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The great American municipal golf movement continues apace at the home of the Masters.
On Monday, during a press conference ahead of the 2025 tournament, Augusta National Golf Club chairman Fred Ridley announced the involvement of Tiger Woods and his TGR Design and TGR Foundation entities in the ongoing revitalization of the Augusta Municipal Golf Course.
In addition to a redesigned 18-hole course, the facility locally and affectionately known as The Patch will build a 9-hole par-3 course called The Loop, laid out by Woods' firm. In addition, the TGR Foundation will build its fourth TGR Learning Lab in Augusta, on the grounds of a former elementary school that closed in 2009. TGR Learning Labs are STEAM education facilities for children, meant to enrich and supplement their educations and maximize their higher education and career prospects. More than 200,000 students have benefited from the first facility, built in Anaheim, Calif. in 2006. The second Learning Lab, on the campus of Cobbs Creek Golf Course in Philadelphia, will officially open in the fall of 2025. A Los Angeles facility is slated to open in 2026 and the Augusta location has an anticipated opening date of 2028.
“We are thankful to partner with the TGR Foundation and jointly invest in the Augusta community," said Ridley. "This partnership, in the TGR Learning Lab, reflects our shared interest in increasing access to high-quality programming and impacting the next generation in a tangible way."
What Augusta's municipal golf revitalization means to the game
In the past, the city that is home to one of the world's most exclusive private golf courses would have seemed an unusual place for community-oriented golf to thrive, but under Ridley's leadership, Augusta National Golf Club has evolved as an institution by broadening its influence in golf - both publicly and privately - beyond that of the annual invitational tournament it has hosted since inception. The establishment of the Augusta National Women's Amateur in 2019 was a major first step in this direction. Standing with the USGA and R&A in support of sensible golf equipment regulation was another. Helping to spearhead the revitalization of The Patch is another.
Ridley first mentioned that the club would be helping to support the revitalization of The Patch ahead of the 2023 Masters. The course dates to 1928 and was the place where golfers who weren't part of Augusta's private-club set tended to tee it up together. Augusta National's caddies were a large part of the culture, and The Patch has been an important outpost of Black golf in America.
The First Tee of Augusta and Augusta Technical College are also involved in the effort; The Patch will embrace the neighboring First Tee facility and will also function as a classroom for Augusta Tech's golf programs.
Like many munis, The Patch suffered from decades of neglect and deteriorating conditioning. Its current GolfPass Rating Index of 3.4 includes several reviews that highlight the hardscrabble condition of the course. "Multiple areas of the greens are irregular with patches of dead grass," reads a review from September 2024. "Multiple areas of poor grass coverage and bare areas in the fairways. Tee boxes were not well-maintained."
On December 29, 2024, The Patch closed to embark on the first stage of its transformation: a redesign of its 18-hole course. The design work there is a collaboration between Tom Fazio and Beau Welling. Fazio has been Augusta National's main consulting architect since 1997. Welling's own start in golf design came as an associate of Fazio's, before he established his own firm, Beau Welling Design. In addition to overseeing several projects of his own, Welling, a native of Greenville, S.C., has also assisted TGR Design on many of its projects as a senior design consultant.
Fazio and Welling's plan for The Patch calls for keeping 11 of the original 18 holes in their same corridors while rerouting the others and relocating the clubhouse from the center of the property to the northwest corner, pllacing it beside both the First Tee facility, The Loop and The Patch's new double-ended driving range. A radical expansion of the short-game facilities - which will be free to the public - will bring The Patch in line with new-age municipal facilities like The Park in West Palm Beach Florida and Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia, offering not just golf for all skill and interest levels, but an overall community asset. The redesigned 18-hole course is expected to open ahead of the 2026 Masters.
Augusta National's involvement in this "Munaissance" speaks volumes about golf's potential as a force for good in civic life, and helps establish a formula that other cities can use as they consider the futures of their own local golf places. The club's titan-of-industry members will undoubtedly be eager to share their excitement about it with other contacts, who will be inspired to support similar initiatives at municipal courses in their own communities. And stubborn or slow-moving municipal governments may well see Augusta National's involvement with The Patch and suddenly look to make similar progress.
The result is a big win for golf.
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