KENNESAW, Ga. | Nov 12, 2026

The PGA TOUR Superstore CEO and finance alumnus told Coles College students about the job he should have taken and what he looks for in a graduate

As a young man, Troy Rice spent his days working as a laborer on the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks that run behind Spring Street in downtown Atlanta. When the work was done, he drove north to Kennesaw State University, showered and cleaned up in the campus gym, and then went to night class studying finance.

The railroad job meant a regular paycheck and security. But, in 1990, he left that behind and took a chance on a manager trainee position at The Home Depot.

“I bet on myself, on what I had learned at Kennesaw and along the way,” Rice said.

Rice is now CEO of PGA TOUR Superstore, a national golf retailer with 84 stores in 30 states. He returned to Kennesaw State, where he earned his finance degree in 1988, to present as part of the Michael J. Coles College of Business’s flagship Tetley Distinguished Leader Lecture Series. He came with slides, a video, a story, and his own mistakes to share, and he stayed late to answer students’ questions.

He told the students about how he got to Kennesaw State.

“I went to three different colleges. I had three different majors,” Rice said, before adding, “I didn’t say I had three different degrees!”

The first college was a small community school in Tennessee, where he studied technology. The second was Tennessee Tech, where he studied engineering and walked on to the football team. By the third, he was out of money and working on the railroad.

He stayed at The Home Depot for 16 years, moving his family five times, and rose to lead the company’s largest division, with $24 billion in sales and more than 600 stores. Later, he transitioned into leadership roles at Toys “R” Us, Office Depot, and Total Wine & More, where he became CEO.

“I didn’t know anybody in the companies,” Rice said. “There were no safety nets.”

In 2025, Rice joined PGA TOUR Superstore, which brought him back under Home Depot co-founder Arthur M. Blank, who owns the golf retailer. Blank and the late Bernie Marcus, who ran Home Depot back when Rice was a trainee, have both spoken at previous Tetley events, which have been bringing business leaders to Kennesaw State since 1990.

“They were like family,” Rice said.

As CEO of PGA TOUR Superstore, he still walks stores with Blank’s and Marcus’s questions in the back of his mind:

“What is the best-selling item? What do you have in your store that you don’t have enough of? What do you have in your store that you have too much of? And what don’t you have that you need?”

Every Saturday, he writes notes to store Associates whose customers praised them in online reviews, a habit he took from former Home Depot CEO, Frank Blake.

“Never once have I had a customer say, ‘Troy, we’re so glad you’re CEO,’” Rice said.

Partway through the lecture, he asked the room who plays golf. A few hands went up. He asked who wants to learn, and many more followed.

“You are so representative right now of what’s going on in the world of golf,” Rice said.

Golf’s growth in rounds played, he said, is coming from women, people of color, juniors, and people under 50.

Rice counts himself among the beginners. Decades of working retail weekends kept him off the course until he joined the company.

“Boy, is it hard,” Rice said. “It’s humbling.”

Rice offered students a line he had read on LinkedIn the day before: “If you were to erase all your mistakes, there’d be no you.” Then he told them about some of his mistakes.

As a district manager, he was offered a sideways move to run flooring as a merchant in the Southwest Division. He said no.

“I wanted to become a vice president so bad I could taste it,” Rice said. He regrets the choice because it would have given him valuable knowledge on how different elements of the business run. “There’s nothing like taking assignments and working in those functions.”

Another error from his years as a leader: assuming that what he had seen at one company would hold at the next. “It’s an easy assumption to make. It’s just natural.”

He was specific about what gets a graduate hired.

“I start with attitude,” Rice said. “Am I hiring someone that’s going to be a net positive contributor to the culture or not?”

Then he reads the record.

“What projects have they done? What assignments have they accepted? What internships have they done?” Rice said. “Those matter.”

When students got the chance to ask questions to Rice, they were curious about trust, personal brands, toxic workplaces, and what he would do differently at 20.

Zainab Choudhary, a senior accounting major, wanted to know how the way he responds to feedback had changed since his early career.

“I’ve learned to listen more deeply and try to understand what is driving the feedback,” Rice said.

“It can be scary going into a career,” Choudhary said. “So just having someone that shares their experience is always nice.”

Daniel Crouse, a senior accounting major and a member of the Coles College Leadership Scholars Program, said seeing a Kennesaw State graduate at that level “gives me the confidence to go out and do my best.”

What drives him, Rice told one student, goes back to his first days as a store manager, when he walked up to a senior leader at a company social event. The executive brushed him off.

Right then and there, Rice made a commitment.

“Whatever I do, wherever I go, I don’t care what I’m doing, I’m never going to be like that,” he said.

Rice gave the college almost three hours of a workday.

“It’s all about the students,” Rice said. “My career path was an unusual one. My educational path was unusual.”

The lecture was his second meeting with Coles College students this fall. Weeks earlier, he and his leadership team hosted Cohort 13 of the Leadership Scholars Program at the company for the cohort’s Applied Leadership course, which was the Scholar’s program’s first visit there. The hosts included Ralph Stokes, VP of Social Inclusion, Partnerships, and Community Relations, who delivered a Tetley lecture in 2015.

“I’m a believer in Kennesaw State,” he said. “I’m a believer in the talent that is here. And if we’re not reaching out as a business, then we miss that talent.”

Story by Andrew Mann