Nicole Glasscock, to create family-friendly events such as an upcoming Easter egg hunt and a fireworks show with games for the Fourth of July.
“[Nicole] and I work really great as a team to try to accomplish everything that we can here,” Derry said.
“I think a lot of people drive by and they see [the club] as a golf course, but we offer so much more here for kids and families and for anybody that would want to be involved,” she added.
In addition to golf, Danville CC, with nearly 300 members, offers tennis and swim lessons to children, teens and adults of all ages, The Advocate Messenger reported. Cooking classes are also offered to members by Executive Chef Tony Williams.
Building relationships with the “great staff,” her bosses and the members is another favorite part of her job, Derry said. “I get along with my staff so well. The people that I work with, my bosses that I have over me, they’re all great.
“The relationships that you build with the membership, you see the same faces coming in every day,” she added. “I know everyone by name. I’m hands-on, and I like to help my staff to make sure the members and guests get the attention they need when they eat here or when they’re here for an event.”
Events at the club range from wedding receptions to business meetings to memorial services, Derry told The Advocate Messenger. Other popular events include pool parties, member crafts fairs, trivia nights.
As a native of Danville who still lives in the central Kentucky town, which has a population of about 16,000, Derry said she wants to enhance the image of the club.
“One of my goals is to get more of my age group here,” she told The Advocate Messenger. “It’s a great place [with] great people to surround yourself with.
“I feel the clubhouse is an asset to society,” she added. “We want to get the word out to people, so they can see that the clubhouse is a place where their kids can grow up and have more role models in their lives.”
Raised by a single mother who taught her what it means to be determined and that she can do “anything” she puts her mind to, Derry told The Advocate Messenger that she understands the importance of hard work and strives to always apply that lesson to her position at Danville CC. She also learned valuable skills for her current job by following in her father’s footsteps into the restaurant business, when she began waitressing at the age of 15.
Derry, who has a degree in Business Administration-Management from National College and is now the mother of two girls herself, told The Advocate Messenger that one of the biggest lessons she has learned is that “everyone makes mistakes.”
“You learn from your mistakes,” she said. “The more I’ve been doing this, the less mistakes I make, because I’m learning as I go,”
Currently, Derry and Danville CC are in the process of building an app for members, The Advocate Messenger reported, that will include a calendar of events, with the ability to sign up or reserve a table.
“You have to keep moving forward,” Derry said.
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