None of the six Solheim Cup staffers are from Iowa. None of them had been to Iowa before joining the Des Moines staff of the women’s professional golf event, as far as marketing and sales director Amanda Scott knows. 

The Solheim staff of six, soon to be seven, now is settling in. Tournament director Chris Garrett is coaching youth sports. Assistant director Drew Blass has kids in local schools. The rest of the team hits the farmers market, the trails and happy hours. Three ran the Des Moines Marathon.

By the way, Scott is from Washington state and had an interesting journey to Iowa. “I will be honest — when I applied for this job I thought it was located in Daytona Beach, Fla., because that is where we are headquartered. On my second phone interview, they asked if I was aware this job would be located in Iowa. So I got out the Google maps and made sure I could make the move. I flew out there in February, and it was negative 15 degrees. I got stuck overnight because the cargo door on the plane was frozen open. I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I called my mom, and she said, ‘What are you doing? Don’t do this.’

“I will be honest,” Scott said. “I had some pretty low expectations. (Note to Amanda: There’s a Raygun T-shirt about this). That was absolutely unfair. I absolutely love Iowa. If you talk to anyone on our team, they will say the same thing. You have everything you need in this community to support major events like this. The restaurants, the businesses, all the attractions. And yet you walk down the street, and you feel like you are in a small town where everyone really rallies around you.”

Members of the Solheim team are running, volunteering, nursing, coaching and otherwise being Des Moinesians, or Des Moinesers — uh, locals. They are looking for a crowd of around 200,000 for the annual competition between the top golfers in the United States and Europe, the women’s version of the Ryder Cup, which would be a record. So they are feeling pretty good about the place. “You may have six more permanent residents at the end of the event,” Scott said. 

P.S. U.S. captain Juli Inkster, who botched the pronunciation of Des Moines on the promotional video for the West Des Moines event, now knows how to pronounce our Midwestern French name. But she has decided to call it “Dez Money.”