Design Notebook: Sweetens Cove’s Next Phase

Hello and welcome back to Design Notebook, where our dreams have been haunted by Andy Lack’s photo of the new back tee on the fourth hole at Riviera. 280 yards! What are we doing here?

Anyway, this week’s big-boned DN digs into the expansion plans at Sweetens Cove and a Bruce Hepner-led, Kye Goalby-assisted redesign of a public course in Florida. Let’s dive in.

Sweetens Cove Powers Up

By Garrett Morrison

Last Friday, Sweetens Cove Golf Club, the beloved nine-hole course in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, announced that it had partnered with Reef Capital, the high-powered investment firm behind Black Desert Resort, to carry out an expansion project. Additions will include a nine-hole short course, a large putting green, stay-and-play cabins, pond access for fishing, a shooting range, an event venue, a restaurant, and a distillery. In other words, “The Little Golf Course That Could” will soon complete its transformation into a full-fledged buddies-trip destination.

Sweetens Cove's expansion plan

The announcement comes on the heels of a difficult stretch for the Tad King and Rob Collins-designed nine-holer. Earlier this year, Sweetens closed down for three months to repair winter turf damage. The course reopened in August, and reviews of the conditions have been positive since then.

Those who played Sweetens Cove in its early years, when it was an obscure hideaway patronized by a coterie of golf sickos, may have mixed feelings about the property’s private equity-fueled makeover. That’s understandable. Gone are the days when you could roll up to the “pro shop” (a shed occupied by then-GM Patrick Boyd), pay a $30 green fee, and basically have the place to yourself. As idyllic as that version of the course was, however, it was not a strong business. Sweetens teetered on the brink of closure before social media popularity and a star-studded ownership group bailed it out.

So yes, the Reef-funded plans are a departure from the course’s golf-only origins. But Sweetens 2.0 will probably be a fun hang, and it will certainly print money. I’m happy for Rob Collins, who took a big risk by purchasing the course in 2014 after the initial developers jumped ship—a risk that’s now paying off.

Hepner and Goalby Break Ground at Miami Lakes

By Garrett Morrison

When Danny Martinez listened to my interview with golf architect Bruce Hepner on the Fried Egg Golf Podcast in November 2023, he had a sudden feeling. “I pulled out my AirPods and said, ‘Damn, I think that might be our guy,’” Martinez told me last week.

Martinez’s family owns a substantial portion of Miami Lakes, a suburban town 20 miles north of Miami. Their holdings, now organized under the Graham Companies, include four million square feet of commercial real estate, almost 3,000 apartments, and Miami Lakes Golf Club, a 1962 Bill Watts design near the downtown area. While busy, well-liked, and home to a thriving First Tee program, the course has its weaknesses. “We have horrible drainage and have for as long as I can remember,” Martinez explained. “Our back nine—if it sprinkles, we have to go to cart paths only.”

In other words, Miami Lakes could use some attention from a capable golf architect.

“I just cold-emailed Bruce Hepner,” Martinez said. “‘Hey, I heard you on The Fried Egg. This is my family story. This is where we’re at. I have something that I think could be an interesting project.’” Martinez didn’t expect a quick response. He knew that Hepner—who has guided many restorations and renovations at high-profile clubs, both as an associate at Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design and independently—was a busy man. But the architect called Martinez the next day.

“We talked for three hours,” Martinez told me. “We talked about our golf course, our family history. We looked on Google Maps, did a hole-by-hole analysis of what was going on. Honestly, I think Bruce and I just kind of liked each other, and we were off to the races.”

Now, 11 months later, Hepner is about to embark on an overhaul of Miami Lakes, with Martinez serving as project manager. The course will close on Monday, November 4, for the beginning of a tree-removal program. Hepner’s team expects to start shaping in December or January, with grassing to follow in the spring. Martinez is optimistic for a limited reopening in November or December of 2025—just two years removed from the time he first emailed Hepner.

Bruce Hepner's renovation plan for Miami Lakes

Assisting Hepner on site will be Kye Goalby, one of the most skilled golf course builders in the industry, and MacCurrach Golf Construction, a well-respected contractor that has worked with Pete Dye, Tom Doak, and Coore & Crenshaw, among other top architects. It’s an impressive team.

To learn more about how this unlikely project came together, I spoke with Danny Martinez last Friday. Here’s our conversation, lightly edited for concision and clarity:

Garrett: What’s the history of your family with this course?

Danny: I’m going to use the royal “we” here because I was not around, but my grandfather really led the development of the town of Miami Lakes. His father, my great-grandfather, came into the land after the sugar cane company that he was working for had their operations washed out by a storm and gave him the land as severance. Good deal.

Garrett: Yeah, no kidding.

Danny: My grandfather is of Scottish heritage. He loved golf. And so they built the course in 1962 and we’ve been in operation since then.

I think it was in 1985 that we partnered with [Miami Dolphins coach] Don Shula and his family, and we renamed the course Shula’s. So the original Shula’s Steak House was at our course, and we had all kinds of cool tie-ins with the Dolphins, which made it a really fun and happening place in the 80s and 90s. And then it slowed down, once Coach was no longer coaching the Dolphins, and times just changed in the golf industry.

We’ve always had a small membership group. I think right now we’ve got 130 members, which is probably the most we’ve had in forever. But we’ve always been open to the public as a daily-fee course. And from conversations with my mom, who grew up a golfer and was a stick back in the day, it was a community hub. It’s where everyone hung out—the golf course and the driving range and the snack bar. That was not the case when I was growing up, but it’s what we’re trying to get back to.

Garrett: How did momentum initially build toward a renovation?

Danny: We had a couple of changes that happened in April of 2023. We brought in a new team to manage the golf course. David Beckham’s MLS team took over a golf course, Melreese Country Club, right next to the airport in Miami [and will soon turn it into a soccer complex]. And the guys who ran that course for over 40 years are Miami Lakes residents. They live right around the corner from our office and our golf course. So [they started running Miami Lakes Golf Club] in April of 2023, and that was kind of a kickstart for our golf course. With them came the First Tee program. So a ton of junior golfers, a ton of energy and action.

From April until about November of last year, we were already seeing significant improvement in our golf course itself and also just the overall operation. We were also in the process of [replacing] our clubhouse. We’ll have a new clubhouse, new driving-range facility, new members lounge and lockers and all that stuff.

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So these guys came in, started kicking major butt, and I kind of approached them and said, “Hey look, I’m the guy in the family that likes golf and so just keep me in the loop.” And I got to know them pretty well. And we decided that as we were doing all this other construction and improving the facility, it would be prudent to have the golf course to match.

Garrett: Why Bruce Hepner?

Danny: I listened to a podcast called The Fried Egg. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.

Garrett: This is kind of a self-serving question that I already knew the answer to, but I don’t know the details, so I’m curious how it all came about.

Danny: So I played a lot of golf growing up, kind of got out of it in college, and got a little bit back into it in my late 20s. And then, like a lot of people, during the pandemic I started playing more golf. I started consuming more golf content, getting interested in golf course architecture. I had two trips out to Bandon Dunes in 2022, and that kind of opened my eyes to what golf could be. And in early 2023, I played The Park down here, which Gil Hanse had just redone. And so I just kind of found myself more and more interested in it.

We had kind of gotten a little more serious about the golf course renovation project by October of 2023. And then I heard Bruce. And I don’t know what it was, necessarily, about the way that you and Bruce spoke about golf and what you guys thought it could be or what it should be and what golf course renovations should look like. But I just felt very comfortable with the discussion. There was just something about the way you guys spoke about his [municipal golf] projects in Nashville, and just golf courses in general, talking about subtle elegance and stuff that really hit home and aligned with what our family vision is for our community of Miami Lakes. Whether it’s a mixed-use apartment and retail building or an office park, we really are very intentional with how we approach things. And that’s kind of just the vibe that I got from the episode.

I listened to it back yesterday for the first time in almost a year, and I came away with the same feeling. I was like, yeah, we made the right call.

Garrett: That’s good to hear. And he really did come across well on that podcast. He’s not a guy who’s trying to sell anything.

Danny: That was the biggest thing. We had a conversation with another golf course architect, and in retrospect, everything he said was correct in terms of what we needed to do. But the way that he delivered the message didn’t really resonate with anybody in the room. I’ll put it politely like that. But in listening to Bruce talk, I knew that he would be a hit with everybody. Bruce is just a normal guy, obviously very talented and very adept at what he does, but I just felt like he would be accessible, and that was kind of the difference.

Garrett: How did Kye Goalby get involved?

Danny: So Bruce came down in January of 2024, and I remember telling him, “Hey Bruce, I’m pretty self-aware, and I understand that this may not be the same level of golf course and setup that you’re accustomed to working with. If you have any young up-and-comer or somebody that you think would be a better fit, I’m all ears. I won’t take offense to it.” And Bruce goes, “No, I think I’m pretty into this, man. I think that I like the fit. I think I like what you guys are trying to accomplish here. Give me a couple of weeks and let me call some of my guys to see if anyone’s available on our timeline.”

Probably about a week later, I was actually playing our course. I was on the ninth hole. I’ll never forget—Bruce calls me and says, “Okay, I’ve got, I’ve got MacCurrach Golf interested. They need to come down and see it and make sure, but I think I’ve got my guy Chris Monti from MacCurrach who’s interested. I’ve got Kye Goalby interested.”

I think Bruce and Kye are simpatico in a lot of ways. I have yet to meet Kye—I’ll meet him in December when they come down for their first pass. But just in listening to every podcast I can find with Kye, he seems like a guy who is easy to get along with and hang out with. And come to find out, Kye has been to our golf course when his dad [PGA Tour player Bob Goalby] was playing in some of the celebrity-type events. We used to have a Jackie Gleason event at the golf course, and when Kye was young, he came down and got autographs from all the perfect-season [1972] Dolphins—Mercury Morris and Larry Tsonka and all those guys. So he’s actually been on site, which is kind of crazy, albeit 30 or 40 years ago.

But it was all through Bruce. And I think our project is just probably a little different than what some of these guys are working on in today’s world. We’re a publicly accessible golf course in a major metro area. I don’t know how much of that is going on. So it’s a different project; it’s cool. And it’s also Miami in the winter. So I think everyone’s excited to spend January, February, March in South Florida. There are worse places to be.

Garrett: What are the basic goals of Bruce’s plan?

Danny: Goal number one with a bullet is to fix our back nine. And the back nine actually sits two to three feet lower than the front nine. So we’re going to elevate fairway decks up anywhere from three to four feet from what they are currently. We have no surface drainage, and we actually have three holes out there on the back nine that have no irrigation. When Allan MacCurrach [founder of project contractor MacCurrach Golf Construction] came down to visit, he told me that he loves his job because, every now and then, something is so crazy it still surprises him. And that was it. He’s like, “I can’t believe I’m seeing this. I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry, man. This is tough.” Our current irrigation system is actually really the original build from 1962, so we’re completely overhauling that.

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And then one of the really interesting things is that we have no movement in our fairways. All of our land movement is off to the side. And I don’t know if that was a product of that generation because now that I see it and I play more courses in South Florida that were built around the same time, I see it more and more—all of the hills and mounding and shaping in the rough areas.

Garrett: This is such an important characteristic of a lot of courses of that 60s-to-90s era, where the technique was to push all of the material to the sides of the fairway, turn that into features, and then grade the fairway flat. It was such a common process—just kind of automatic.

Danny: And once Bruce pointed that out—and I should have noticed it; I grew up on the course and I played it literally a thousand times—I was like, “Holy crap, he’s 100% right.” And so on the front nine, we don’t have to raise anything, but we are going to bring all of that dirt that’s kind of off to the side and not really in play into the fairways and create really cool contours.

I think the other piece that I’m personally excited about is our back nine now, as I mentioned, has a lot of water. It’s a result of some land damage from a hurricane in 2005, Hurricane Wilma. We’ve got a lot of water, a lot of weird force carries. It’s really tough for the average golfer. And a big goal of our plan is to make the golf course easier for bad golfers and harder for good golfers. We are going to have runup areas where my dad doesn’t have to worry about carrying the creek that’s 30 yards short of the green, that our pros have never even thought about. We are going to widen some fairways where they had been really pinched in with this water. And I want a golf course where people are going to walk off and think, “Man, that was really fun.”

Golf doesn’t have to be super hard. I mean, we will still have plenty of challenging pin positions. For events and tournament play, we’ll be able to make it very challenging. But when I play golf, I feel my best when I’m walking off of a course, I’ve had a really good time, maybe I lost a ball instead of seven, and I’ve played with my dad or my uncle who can’t carry the ball 250 yards. And so that’s a big piece of it, especially with our junior program. You can take your kids out there and they don’t have to carry it over a bunch of water.

I think it was Bruce that put it this way to me first, but we just want to make it harder for the good players and easier for the not-so-good players. And I love that idea. I think golf should be fun.

Garrett: Well, good luck with everything, Danny. It sounds like a great project.

Danny: Oh, I appreciate it. I obviously am super passionate about it. I’ve found some really cool—you know how Soly and KVV always talk about newspapers.com when they do their major retrospectives [on the No Laying Up Podcast]? So I went on newspapers.com and I just started searching for old stories about the course. And what I ended up finding was a bunch of old advertisements. And I found one that stuck with me. It just said, “For people who have a thing about golf.” And I said, “Well, we’re bringing that shit back. That’s going to be our slogan for sure.”

1970s newspaper ad for Miami Lakes

Everyone’s definition of golf is different, and I think that our hope is that we can fit all of them. Our driving range facility is going to have TrackMan tech and a bar and grill. So if you just want to hit balls with your buddies after work and you’re not a good golfer, that’s great. We got you. If you’re a junior golfer, we’ve got the First Tee program running clinics nonstop. If you are a hardcore low handicapper, we have all the tech, we have a fitter on site, we’ve got teaching bays, and we’re going to have a badass golf course. So I’m really hoping that we can run the whole gamut and be a place where people of all levels can feel comfortable.

Chocolate Drops

By Garrett Morrison

Dream Golf eyes the Florida Panhandle. Thanks to some sleuthing by Jay Revell, we now know that Dream Golf’s long-rumored project in northern Florida is moving forward. On October 17, the Washington County Board of Commissioners approved a development order for New Hope Dunes, a proposed golf resort approximately two hours west of Tallahassee. Dream Golf, the Mike Keiser-founded company behind Bandon Dunes and Sand Valley, has been in expansion mode recently, breaking ground on new destinations in Colorado (Rodeo Dunes) and eastern Texas (Wild Spring Dunes). The Florida Panhandle, a relative desert of world-class golf, strikes me as a sensible next target for the Keiser family.

Royal Dornoch moves to beef up the Struie. Last Friday, Royal Dornoch Golf Club, home to one of the greatest championship links in Scotland, announced its purchase of 50 acres adjacent to the club’s shorter Struie Course. The parcel consists of rolling farmland that does not fall under Great Britain’s restrictive Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) designation. Royal Dornoch plans to use the site to expand the Struie Course and improve the club’s practice facilities. An architect has not yet been announced, but Tom Mackenzie of the firm Mackenzie & Ebert has consulted at Royal Dornoch for more than a decade.

Broomsedge opens for preview play. Broomsedge Golf Club, designed by Kyle Franz and Mike Koprowski, began to host limited preview play last week. Among the first to hit shots on the Rembert, South Carolina, course: 16 Club TFE members. What I’m saying is, join Club TFE!

A Course We Photographed Recently

Broomsedge Golf Club (Rembert, SC)—designed by Kyle Franz and Mike Koprowski, opened for preview play in 2024

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Quotable

“The middle of the fairway—except for perhaps once in the round for the sake of variety—should never be the true line to the hole.” -Tom Simpson