PINEHURST There’s the uncertainty of the weather in the Sandhills in June. There’s the demands placed on a championship golf course by hosting back-to-back major tournaments on it. And there’s even the matter of finding a parking lot for traffic from the north – the one used in 2005 is now a golf course itself, fittingly enough.

The list of challenges facing Pinehurst Resort and the USGA as it prepares to host the U.S. Open and the Women’s Open in back-to-back weeks in 2014 is long and significant. The biggest variable of all may be the most human.

Despite being a multimillion-dollar undertaking, a U.S. Open is built on volunteers who pay about $165 for their uniform and work a minimum of four days in return for entry into the grounds – marshalling crowds, manning merchandise tents and filling countless other roles. The same group of volunteers from Minnesota has worked the U.S. Open media tent for decades.

Finding enough not just for one major golf tournament but two in a two-week period may be the toughest hurdle to clear as the USGA and Pinehurst attempt to pull off this unprecedented double on Pinehurst’s No. 2 course, now a mere two years away.

“One of the biggest concerns we had looking at the two-week concept was whether we could pull together the volunteer leadership,” said Reg Jones, the USGA’s senior director of U.S. Opens. “We’re not sure we could do this anywhere else, more than anything because of the volunteers.”

Jones, who worked at Pinehurst before joining the USGA, is inherently biased, but he’s not wrong about the degree of support: Not only the Sandhills but the entire state has embraced the previous USGA championships here.

Ron Crow, known around Pinehurst as “Mr. Volunteer,” has rallied the troops time and time again for two men’s opens, two women’s opens and a U.S. Amateur, not to mention Pinehurst’s annual North & South Amateur. Many come from within an hour of Pinehurst, retirees and working people alike, while others commute from the Triangle, Charlotte and the Triad.

More than 5,400 volunteers worked the men’s open in 2005, while 2,700 worked the women’s open in 2007.

“You can see the vast number that we have,” said Crow, who in 2014 will serve as one of five vice-chairmen. “In 2014, having never, ever (experienced) back-to-back opens, how do you go about it, how do you plan for it?”

The USGA will need more than 7,000 volunteers over the two-week period in 2014, and the USGA is offering applicants the opportunity to work a few days of each tournament in hopes of spreading that support as widely as possible.

Applications were sent to Pinehurst and USGA members earlier this month, and became available to the general public Monday. As Crow solicited volunteers for next month’s North & South, many of them couldn’t help asking about 2014 as well.

“Even though it’s called work and you do work hard in many categories as a volunteer, you love it at the same time,” Crow said. “I certainly do, or I wouldn’t be doing it. It’s a lot of long hours, but I feel like I’m giving a little something back to the community and in this case the state. You get watch some great golf as well.”

There’s one area where there won’t be any shortage of volunteers. As part of the reworking of the No. 2 course, much of the rough was torn out and replaced by sandy expanses of scrub brush. Some of that vegetation was intentionally planted. Some of it was not.

“A few native plants kind of volunteered themselves,” Pinehurst CEO and owner Bob Dedman Jr. said, hoping enough humans share the same spirit.