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Changing the way people view the game of golf.

Rob Collins joins Golf Today to discuss the process of building Sweetens Cove Golf Club in South Pittsburg, Tenn.

Rob Collins from King Collins Golf Course design joins us again to tell the Sweetens Cove story from the top. The little nine hole course with a shed for a clubhouse has become a cult favorite, and now features a celebrity packed ownership group, but it was many years of challenges, blood, sweat, and many tears before that became the reality.

If Woods is the headliner in the experimentation category now overtaking recreational golf, Rob Collins, once a relative nobody, might now be the guru of the movement.

Seven years ago, Collins emptied his bank account to build an architecturally distinctive nine-hole course in eastern Tennessee, which was no one’s idea of a golf mecca. Collins did not have the money to build a clubhouse for his new course, called Sweetens Cove. Nor could he afford a bathroom. A portable toilet and a 20-foot-by-10-foot aluminum shed greeted golfers on opening day in 2014.

Business was slow, but another phenomenon — social media — helped spread the word of Sweetens Cove’s eccentric charm, which is a mix of playability and winsome challenges for golfers of all abilities. Influential golf websites like The Fried Egg and the popular Twitter account No Laying Up raved about Sweetens Cove’s unconventional allure and minimalist approach.

A cult attraction was born, as golfers from around the world happily made the pilgrimage into the Tennessee countryside 30 miles west of Chattanooga. Soon, Sweetens Cove was ranked among the top new American golf courses.

In March, when Sweetens Cove opened its online booking system for this year, it took 31 minutes for every available tee time Thursdays through Sundays from April 1 to Oct. 31 to sell out.

“We’ve become an international golf destination without the benefit of food and beverage, lodging or indoor plumbing,” Collins, 46, said with a laugh in May. “Led by younger generations, golf is refocusing. They crave compelling golf, and old assumptions about location, length and the configuration of the golf holes no longer apply.”

Collins and his design partner, Tad King, have become hot commodities with a slew of projects completed and planned.

“In those dark days around 2016, I never would’ve guessed that would happen,” Collins said. “But here we are.”

Big and bold – good words to live by. Interesting, different, unlikely. All attributes ascribed to artists, authors, chefs, actors … really anyone who can grab attention and hold it.

Even golf course architects.

Landmand Golf Club was quite unlike anything Ralston had seen before. Numerous architects would likely have said a course couldn’t be built on such massive slopes, but Collins and King saw the potential especially after discovering the soil underfoot was a soft, sandy, almost damp glacial till that didn’t crumble but would yield to Caterpillar D8 bulldozers and on which 007 creeping bentgrass (greens) and bluegrass/ryegrass (fairways) would thrive. Ralston was hugely impressed and eager for Collins and King to see his site in West Texas.

Golf’s popularity is on the rise among younger generations. Inness, a new Hudson Valley resort, responds with a cooler kind of country club.

Tron and Rob Collins, Architect of famed Sweetens Cove, break down Rob's newest course - Landmand Golf Club in Homer Nebraska.

Before I made the 14-hour drive from Toronto to South Pittsburg, a lot of my regular golfing buddies asked if I would get bored playing a 9-hole course for three days straight, but the truth is you could probably play it for a week and still not quite understand it in its entirety.

In 2017, the names Tad King and Rob Collins burst into the brains of course connoisseurs everywhere. In August of that year, word began to spread about what their King-Collins firm had accomplished with a redesigned nine-hole layout in rural Tennessee called Sweetens Cove. Eager to prove they were no one-hit wonder, King-Collins opened its first 18-hole creation in September, Landmand Golf Club in Nebraska. Mission accomplished. Landmand is already so acclaimed for being so distinctive, King and Collins are guaranteed to lose their anonymity forever.

Ever since the acclaimed opening of Sweetens Cove in Tennessee—the 9-hole debut from architects Tad King and Rob Collins—the golf world has felt a sense of anticipation waiting for the team’s first 18-hole layout.
After getting the nod from the Andersen family in 2019 to create a public course on a 500-plus-acre plot of prairie land in Homer, Neb., King-Collins’s dream is preparing to be realized: Landmand (Danish for “farmer”) is set to open late this summer.

Landmand Golf Club in northeast Nebraska, just across the Missouri River from Sioux City, is one of the largest and most expansive golf courses ever built, with the largest total square footage of greens of any course in the U.S. That it was designed by Rob Collins and Tad King, creators or the equally audacious though much smaller Sweetens Cove outside Chattanooga, should come as no surprise–both courses (Landmand is their first 18-hole course) are courageous pieces of architecture that push the boundaries of the genre.

Tom Morris, the first great golf course architect, was known to spend a single day on a new site. The property would be walked, the course routed and staked – and the next morning Morris would be on a boat or horse-drawn carriage back to St. Andrews, presumably with his £5 fee in his waistcoat pocket. With this expedient and efficient method, the great man created or redesigned memorable places such as Askernish, Anstruther, Cullen, Cruden Bay, Tain and Machrihanish. Even for just a single day of work, his design fee was a bargain.

By now, many have heard about & seen the impressive images from the recently opened Landmand GC in the Loess Hills of Homer, Nebraska. Landmand (pronounced “Lanman”), Danish for Farmer, is owned by the Andersen farming family. Will Andersen, the 4th generation of his farming family & a talented amateur golfer, had the vision to develop the course on land that was no longer used to raise crops. Several years ago, after an enthusiastic visit from the talented duo of Rob Collins & Tad King, Will hired King-Collins to design the inland links style course on this rugged site featuring close to 200′ in elevation changes from the high to low points.

There’s not much to say about Sweetens Cove Golf Club that hasn’t already been said. Tucked just off a highway in the heart of rolling Tennessee hills, the course with an ownership group that includes Peyton Manning, Andy Roddick, PGA Tour vet Keith Mitchell and others is arguably golf’s greatest success story of the last decade.

A quirky, strategic, nine-hole course, since opening in 2015 Sweetens Cove has found its way on numerous lists, including its current ranking of No. 63 on Golfweek’s Best Modern Courses — which places the course above tracks like Erin Hills, Hazeltine and Shoal Creek.

For episode #91 we welcome back golf course architect, Rob Collins to share the story of his latest creation, Landmand. You are about to get an insiders glimpse into how every hole at Landmand took shape.

From Utah to Iraq, exciting original designs by architecture's biggest names are set to debut.

If you know three fun facts about Sweetens Cove Golf Club, the course’s funky golf-this-way road sign is likely one of them.

Say you get to the nine-hole course in rural Tennessee as most people do, as a motorist and via I-24. You got your Rand McNally out? OK: now run your finger along Highway 72, aka North Cedar Avenue, heading south. You’re looking to make a sharp right on Sweetens Cove Road, named for a cove, not a golf course.

Last year, I spent six months working for King-Collins Golf Course Design and Construction team — and chronicling it all — as they rebuilt the nine-hole golf course within Overton Park in Memphis, Tenn. The experience, while brutally difficult at the time, becomes a fonder memory to me as time passes. To think I was helping to build something that would have a lasting legacy for a community and bring more kids into the game, while cliché, was one of the only things that got me up before sunrise each morning.

Imagine you’re the GM of a modest liquor store in suburban Indianapolis. The phone rings, with a familiar voice on the line. He wants to talk inventory.

“Hello, this is Peyton Manning.”

It’s the current plot twist in The Little Course That Could. If you’ve heard of Sweetens Cove — a dead flat nine-hole public course in South Pittsburg, Tenn. — you’ve heard of how it got a facelift a few years back from cult-hero architect Rob Collins, gained a loyal following and brightened the game of golf just a little bit along the way.

Rob Collins of King-Collins Golf Course Design joins the podcast and talks about his background building golf courses, tells the story of Sweetens Cove, and updates us on his firm’s current projects including their first 18-hole design at Landmand in Nebraska (pictured above), the redesign of 9-holer Overton Park in his home state of Tennessee, and Red Feather, another new 18-hole course in Texas. Rob also reveals his favorite halfway house order in our “Teed-Up Topic of the Week.”

Rob Collins and Tad King are the talented duo behind King-Collins Golf Course Design. Together, they have built a brand that is quickly becoming one of the hottest names in golf course architecture and construction. Their company is so unique in its approach to envisioning how golf can be played, a number of golf writers have questioned if King-Collins Golf will be the change agent that alters the trajectory of the game of golf forever.

When it opens for public play (currently set for mid-2022), Landmand will confront players with views, shots and decisions that they have never faced before....Even to the layman, features leap off the land and reveal a golf course with potential to storm its way into the world’s elite.

Brad Ralston’s building Red Feather Golf & Social Club in south Lubbock. It’s private, expensive … but you can bring your flip-flops

The highly anticipated Inness golf course opens in Accord, the latest from acclaimed golf architects King-Collins Golf. Situated between the Catskill and Shawangunk Mountains, the golf course at Inness — a new resort and members club in Accord — is a wide-open, Links-inspired course with expansive views across the property. Opening in June, it is the newest project from acclaimed golf-course architects Rob Collins and Tad King and has golfers in the know brimming with excitement to play.

They come from two different corners of the golf-course design world—Rob Collins from the architectural side, Tad King from the contracting side. As such, they had both witnessed the inefficiencies of having those two services offered by different companies, often with competing interests. King/Collins Golf Course Design, then, would do things differently. Formed in 2010, it would function as one group to take your project from the first sketch to Opening Day.

The Authorized History of King-Collins Golf and the Creation of Sweetens Cove (foreword by Rob Collins)

You might recognize the name King-Collins from its first celebrated design, Sweetens Cove, on the other side of Tennessee. Overton Park...originally opened in 1904 and is in dire need of some updates.

The goal: add fun and strategic elements to tee shots, approaches and the area around the greens, while still making it feel like the course could have been built in the early 1900s.

Rob Collins and Tad King's renovation of the Links at Overton Park, a historic nine-hole golf course in Memphis, Tenn., offers a window into the juggling act inherent to golf course construction. Thanks to Collins (@KingCollinsGolf on Twitter) and Marc Burger (@shaper13 on Twitter) for their insights.

The following is an exclusive preview from Jim Hartsell’s upcoming book, The Secret Home of Golf, a history of Sweetens Cove Golf Club. This excerpted chapter explores the pre-history of the land where Sweetens now sits, and how it evolved through time into a grounds for the game.

The little course — with its wide fairways and humpy, bumpy, rolling greens of every shape and size — gave its golfers much delight. As children who have found a small but endless treasure, they told their friends about the little course so that they, too, could share in its joy.

To dig a little deeper into the world of golf course design and some of the misconceptions about building courses, I talked with one of the bright stars in the industry: Rob Collins, Principal Designer of King-Collins Golf Course Design. King-Collins, comprised of Collins and Tad King, has gained cult-like status for their work on Tennessee’s now-famed 9-hole gem, Sweetens Cove. Collins has seen the highs and lows of the design industry and knows the many tales that his line of work has produced.

Collins says he is “especially pumped” about the Jackson project because of the site itself. “Sweetens Cove was designed on a dead-flat piece of ground, no elevation change at all,” Collins says. “We had to move a whole lot of dirt to get the effect we wanted. Here, we’ve got land that reminds me of Texas hill country, a gently rolling terrain with all those great, old oak trees.``

At Landmand — King Collins’ first 18-hole design — any temptation to assume it as Sweetens Cove’s sequel is cast aside like dust in the unceasing Nebraska wind. Sweetens Cove sits in a floodplain, renovated on top of an unremarkable, dead-flat 1950s design. Landmand could not be more different in size, shape, and scale.

The Loess Hills of Nebraska are a geological oddity, to paraphrase Ulysses Everett McGill from the classic Coen Brothers film O Brother Where Art Thou? Loess, a loose silicate clay, was deposited by centuries of wind to create these unique landforms in relatively small area of eastern Nebraska and western Iowa. This landscape was supposedly deemed too severe for golf course construction by several leading golf course architects, thus opening up King Collins Golf for their first shot at designing and building an 18 hole course...

Collins’ attention is presently centered on his home state and a project near and a project that means more than most: a redesign of Overton Park Golf Course, a municipal nine-holer in Memphis. This is Collins’ first muni — and, like every one of his designs, this one’s bound to look, feel and play a little bit different.

I had the opportunity to meet Rob in person while playing Sweetens Cove in June of 2020 and he could not have been nicer. He was genuine and conversational and made me feel like we had been friends for years. He was also kind enough to connect with me over the phone to have a conversation about his background, the allure of Sweetens, his excitement for Landmand GC, and what is next for King-Collins Golf.

Design firm King-Collins has signed up to design a new twelve-hole course on the site of the closed Colonial Country Club in Jackson, Mississippi. The course, to be known as Brazenhead, will be public and is hoped to start construction sometime in 2021.

Expert’s take: A 9-hole course that truly packs a punch! While the track itself is interesting and keeps a golfer intrigued from start to finish, the vibe that surrounds the course is perhaps even more noteworthy and memorable. There are no rules at Sweetens but to have fun, and the experience is consequently unmatched.

The darling of the golf world is a nine-hole course with double-pinned greens just 30 miles west of Chattanooga, Tenn. Low in the valley sits nine holes with enough alternate-routing options to make your head spin.

Sweetens Cove lived up to the hype. There are endless possibilities to approaching these wildly imaginative greens, which total over 100,000 square feet.

Rob Collins was fighting for his big break, and it finally arrived — in an unlikely form. He and his course-design partner Tad King took an insolvent nine-hole golf course on a flat, featureless flood plain in rural Tennessee and turned it into an imaginative, eye-popping revelation. The result, Sweetens Cove Golf Club, opened in 2014 and has become a gold standard for modern nine-hole innovative design ...

As for Manning’s ties to the place, architect Rob Collins of King-Collins Design & Golf Construction, tells it best. He recalls how when Sweetens Cove first opened, he and Patrick Boyd, the original course general manager, always would say the one investor they’d really love to get on board is Manning. “No one better to be involved in a golf enterprise in the state of Tennessee,” Collins said. “We’d laugh and say, ‘Maybe one day, who knows? How cool would that be?’ ”

“The place is Tin Cup meets Field of Dreams. From tee to green, the course is 1,000% pure. There’s a wonder and an innocence and a purity to what Rob and the crew have created there. We see our role as preserving and protecting that first and then enhancing it second.”

A preview for The Fried Egg's upcoming documentary film on the building of Landmand GC, the first 18-hole design by King-Collins Golf. In this preview, The Fried Egg tells the story of how the Anderson family found Tad King and Rob Collins and shows the breaking-ground moment at the site in Homer, Nebraska.

Go out as an eightsome, have your dog fetch an errant shot—Sweetens Cove, in Tennessee, has found a way to please both purists and duffers while attracting new golfers

From Instagram-worthy ocean views to sweeping scale and iconic links, we’ve seen some of the best the world of golf has to offer already on this list.

And then there’s Sweetens Cove Golf Club—the little club that could.

Opened in late 2014, this nine-hole layout in seemingly the middle of nowhere is helping usher in a new era in American golf. It’s a fun and stunningly beautiful layout, and a feature in The New York Times in 2017 called Sweetens Cove, “the answer to golf’s post-recession challenges of declining participation and stagnant course construction.”

Sweetens Cove is something of a manifestation of Collins’ personality: wildly creative but unassuming. Ironically, though, Collins’ career began in a setting as far away from Sweetens Cove’s ethos as one could conjure.

Erik sits down with Sweetens Cove architect, Rob Collins, and general manager, Nash Pater. They discuss how Rob Collins became involved with Sweetens cove and the future of a new golf movement.

Sweetens Cove is simply one of the highest rated 9 hole tracks in the United States. Tucked away in a valley of South Pittsburg, TN (outside of Chattanooga), Sweetens Cove is a charming yet sneaky tough 9 hole routing that features double greens to satisfy those with a hankering for 18.

There’s a small wooden sign hanging outside the trailer-masquerading-as-a-clubhouse at Sweetens Cove Golf Club. It’s small enough, and the engraved quote is small enough, that if you’re here and you’re in a hurry, you might miss it. Maybe that’s the point.

King-Collins Golf’s first design, Sweetens Cove, has received a seemingly endless amount of praise over the last several years. Both the course and the design team have been the darlings of golf social media since the community discovered Sweetens Cove. And yet, it has taken Rob Collins and Tad King a while to add a full 18-hole course to their design portfolio. All of that is about to change.

“The terrain is so bold, wild at times,” Rob Collins says of the site at Landmand Golf Club in northeast Nebraska where he and design partner Tad King have routed 18 holes that are set to open in 2021.

At Walker’s Drive-In, the center of the local restaurant universe in Jackson, Mississippi, Tad King is quietly holding court. He has come here to meet a small group of local enthusiasts chasing a dream: the rebirth of a now-defunct country club golf course, and an opportunity to revitalize Jackson’s lackluster public golf scene.

Construction of Landmand Golf Club in Homer, Nebraska, the first eighteen-hole new-build by King-Collins Golf Course Design, will begin in September.

Over the last couple of years, Rob Collins has become one of the best-known golf course architects in the country basically on the strength of nine holes. Those holes at Sweetens Cove Golf Club in South Pittsburg, Tenn. opened in late 2014, and since then they’ve attracted a huge following of golfers devoted to courses with character, charm, and soul.

More golf at Sweetens Cove? Architect Rob Collins discusses future plans and star-studded partnerships. Collins joins hosts Darin Bunch and Mitch Laurance to discuss what this new infusion of capital means for Sweetens Cove, especially since the course has forged a reputation as an amenity-free, come-as-you-are, all-about-the-golf mecca that attracts golf purists from across the country with dreams of shotmaking fun.

Duo responsible for Sweetens Cove have announced their first confirmed 18-hole commission.

The Andersen family from Dakota City has combined their two pursuits to create a golf experience unlike any other. Landmand Golf Club is the newest golf venture in the state, and it will bring breathtaking views and 18 holes of pure golf.

There’s no name for this course yet; that, plus site maps and images, will come with a more formal unveiling. But if you stand up above the 4th tee, the highest point of land on site, you can squint across the property and convince yourself you’re at Sweetens.

Since then, I’ve wanted the answers to two questions: what makes this place feel sacred, and why does it stick with you like a religious experience? So I hopped in the car and drove down to South Pittsburg, Tennessee—located 30 minutes outside of Chattanooga—to play a round with the man who designed and built Sweetens Cove Golf Club.

The second takeaway is one that ate away at me for weeks after my first trip to Sweetens in August: why did this place stick with me—and many others—like a spiritual experience? This answer was revealed to me while Rob and I sat and talked on the porch of America’s favorite shed/pro shop/clubhouse/snack shop on a cold December morning.

A look at the basics of golf course architecture and strategy. Here's a breakdown of the options laden Sweetens Cove Golf Club.

Like any great idea, it all started over dinner and conversation at a Carabbas. This was the birthplace of King Collins Golf Course Design. A firm that would grow to break the norm and introduce the world to one of the best nine-hole courses we have ever seen ...

Sweetens Cove Golf Club in rural southeast Tennessee might be golf’s unlikeliest story in the Twenty-First Century: a truly world-class golf course, born from an abandoned, dead-flat goat track in a flood plain in South Pittsburg, Tenn., that staved off financial ruin thanks to — of all the things in the world — an Internet cult following and a feature in the New York Times.

Thanks to Dylan Dethier for capturing the heart of Sweetens Cove, our debut project, in this terrific New York Times piece

If someone told you to imagine a nine-hole golf course 30 miles outside of Chattanooga, Tenn. in a town called South Pittsburg, you would probably picture some low-end, struggling track that only keeps their lights on because the driving range stays busy ...

A few months after my clandestine credit card purchase was made in the shadows of my marriage I found myself standing in a gravel parking lot in South Pittsburg, Tennessee. We were all there together at Sweetens Cove Golf Club trying to decipher which faces went with which of our favorite Instagram accounts ...

Our caravan approached the driveway, and slowed down as our tires crackled over the gravel. The little red sign that reads “Sweetens Cove Golf Club” is slightly overgrown and deliberately unassuming–in other words, the exact opposite of the course itself. A veer to the right reveals a little green shed and an unpaved parking lot–both as unassuming as the sign out front ...

The course has received an extraordinary amount of praise, especially for a nine-holer from a design team that was making their debut. Aside from Golfweek, it has been the subject of fawning critiques in The New York Times and various architectural blogs. It’s currently No. 1 on Golfweek’s list of public-access courses in Tennessee and No. 50 on the list of Golfweek’s Best Modern Courses ...

A nine-hole rural Tennessee course built during the recession might be this decade’s most transcendent golf facility. A look into the ways of Sweetens Cove.

A great club presents a blank canvas, leaving the experience to the golfer’s creation and design. A great club gives the golfer a sense of ownership and accomplishment. A great club says simply, “it’s yours.”

Sweetens Cove is truly a golf course without a parallel. It’s a place that serves as a refreshing counter-culture to the vast majority of 21st-century golf courses and, frankly, to the American lifestyle in general. In a world with so much excess, Sweetens Cove will remind you that if all you had left was just a fantastic golf course, all would still be very much right with the world.

Rob Collins knew he needed to build something completely different. No pressure or anything, but he had to provide a course that was surprising and fun or possibly watch his new design business perish.

Sweetens Cove, which has climbed to No. 50 on Golfweek’s Best rankings of modern courses, is among the mountains but is not a mountain course. Collins described it as an inland links with an emphasis on the ground game.

With all due respect to The Old Course, I always tell them that in my opinion, `{`Machrihanish`}` is The Secret Home of Golf. After spending the day at Sweetens Cove Golf Club, I believe I’ve found the Secret Home of Golf In America. I can’t wait to go back and play 36….or 54.

``I had this surreal day and after I left there for the first time, I was just sitting in my car and it finally hit me that these are the kinds of places that people need to be highlighting.``

“I don't necessarily equate multi-million dollar fees with being influential,” he explains. “Today people want golf courses that are intellectually interesting.”
Ran Morrissett

Does the King-Collins Design team deserve a spot on this list even though they have only designed one new nine-hole layout and renovated two holes on a second course? Given the high praise their Sweetens Cove Golf Club outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee has garnered – people are throwing the phrase “best nine-hole course in the country” around liberally – we have to believe that this duo will be getting more chances to apply their rustic aesthetic to existing courses and perhaps a new tract or two in the near future.

Sweetens Cove received the highest average rating of ALL golf courses in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, & Louisiana.

``Sweetens Cove is one of the most audacious designs we’ve seen. (King-Collins) built one of the most diverse & entertaining set of green complexes found anywhere. This kind of fun, inventive, quick golf is more commonplace in the UK, which is why the game is so much healthier there than in America. If you leave (Sweetens Cove) smiling, don’t panic: golf is supposed to be fun.”
Ran Morrissett, co-author, The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, v. 2

``Sweetens Cove…harkens back to one of the most influential golf courses ever built in the United States (Augusta National) …. Collins and his partner, Tad King, have embraced the original MacKenzie-Jones tenets with gusto. Writing about Augusta then, MacKenzie could have been describing Sweetens today.``

Anthony Pioppi, To The Nines

See the attached link for a terrific article by Martin Kaufmann about the unlikely ascendancy of Sweetens Cove to the top of Golfweek's rankings for the state of Tennessee.

This month’s Feature Interview with Rob Collins tackles the age old question: if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

By that, I mean how do you credit an architectural firm that conceives an AWESOME design on spectacular land only to see the developer go in a different, non-golf direction? I first met Rob face-to-face this past February after his round at No.2. At that time, he showed me photos and drawings for a golf course outside Fernie, British Columbia. It had all those hallmarks that Lorne Smith of FineGolf would categorize as a very high ‘joy to be alive’ quality: shared fairways, huge central bunkering, a zig-zagging stream, minimal rough, and vistas of the snow-capped Canadian Rockies. Very tasty – a modern Jasper Park! However, the developer opted to go the home/park route and golf was scrubbed. What credit will King-Collins ever receive for such an unrequited effort? Essentially none. That’s why I promptly invited them for a Feature Interview and I believe that this firm is capable of grand things, well beyond the same old fare.

This was one of the most anticipated rounds for me on the trip to Tennessee. Sweetens Cove is a nine-hole course with an interesting history and a cult following. The course is located outside of Chattanooga in South Pittsburgh, Tenn., and after a few holes, I fell in love with the place ...

Sweetens Cove – the course and the story behind its creation – has fascinated me for some time. Golf geeks who make the trip to play this modern 9-holer return with the same two points of feedback. That course bold, beautiful, and great fun. And its creator and owner, Rob Collins, is a good dude ...

Listen to the story that makes the story so powerful. Virgil and Rob talk about the dramatic transformation of Sweetens Cove.

I often receive emails, texts, or comments on my reviews suggesting that I play various courses. That said, I have never had more people tell me to play a course than Sweetens Cove in South Pittsburgh, Tennessee. Droves urged me to make the drive across the Carolinas, and with that, I was introduced to the cult following of Sweetens Cove.

We talk golf course architecture with golf course architect, Rob Collins. Rob is the principal designer of King Collins Design and responsible for the build and design of Sweetens Cove Golf Club.

Here is a list of the top 100 courses in the United State built after 1960 according to Golfweek’s Raters, listed with the Golfweek Rater number, location, year opened and designer. Sweetens Cove makes the list at #59!

Pure golf. That’s the sensation you feel the moment you step foot on the grounds of Sweetens Cove Golf Club, a gem tucked into the foothills of the Appalachia 30 minutes outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

If you're like me, slightly attention-deficit and unable to focus for a full 18-holes, then an absorbing nine-hole course like Sweetens Cove is just the ticket. Located a half-hour west of Chattanooga, just off Interstate 24, Sweetens Cove is guaranteed to distract you from worldly concerns and worries using a combination of charm, character and railroad ties.

I’m sitting in a meeting room in Tallahassee, Florida...but my golfing soul is somewhere near South Pittsburg, Tennessee. For those in the know, South Pittsburg is home to Sweetens Cove Golf Club, the modern masterpiece of a course hand crafted by King-Collins Golf Design.

Rob chats about Sweetens Cove but also course architecture more generally as well as the importance of up and coming designers such as King Collins golf getting the chance to show off their skills. A fascinating interview subject, Rob is a breath of fresh air and will undoubtedly be a guest again in the future.

“Every shot at Sweetens is a wait-til-you-see-this-shot type of shot.”
— Travis Hill

“But for those who had heard rumors or read the fawning blog posts from diehards who had made the trek, the response was unabashed envy. “Sweetens is more than golf,” a friend who had played there whispered. “It’s a religious experience.””