Firm, healthy new Bermuda grass greens await ANWA field at Champions Retreat

The field in this year’s Augusta National Women’s Amateur face a new challenge in this year’s first two rounds at Champions Retreat: fresh and firm Bermuda grass greens.

Champions Retreat in Evans, Georgia – just less than a 30-minute drive from the gates of Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters – installed new putting surfaces in 2021, replacing heat-sensitive and disease-prone bent grass with the TifEagle strain of Bermuda grass.

Cameron Wiebe, general manager of Champions Retreat, said the new putting surfaces have grown in incredibly well and will provide improved, consistent and healthy putting surfaces for the ANWA and for club members throughout the year. The first two rounds of the ANWA are March 30-31 at Champions Retreat before the tournament moves to Augusta National for a practice round April 1 and the final competitive round April 2.

“We couldn’t be more pleased” with how the greens grew in, Wiebe said. “We’re looking forward to a very good week for the ANWA.”

The greens on the 27 holes at Champions Retreat – which features distinct nines designed by Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player – had featured bent grass since the club opened in 2005. But bent grows best in cool climates, and the warm, frequently wet summers in northern Georgia created extreme challenges. Wiebe said heavy rains followed by five days of 100-degree-plus temperatures in 2020 proved too much for the bent, with the club losing 30 percent of its putting surfaces.

The bent greens were repaired for the 2021 ANWA, but the putting surfaces clearly needed to be replaced to provide superior conditions not only for the ANWA but for Champions Retreat members year-round. By contrast, Augusta National Golf Club features bent greens, but the Masters host course is closed during the summer while those famous greens are protected and given a rest.

No. 8 of the Island nine at Champions Retreat in Evans, Georgia (Courtesy of Champions Retreat/Martin Miller)

“Obviously, growing bent grass in Augusta, Georgia, 12 months a year isn’t the easiest thing to do, and I have the gray hair to prove it,” said Wiebe, who joined the staff at Champions Retreat when new ownership acquired the club in 2014. “We were starting to see some susceptibility to disease. … In 2020, late that summer, it became evident to us that our time was up and that we needed to make a decision as to what we wanted to do and when we wanted to do it.”

After much research, Wiebe and his team chose to replace the bent with TifEagle, which was developed in Tifton, Georgia, and has proved to be more disease-resistant while providing excellent putting surfaces throughout the South over the past 25 years. Replacement efforts began in May of 2020, with greens being sprigged one nine at a time. All 27 greens – plus several practice greens – at the club were regrassed by October that year. The greens on the Island nine by Palmer and the Bluff nine by Nicklaus, which comprise the 18-hole layout for the ANWA, were completed first and had the most time to grow in.

“Ten days after they put the sprigs in, you look at it and think, there’s no way that’s growing,” Wiebe said. “Then all of a sudden, they start to pull these layers back and sure enough it’s all growing underneath. It’s an amazing transformation.”

Wiebe said the greens were reconstructed to within an eighth of an inch of their original design. Over the decades since the club opened, the greens had changed in places. As players hit greenside bunker shots, sand would fly onto the putting surfaces, slowly increasing the size of knobs and affecting the slopes near the edges of the greens. Wiebe said that reconstructing the slopes to original specifications decreased the unintended severity of some slopes and provided more area in which to cut holes.

“What we’re seeing are some subtle changes,” Wiebe said. “Maybe before where you would see (the aiming point for) a putt being one ball outside the hole, now it’s closer to the edge. We actually found them to be a little flatter now. … The feedback from our members, you can certainly see that’s they are the same greens with just a little less contour. Actually, that isn’t such a bad thing, because with TifEagle we are able to create and maintain a little more speed and maintain it through the year, as opposed to us having more of that fluctuation seasonally because of the heat.”

No. 8 of the Bluffs nine at Champions Retreat in Evans, Georgia (Courtesy of Champions Retreat/Martin Miller)

Besides improved health and quicker potential putting speeds, the newness of the greens has one other consideration: firmness. Historically, the greens at Champions Retreat rolled about 12.1 or 12.2 on the Stimpmeter for the ANWA, Wiebe said, but the new and firm greens likely will provide larger bounces on incoming shots for this year’s opening two rounds. Wiebe said the club will hand-water the greens and do everything necessary to make sure the greens are still receptive to a well-struck shot.

“We will give the players the best chance to highlight the players, not the club and the greens,” Wiebe said. “This year is going to be challenging for the players, but these new greens surfaces are really healthy. There’s just not a lot of organic material beneath the surface to receive the shot yet. But these players are so talented, they are highly skilled at being able to control their spin and get the ball to stop.”

All the work is nothing new since 2015. In 2017 the club installed Better Billy Bunker Lining to improve drainage and playability, and in 2018 through ’19 the club focused on drainage throughout. The encroachment of trees has been addressed continuously with a focus on opening new vistas while providing better airflow with less shade to promote overall turf health for the Bermuda grass fairways and roughs.

“We learned very quickly that you either have forest or have quality playing surfaces, but you can’t have both,” Wiebe said. “… Since the change of ownership in 2014, we have been diligent and committed to the improvement process, and every year we work on it.”