The course plays host to the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship this week, part of a broader movement to bring the women’s game to traditional championship courses, and while some of the elements remain the same from previous men’s majors, a 2016 redesign by Rees Jones and a few alterations since mean it won’t be quite the track you remember.
Do you lay up short of the lake, which is really not much club at all? Or do you go for it? There’s plenty of room to the right to bail out, but then it’s a really tough chip if you do miss it right.
Haigh also spoke of the general difficulty of the course, particularly on the back nine when water comes into play.
Many of those would only have affected member golfers—Harvey said that bunkers impacting championship play are mostly intact—but it’s a major cosmetic difference anyway, with a series of trees, from black maples to loblolly pines to white oaks, planted to serve as visual framing anchors in areas where tree cover around the fairways had grown sparse.
“We took out some bunkers, but it was more about strategy, to add a more challenging element for players.
Heavy rain earlier in the week raised the possibility that nature would dull the sharp edges in this regard, but recent weather has dried things out, and Harvey—whose team numbers in the 80s for this week, up from 65 normally—mowed the greens and surrounding areas Wednesday night to ensure the course would show its teeth on Thursday.
Harvey and his team have been preparing for this tournament for months, and one of the unique challenges is that the growing season for their turf hits its stride in mid-to-late summer, which is fine for PGA Championships in August, but more challenging for a June event.
“The members are so fantastic,” Harvey said.
All of Harvey’s work, from fertilizer to fungicide programs to verticutting and top-dressing the greens, was geared at making sure the timing would be perfect, and that he’d be at peak growth rate this week.
That stage will be somewhat familiar to golf fans who remember AAC from majors past, but the subtle and not-so-subtle changes since 2016 mean that the actual tournament could look very, very different.
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