Shoal Creek Club

Bob Cupp (when he was senior designer for Jack Nicklaus) designed Shoal Creek and the course opened in 1977, hosting several top-flight competitions since then. Buddy Alexander won the U.S. Amateur Championship in 1986 whilst Lee Trevino and Wayne Grady won two majors here – picking up the coveted PGA Wanamaker Trophy in 1984 and 1990. The Shoal Creek Club hosted the 2008 U.S. Junior Amateur championship, won by Cameron Peck, then the first of five editions of the Tradition tournament on the Champions Tour (one of the senior tour's five major championships) was held here in 2011.

It’s a fabulous course serving a private golf club whose members luxuriate in a Williamsburg-styled clubhouse surrounded by a residential golfing community which sees each exist in perfect harmony. Shoal Creek is routed through a natural and secluded environment which is just a short distance from the city centre of Birmingham, Alabama. With the magnificent backdrop of Double Oak Mountain to the east, Shoal Creek is one of the most peaceful golfing environments imaginable.

Regarded as a challenging shot makers course which makes good use of creeks and ponds, Shoal Creek is always in excellent condition but the critics think it’s a bit too bland with insufficient variety of holes, shape or elevation change to get the golfing pulse racing.

In the book Golf’s 100 Toughest Holes by Chris Millard, the 470-yard par four 12th is described as “a relatively straight driving hole”. The author continues: “At the turn of a gentle dogleg right, a turn marked by bunkers, the hole heads uphill to a long narrow green that features a big slope on the right and a gaping, deep bunker on the left. For the PGA Championships and U.S. Amateur, deep rough turned a difficult hole into an extraordinarily difficult one.”

The course was updated ahead of it hosting the 73rd US Women’s Open in 2018 (won by Thailand's Ariya Jutanugarn), the first time that the event was held in the state of Alabama. Jack Nicklaus and his former senior architect Jim Lipe (who now runs his own design company in Louisiana) virtually reconstructed every hole, replacing former large fairway sand traps with smaller clusters of bunkers, removing trees to improve sight lines, and re-contouring greens with Auburn Victory bent grass to allow more pin positions.