Rembert, South Carolina | In the past ten years, South Carolina has developed into one of the seductive places for Golf in America, especially for demanding players who are interested in course architecture and appreciate golden age. In fact, in the late 1960s, they passed into the Palmetto state in Haight-Ashbury like Hippies. But the attraction in this case is not free love and Owsley LSD. Rather, these pilgrims are drawn by the recently opened new layouts, with some of them being seen as the best modern tracks in America today.
Congaree is such a place and offers a great Tom Fazio course. Old Barnwell and The Tree Farm are two more, the former were made by Brian Schneider and Blake Conant and the latter by the PGA tour player Zac Blair and the architect Tom Doak and Kye Goalby.
A further addition to this increasingly exciting golf dish The Golf is Broomsedge. His course in the sand hills in South Carolina, about 40 miles east of the state capital of Columbia, was shaped by Kyle Franz, who was about 20 years ago with Doak with Doak in the Pacific Dunes outside of Bandon, Oregon and Mike Koprowski. Work with the course with his old boss.
The changes in the height are one of the most convincing features. The same applies to the spacious greens and cave -like bunkers, which together with the grandstands of the cathedral jaws spend the place with a feeling of size, although the location is only about 200 acres. The architects used the Ridmen and Ridgelines, who have both the Hummocks and Mulden – and, according to Koprowski, moved very little earth.
Koprowski and Franz described the course as a “flexible design” and quite appropriately. A golfer has to hit all the different shots in broomsedge – which its name from the system, which grows throughout the property – and use most clubs in their pockets. Club officials make the mixtures of the meters. For example, the Par-4, which measures 434 yards on the map of the white T-shirts, are sometimes longer or shorter. In one step that architect George C. Thomas, the man who advocated the concept of “course within a course” a century ago when he built the layouts in the Los Angeles Country Club and Bel-Air, she might have even changed the removal of a certain hole so much that they had to change his nene.
A trio of holes with alternative greens, in the sixth and 11th par-3 and also No. 13, a 4-par, reflects this thinking. And with a dozen Par-4S, a pair of Par-5 and four Par-3S, the Par-70 route sets a real demand for firing, exactly when the captain, who was Thomas' much loved nickname, would have wanted it.
Boomsedge is also able to test players of all skills, with the back -t -t -shirts measuring more than 7,500 yards and who came on site by only 5,000. There are six T -shirts sets, and if golfers play the right games, they also enjoy when I found when I used the white on my three loops here. I never lost a ball and posted rounds in the high 70s and low 80s that corresponded to my handicap index.
As new world may be in many ways, Boomsedge also has some very strong roots in the old country. Its firm and fast conditions play like a correct connection. And the minimalist design also causes this part of the golf world. Then there is the structure of the club itself, which offered a preview game in autumn 2024 and officially came online in spring. It is of course private. The founders enable limited access to non -members all year round.
The very inviting ethos made it possible for me to take a match last spring with the name The Sweep between the Outpost Club, an international golf group to which I am an ambassador, and the Silver Club Golf Society, a national organization for competitive golfers, which is known to take Tiger Woods. The tournament was a one-day 36-hole affair, and I arrived for a practice round a day earlier. This gave me the opportunity to check the course without worrying about how I played or how often I was to take notes.
Now 41 and the married father of two children, Koprowski took a cumbersome way to become golf course owners and architect.
“Designing a course is something that I wanted to do since I was 8 years old and grew up in South Florida,” he said. “My father was a golfer. In fact, he had played the golf team there in college at Notre Dame. I remember that he had taken me to TPC Sawgrass as a child.
Koprowski is quite competent to read topographical maps in the Air Force, a skill that certainly helped when he entered the golf business.
Shortly afterwards, Koprowski bought Pete Dyes Memoire: “Burden me in a pot bunker”. At that time, says Koprowski, he was officially bitten by the course design error.
It took years for him to act on this impulse. After Notre Dame, from whom he graduated in political science and history in 2006, he spent four and a half years in the Air Force, a trailer coupling that included a tour in Afghanistan.
“I was Rotc at Notre Dame and stationed in Alabama and West Texas before I ended up in Bagram Air Base in this country,” he said. “I was an Intel officer who was connected to an F-15 hunting squadron. And no, I didn't flown.”
However, he was quite competent to read topographical cards, a skill that certainly helped when he entered the golf business.
But Koprowski found his way into play for a few more years. First he acquired Master's degrees from Duke and Harvard in international relations and education, according to which in Tennessee and Texas stops for jobs and finally in Washington DC “I carried out a lot of political development and analysis work there,” he said. “Mostly things affect economy and living space.”
It was only at this point that he decided to finally scratch the itching for the course, which he had felt as a child at first.
Scenic Boomsedge joins a collection of strong courses in South Carolina.
In 2019, Koprowski Franz sent Franz, which he “not daring, nothing daring”, out of the blue out of the blue at the emerging architect. A few weeks later, Franz offered him a job in the crew that repeated southern pines outside of Pinehurst.
“The first thing Kyle asked me was the examination of the greens and determined the size and form of the original, which had shrunk a lot over the years,” said Koprowski. “Not long after that I was sitting on a bulldozer, was digging out and shaped. It was great to deal with this golf course back to life.”
Koprowski worked with Franz on several other projects, including a new course building in Cabot Citrus Farms in Florida and a restoration job at Eastward Ho! in Massachusetts.
In 2022, he decided to go alone, to buy the property for broomsedge, to put together a founder group and then to commission Franz to design the course with him.
“I fell in love with the country,” said Koprowski about the package, which was used as a hunting reserve due to its healthy population of BobWhite Wachtel, Truthahn and White Cock Hirschen and secured $ 630,000. “I thought it was a perfect place for a course, especially since it was in the same sandy vein and pinehurst with the Aiken area (in which old Barnwell and the tree farm), but in a region where there was a golf shortage.”
He says it took a little more than a year to “put everything in order”, with the construction being dismantled at the end of 2022.
“The golf course itself costs around 9 million US dollars,” he said. “But what took into account the total price was between 13 and 14 million US dollars.”
There is more money to spend, since Boomsedge does not yet have to build a permanent clubhouse, a restaurant and a bar or has built one of the cottage that Koprowski hopes to become a popular part of the club experience.
This meant that there were little more for those of us who toned at the Sweep Ton than to experience the golf course. It was a pleasure to do.
“Every time I play broomsedge, I see something new. A little hump here. A dip there. And these things make it a course that I can hardly wait to play every day.” – Trevor Murphy
I appreciated the peculiarity of the start with four 4-savings of different lengths and consecutive Par-3S to No. 5 and 6 and another 3-par on the eighth (a meaty hole that played about 240 meters from the white). Both the front and the rear nines ended with par-5s, the 18th a particularly testing finisher an exact approach to a gnalled Greens, which was carried out by a lake. As for the holes with the alternative greens, they let me think of the eighth and ninth holes in Pine Valley – and smiled at me to smile when I remembered that the architect of this great layout George Crump was another inspiration for Koprowski. I also thought it was great how the club changed it from one day to another.
Oh, and I giggled over the Faux Boomsedge Tufts, which Koprowski installed on the top of the flag sticks, and the broom brushes that he used as tea markers.
At the end of my third and last round, I thought about how the headgolf professional, Trevor Murphy, described the course on the day on which I arrived.
“I liked the country's natural contours as soon as I saw it,” he said. “And Mike and Kyle used them so well to create a lot of deception and keep things interesting. Every time I play broomsedge, I see something new. A little hump here. A dip there. And these things make it a course that I can hardly wait to play every day.”
I felt the same way and also agreed with what one of my OC teammates said when our round was finished.
“While Broomsedge reminds me of many of the really great places I could play, it is like nowhere else that I have ever seen,” he said. “I can't wait to come back.”
Me too.
Photos: Mike Koprowski
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