Coal Creek’s Flood of Changes

Jon Rizzi

On June 29, more than 21 months after the Flood of the Century nearly washed it away, Louisville’s Coal Creek Golf Course will reopen to the public. And while the basic routing of the 25-year-old Dick Phelps layout remains the same, an entirely different experience awaits golfers.

The differences start at the clubhouse, where The Mine, a privately contracted restaurant, will operate from refurbished digs. A hopper car now modifies the course logo, and the mining theme continues on the scorecard, which features tees labeled TNT, Pick and Shovel, Coal Car, and Lantern. Eight shiny new Golf Bikes stand alongside the carts by the clubhouse. A few yards north, a roiling, 21,000-square-foot mini-version of Bandon Dunes’ Punchbowl Course welcomes all levels of putters—especially younger and inexperienced ones—to roll for free.

“The putting course differentiates Coal Creek from other munis in the area,” golf course architect Kevin Norby explains. “It’s a fun way to get kids and non-golfers into the game.”

A principal in Minnesota-based Herford-Norby Golf Course Architects, Norby included the massive green as part of a 2011 long-range master plan to upgrade the course over five years. But after the September 2013 storms destroyed most of the course, the timetable for executing that plan—which called for hole lengthening, bunker remodeling, removing and relocating trees, constructing curbed cart paths, re-contouring greens and modernizing irrigation—accelerated, due in large part to enthusiastic community support and FEMA funds earmarked for “engineered landscapes.”

Collaborating with Jeff Matthews of Landscapes Unlimited, Norby naturally re-engineered and re-graded the course to protect it from the kind of devastation it suffered during the 2013 deluge. The course passed a critical test when a surging Coal Creek overflowed during last month’s downpours and the drainage and collection areas functioned as planned.

Function married form, however, as many of those little hills, pockets and collection areas added distinctive contouring to the formerly flat fairways and green surrounds. This not only produces more challenging lies; it also adds visual interest, dimension and strategy. The tree-encroached playing corridors, especially on holes 2, 4, 5, 6, 10 and 17 have become much wider. You can now actually see the fairway from the sixth tee and hear the babble of the stream near the first landing area. The green on the 514-yard eighth no longer hides behind the trees. It moved 60 feet left to become a true risk-reward par 5. 

Norby redid every bunker on the course. He also added, moved and removed many of them, bordering most with fescue. He realigned every teeing area, sodded the green surrounds and even moved cartpaths to direct play away from homes along certain fairways.

Back nine changes included bringing the fairway bunkers into play on hole 15 and flipping the greenside bunker from the right to the higher left side of the green, which is now wider, deeper and has three “shelves.” The downhill 16th, visible to drivers along US 36, now sports berms and 36 new trees between it and the highway. Norby put a centering cross-bunker 70 yards from the center of the green, and big hitters might also find the right fairway bunker now that is has been moved deeper down the fairway.

The biggest change on that hole is the green now sits 70 feet further from the road.

Players used to having their tee shots carry the pond at the elbow of Coal Creek’s right-dogleg finisher might not be happy with the extra 25 yards added by the new TNT tee. But they’ll no longer hit through the fairway to the left. A shelf now bisects the previously nondescript green, giving it more movement.

“Everything you thought you knew about Coal Creek, forget it,” says Norby. “It’s a different golf course.”

For its new-look course, Coal Creek hired a new Head PGA Professional (David Baril, from Brown’s Run Country Club in Ohio) and Course Superintendent (David Dean from The Raven at Three Peaks in Silverthorne). They’ll both be on hand, as will Norby, City of Louisville Director of Parks Joe Stevens and other dignitaries for the Grand Opening ceremony June 27. Coal Creek is staging a lottery ($100 per ticket) to play in a Sunday, June 28 Shotgun for “stakeholders,” as well as a sealed-bid auction for the first tee time when the course opens on June 29.

coalcreekgolf.com; 303-666-7888.

RELATED LINKS

Coal Creek Rises: Opening Summer 2015

The Post Brewing Co. — Beer and Fried Chicken in Lafayette

Hale Irwin Speaks to Junior Golfers at CommonGround

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