The secret to happiness, it has been said, is to love what you do for a living.

If you can manage that, or so they say, you’ll never work a day in your life.

It’s advice that has certainly seemed to work for Austin Hurt, who, after a decade of hard work and accumulating renown in the regional golf world, has returned to his old high school team to hopefully once more lead the Spartans to state — this time as head coach.

Hurt, a 2006 Bainbridge High grad, was announced as the replacement for Joe Lanza, departing head coach, late last month. He is the boys golf team’s third new coach in three years (Lanza replaced Tom Zuzelski last season).

“I felt like it was an opportunity to make an already great program a little better,” Hurt said.

The new coach was born and raised on Bainbridge Island. He played varsity golf during all four years of his high school career.

The 2004-2005 season was especially exciting for him, as Hurt and team took home the first-place trophy from the state tourney.

Hurt then attended Washington State University and competed for the Cougar golf team during his time there. He graduated in 2010, and currently serves as assistant golf professional at the Spartans’ home course: Wing Point Golf & Country Club.

The techniques necessary to lead a team are not much different from those he employs when working with individual clients, Hurt said. It is, after all, not a team sport in the strictest sense.

The individualistic aspect of golf in fact was what first attracted Hurt as a player.

“I think the thing that attracted me about golf is, not only is a beautiful place to be — I love the setting, I love where it’s at — but it gave me the opportunity to do something by myself without a team, not having those things to maybe put on other people,” he said. “This gave me control of what I was doing and to not have to worry about a passed ball or a failed base hit or something like that.

“It’s all on you all the time,” Hurt added. “I like that a lot, that aspect really drew me in.”

With that in mind, Hurt handles the team a little different from coaches past, fostering a communal, encouraging atmosphere, he said, where everybody helps everybody else improve according to their own strengths.

“We kind of made the team a little bit smaller this year,” he said. “We were just kind of looking to focus more on helping kids who wanted to be here or didn’t just want to come make it an activity [but] wanted to come play on a high school sporting team. That was something I really kind of enforced right off the bat.”

More than 30 students came out for the team this year, Hurt said.

Of them, eight or nine will play on the varsity roster (including four seniors) and another nine make up the junior varsity team. They practice together, though, so as to give the younger kids a more direct look at varsity-level dedication and the seniors a chance to pass on knowledge.

“For the purpose of practice, it’s pretty much one team,” Hurt said. “This way we can play with varsity and JV together. They get to play with one another. They get to see how much time and effort it takes to do something that these varsity kids that are now seniors and juniors, they’ve put a lot of time and effort into it.”

Despite the somewhat rapid run of coaches these past few seasons, Hurt said the program has remained successful because of a unique blend of factors, including the looming memory of past Spartan superstars.

“I think the true strength in our program is the strength of our junior golfers around here,” he said.

“You go back 10 years or five years, we’ve had some pretty successful college golfers. You just look at who has been around and kids around them want to play golf with them. That’s kind of led to the success, I think.

“It’s helped the program quite a bit,” he added. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the coach per se — I think it has a lot to do with what the kids’ goals are and what they want to do out here. I think they want to carry on that legacy of program strength.”

Hurt is unconcerned for now about specific opponents, he said. The Spartans will play as well as they can and continue to work to get better regardless of who’s teeing off against them.

“From what I’ve heard a lot of schools lost a lot of their players,” he said. “Normally O’Dea’s pretty strong [and] Eastside Catholic.

“The kids know better than I would,” he laughed.

“I don’t know if it matters who we play, really.”