Tad King – Syndication Server

Sweetens Cove in Tennessee to add cabins, a par-3 course, a distillery and more

Groundbreaking plans will be announced in the coming months.

The nine-hole Sweetens Cove – ranked by Golfweek’s Best as the No. 1 public-access golf course in Tennessee – announced this week that it will collaborate with Reef Capital Partners to introduce a new par-3 course and much more.

Plans also call for stay-and-play cabins, a new winding putting green, a fishing dock, a skeet range, a restaurant and a distillery at the famously laid-back facility in South Pittsburg, about a 30-minute drive west from Chattanooga. Groundbreaking plans will be announced in the coming months.

Sweetens Cove had a tough 2024, closing for several months to replant greens and fairways after a particularly bad winter killed off much of the playing surfaces – its operators opted to shut down for repairs instead of presenting sub-standard conditions. The course reopened this fall with new grass that has grown in well, and the layout should regain its often fiery and bouncy playing conditions in 2025.

Besides excelling as a nine-hole layout, Sweetens Cove is different than most courses in many other ways. Operators started several years ago offering all-day passes instead of traditional tee times, with players going round and round the course as often as they like. The dress code is basically non-existent, and music typically blasts from a patio overlooking the first tee and ninth green. The clubhouse is named the Shed because it is one, and it’s packed with much-loved merchandise sporting multiple logos. A patio built around a tree has been tagged as the heckle deck.

There have been discussions about expansion for years, with the biggest concern among die-hard fans being that the facility retains its vibe.

“Sweetens Cove grabs you the moment you step onto the course – there’s an energy here that you won’t find anywhere else,” Jared Lucero, CEO of Reef Capital Partners, said in a media release announcing the new partnership for which terms were not disclosed. “It’s not just about golf; it’s about the experience, the people and the simplicity of spending a day out here.

“We aim to preserve that unique charm while adding a place to stay, a bit more to do, including Sweetens at Night, and some amazing food and drinks. Those things will only make every visit even more memorable, whether you’re playing the course for the first time or the hundredth.”

Sweetens Cove opened in 2015 on the site of a former course, which was erased as a new course was laid out by the team of Tad King and Rob Collins. It quickly gained a following among Golfweek’s Best course raters and catapulted into the top 100 modern courses in the U.S., where it now is No. 90.

King and Collins soon took over operations of Sweetens Cove from its founding family, and investors have come onboard including sports stars Peyton Manning and Andy Roddick. The ownership group also has released a bourbon named for the course, with the planned small-batch distillery an extension of that.

“I’ve been with Sweetens Cove from the beginning, from designing and building the original course with Tad to being responsible for its operations and management for the last 10 years,” Collins said in the media release. “It is thrilling to me and everyone involved with Sweetens Cove to see how the expansion builds on that foundation and brings to life every big dream we ever had for the place.”

Reef Capital Partners’ has been expanding in golf with its development of Black Desert Resort in Utah, which opened in 2023, jumped to the No. 1 spot among that state’s public-access courses and recently hosted an eponymous PGA Tour event. The company also is developing Marcella Deer Valley, which will include Tiger Woods designing his first mountain course.

“Reef Capital Partners has an incredible vision for this expansion,” Collins said in the media release. “They came to Sweetens to play the course and by the seventh fairway they had drawn up a model, envisioning a par-3 short course that offers flexibility and creativity. It’s not just a regular short course – you can play each hole in multiple ways, adding a cross-country style that you won’t find anywhere else.”

Sweetens Cove tee times are coveted and sell out incredibly quickly each year, a testament to the layout’s architecture as much as its atmosphere. King-Collins Golf Design has gone on to lay out several other courses around the country including Landmand, which opened in 2022 in Nebraska and has jumped to the No. 1 spot in that state’s ranking of public-access layouts.

“Sweetens Cove is a golf anomaly,” GM Matt Adamski said in the media release. “We’ve created a place where you can play all day with no tee times, no dress codes and no pressure. It’s a giant adult playground, where everyone can find something to love.

“(The expansion) will maintain our unique culture and enhance guest experience. The demand is incredible – we’re sold out through the end of the year. But even with this expansion, we’re maintaining our focus on a quality experience by keeping a limit on the number of daily passes to ensure that Sweetens Cove remains the special place people love.”

Check out fresh photos of the new Crossroads in South Carolina, designed by Sweetens Cove and Landmand architects

Check out the photos of a new reversible nine-hole course by the team behind Landmand and Sweetens Cove.

One of the more interesting golf course openings of 2024 has been Crossroads at the private Palmetto Bluff in Bluffton, South Carolina. It’s fitting that it was designed by one of golf’s more interesting firms, King-Collins Golf Course Design.

Tad King and Rob Collins are the architects – and now co-owners – of the nine-hole Sweetens Cove, which for the better part of a decade has been the No. 1 ranked public-access layout in Tennessee. They also designed Landmand, which in two years has shot up to become the No. 1 public-access course in Nebraska. Their resume of courses continues to grow, including the new Red Feather in Texas.

At Crossroads, they went back to their nine-hole roots. Situated on 54 acres of rolling dunes alongside an extensive inland waterway, the layout features a mix of par 3s, 4s and 5s integrated into a reversible layout. Playing it in one direction sports the name The Hammer, and the other direction is called The Press as the course crisscrosses itself. Like Sweetens Cove, the layout was built with match play in mind and is a great venue for cross-country golf in which players pick their own holes, should they choose.

Crossroads opened in January of 2024, the second course at Palmetto Bluff following the Jack Nicklaus-designed May River course that opened in 2005. In keeping with a low-key vibe, Crossroads features a pro shop in an Airstream trailer and a food truck on site, plus a 34,000-square-foot Himalayas-style putting green near the first tee. The course is accessible by electric boat or kayak. The course plays anywhere from 1,000 yards to 3,100.

The Crossroads is mostly private, but there are a limited number of tee times available to guests of the onsite and upscale hotel at Montage Palmetto Bluff.

Check out a selection of the latest photos of Crossroads below.

Sweetens Cove, the top public course in Tennessee, to close all summer

Sweetens Cove vows to rebound after harsh winter caused sub-standard conditions.

Sweetens Cove, Golfweek’s No. 1-rated public-access golf course in Tennessee, announced Sunday it will be closed all of June, July and August this year.

In a social media post announcing the move Sunday, the course owners explained how the harsh winter included snow, ice and a nearly two-week stretch of freezing temperatures that damaged turf on the course in South Pittsburg, Tennessee.

Their attemped defensive measures to save the dormant Bermuda grass were unsuccessful as it “hit us harder than we could have ever imagined.” Instead of remaining open with sub-standard conditions, the owners made the tough – and expensive – decision to shut it down this summer to focus on returning the nine-hole layout to excellent conditions.

The rural Sweetens Cove has become almost a pilgrimage for many golfers who seek a perfect vibe as well as interesting architecture, and the course has in recent years sold all-day passes that allow players to kick back on the club’s heckle deck before venturing out for more golf.

Besides being ranked No. 1 in Tennessee on Golfweek’s Best list of top courses in each state, the layout is No. 32 on the list of top public-access courses in the country and No. 84 on the list of all modern courses built since 1960 in the U.S. The layout was designed by Tad King and Rob Collins and opened in 2015. The course’s ownership group includes Collins, Tom Nolan, Andy Roddick, Peyton Manning and Skip Bronson.

Collins confirmed the news in a text to Golfweek in which he promised, “We’ll be back better than ever in September!”

Course Closure Announcement… Please read the images. This was a tough decision that will only make this special place even better. #mothernaturestough pic.twitter.com/6XfQ3EraZj

— SweetensCoveGolfClub (@SweetensCove) May 5, 2024

The operators’ tweet continued:

“Saying that, is with a heavy heart that we have made the decision to shut down the golf course to re-grass everything that Mother Nature took from us. We will be shutting down effective May 27 to August 31 and reopening on Sept. 1.”

Sweetens Cove will give anyone who has booked a pass during the closure first dibs – including a 25-percent discount – for a 2025 pass.

The announcement ended with:

“Please be patient with us as we will work to get you taken care of as soon as possible so pour out a little bourbon with us and toast the future of what will be amazing conditions going forward.

“To new friends. Old friends. And a day a Sweetens.”

‘Put the pedal down and go for it’: King-Collins’ Landmand Golf Club opens in Nebraska

Rob Collins and design partner Tad King break the glass ceiling with Landmand Golf Club in Nebraska.

Big and bold – good words to live by. Interesting, different, unlikely. All attributes ascribed to artists, authors, chefs, actors … really anyone who can grab attention and hold it.

Even golf course architects.

Rob Collins initially grabbed attention for his big and bold design at Sweetens Cove Golf Club which opened in 2015 in remote Tennessee. A nine-holer built on a flat floodplain amidst the Appalachian Mountains, Sweetens Cove had to grab attention and hold it – a run-of-the-mill design atop the previous course named Sequatchie Valley on the same damp site might have drawn flies, but not many golfers.

Instead, Collins and his design partner, Tad King, moved some 300,000 cubic yards of dirt to erect what has become Tennessee’s No. 1-ranked public-access course in Golfweek’s Best ratings. Big greens, bold slopes – there are those words again, and at Sweetens Cove, those concepts have drawn a loyal following of golfers who will drive to the middle of nowhere to experience something different and entirely interesting.

“I always did believe there was some form of greatness to be achieved out there, and that it could be very popular,” Collins said of Sweetens Cove, the first course built by his and King’s then-new golf architecture firm, King-Collins. “It was so different and so unique and so much fun, the early adopters of the place gave us so much enthusiasm and belief in what we had done. It was like a religious experience for a lot of people.”

Now comes the next step in big and bold for King-Collins, on a completely different landscape and scale – and after waiting longer than either could have imagined after Sweetens Cove’s ascent into the top 100 modern golf courses in the U.S.

The public-access Landmand Golf Club in eastern Nebraska, King-Collins’ first original 18-hole layout, opens for regular play September 3 on what Collins describes as simply crazy terrain for golf. Built atop and around bluffs and dunes near the village of Homer in the Loess Hills – geologic terrain left in the wake of retreating glaciers during the last Ice Age – Landmand presented unique challenges and opportunities in a wide-open and extreme landscape with views for miles. Collins said he and King went all-out in trying to take advantage of everything the site, including its 150 feet of elevation changes, offered.

An all-timer today ⁦@LandmandG⁩ – it’s impossible to express the amount of gratitude that Tad & I feel toward ⁦@wanders1140⁩ & his great family for giving us this opportunity. It was a thrill from start to finish playing shots into features that so many labored over. pic.twitter.com/cujUBk2pQk

— King-Collins Golf (@KingCollinsGolf) August 31, 2022

“You had to just put the pedal down and go for it,” Collins said of his approach to Landmand. “The first time you see it, the scale is just going to blow your mind. Every time I go out there, I laugh about it. Things that are gigantic in reality just shrink in this landscape.”

On such a vast playing field – and because of the region’s frequent gusty winds – Collins said his team was inspired to install massive fairways, sometimes with one fairway corridor serving two holes. None of the fairways are less than 80 yards wide, several single fairways top out at more than 100 yards wide and the connecting fairways are stretched beyond 150 yards.

“A 60- or 70-yard-wide fairway just doesn’t cut it out there because it shrinks visually in the scale of that landscape,” Collins said. “And so, a 60-yard fairway would look 30 yards wide. You hit a ball out there and walk down into the fairway, you’re like, ‘My God, it’s gigantic, there’s no way I could have missed this fairway.’ You need features that are just that big out there.”

The greens at Landmand are similarly huge. Average greens at most U.S. courses are between 5,000 and 7,000 square feet – purely for example, Augusta National Golf Club’s greens average just over 6,400 square feet, while those at Pebble Beach Golf Links are tiny at about 3,500 square feet. At Landmand, King-Collins constructed putting surfaces that frequently blow past 20,000 square feet.

As a comparison for King-Collins fans, Collins said he receives frequent comments on the size of the fourth green at Sweetens Cove, an Alps-inspired putting surface stretching some 80 yards front to back. At Landmand, the fourth green from Sweetens would be only the fifth-largest putting surface.

Collins cites the par-3 fifth at Landmand as a great example of a large green fitting a big landscape. The approach from the back tee is some 240 yards across a chasm to a putting surface of more than 25,000 square feet.

“You look at it, and yeah it seems big, but then you get on it and realize it’s huge,” Collins said. “It has to be to fit. Standing on the tee, even a 12,000-square-foot green on top of that ridge would look stupid. It would look like a pimple on the ass of an elephant. It would look like we shied away from the landscape. We had to build features that embraced that boldness.”

It’s all part of the width and size serving strategy. Players shouldn’t just whack away and expect an easy next shot from a wide, forgiving fairway, especially if the wind blows. There’s skill to discerning the best route to any hole, Collins said, and golfers better think before they swing.

“Every shot on every golf course we ever do, we want to have a meaning behind it,” he said. “We don’t want any hole to take a shot off. We always want the golfer engaged. That may mean hazard placement, or in a lot of cases at a place like Landmand, it’s a big contour. … Each hole at Landmand was built to ask varying versions of some type of questions, and a lot of that is through contour.”