Rob Collins has served as the architect, owner-operator, General Manager and entire maintenance crew of the daily-fee facility in South Pittsburg, Tenn., which he built on a budget of $1 million. Now, the property is one of two nine-hole layouts featured in Golfweek’s top 100 modern golf courses list, and has golfers who drive 75 minutes each week to play it.
The New York Times recently featured Sweetens Cove Golf Club in South Pittsburg, Tenn., a daily-fee, nine-hole facility included in Golfweek’s top 100 modern golf courses, that the publication describes as an answer to golf’s post-recession challenges of declining participation and stagnant course construction
Rob Collins, 42, is the architect of Sweetens Cove and its owner-operator. He also has served as its head of construction, head pro, general manager and entire maintenance crew. Recently, he has acquired a newer, unlikelier title: golf cult hero, the Times reported.
Collins had an entry-level job in golf course architecture in British Columbia during the housing market crash in 2008, working with Gary Player’s firm. “We were grassing the third hole on this course, Wildstone, when Bear Stearns collapsed,” Collins said, “and then, almost that very same day, everything in the industry stopped dead.”
Collins’ job disappeared, so he took his wife and 4-year-old daughter and moved in with his mother in Chattanooga. He sensed a glimmer of opportunity in the industry’s rubble and fell back on a conversation he had had with the builder Tad King years earlier at a restaurant in Naples, Fla., the Times reported.
“We’d spent hours that night at Carrabba’s just talking about the slow, expensive way things went between firm and contractor,” King said. “And we just kept shaking our heads, like, there has to be a better way.”
Post-crash, Collins called King, wondering: What if golf’s rapid decline was not just the result of the recession? What if the courses themselves were to blame? “People had been building golf courses completely wrong for years,” Collins said.
Before the crash, he said, courses were either so long and so hard that golfers needed to be professionals to have any fun, or “limp, bland, paint by numbers”—built as decoration for a housing development. And they were too expensive to build and maintain, a cost ultimately borne by customers, the Times reported.
“It’s no wonder people cut golf out of their lives,” Collins said. “They were paying a lot of money for a mediocre experience.”
By 2010, King and Collins had started their own design firm, but they had no prospective clients. Then a project fell into their lap: the redesign of a featureless, insolvent parkland course in South Pittsburg, Tenn., population 3,000. It had been purchased as the side project of a local concrete conglomerate, the Times reported.
“Everyone said it was a no-potential dead end,” Collins said. “And they weren’t necessarily wrong, but I knew this might be my only chance to make something special.”
Collins worked with a skeleton crew for long hours and low pay on an accelerated timeline. Other architects and prospective owners circled like vultures, ready to buy up the property. In sheer desperation, Collins mortgaged everything and took over the lease himself. The course cost about $1 million to build, while a top design firm would have charged $8 million to $10 million for such a project, Collins said.
“The whole thing just got bootstrapped together; it was a labor of love,” he said. “I had a thousand opportunities to walk away, but, damn it, I believed so much in the project, and I honestly had nowhere to walk away to.”
Four years after getting the job, with Sweetens Cove finally set to open in October 2014, Collins officially ran dry. There was no money to keep the maintenance staff on, never mind pave a parking lot, build a clubhouse or do any marketing for the course’s debut, the Times reported.
But maybe the golf course was enough. Broad, undulating fairways stretch out across the property, some of them 100 yards wide, the rolling landscape interrupted only by a set of vast waste areas and a handful of wild, chasmic bunkers that would be easier to escape with a shovel and a ladder. A budget-restricted or schedule-conscious golfer can walk Sweetens Cove for only $20 or rent a cart for $10 more—and finish all nine holes in an hour and a half.
“It’s not the ’60s anymore,” Collins said. “Dad can’t take off by himself at 8 a.m. and come home late night, eight martinis deep. That isn’t going to work.”
At first, nobody showed up. Collins ran the entire operation that first winter, from manning the rent-a-shed pro shop to raking the bunkers and cutting the grass. But as word spread to Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta and beyond, more players started to fill the tee sheet. Collins persuaded some industry experts to come to town, and they were impressed, the Times reported.
“If you leave Sweetens Cove smiling, don’t panic: golf is supposed to be fun,” wrote Ran Morrissett, the author of “The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses.”
John Allen, 49, lives in Huntsville, Ala., a 75-minute drive from Sweetens Cove. He belongs to a golf club near his house, but instead makes the drive to South Pittsburg at least once a week. He considers himself a leader of what he refers to as the Sweetens Cove illuminati, the Times reported.
“Once you realize the nuances are there, this is a legitimate thinking person’s golf course,” Allen said. “There’s angles and alleys and contours like you can’t even believe. My friends are so sick of hearing me talk about it.”
Golfers are not the only converts. Collins said Arnold Palmer’s design firm had called recently to enlist his help on a streamlined construction model, the Times reported.
Can courses like Sweetens Cove help solve the waning interest in golf? “The phone’s ringing,” Collins said. “The promised land is in view.”
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