Four new golf courses in Arkansas are expected to see play this year while six more are in the development pipeline for 1999 and beyond. And tradition-steeped country clubs, which have watched as numerous luxurious daily-fee tracks have opened in the past two years, have geared up with expensive renovations.

Greystone, the Cabot housing and golf course development, will open its second course sometime around Memorial Day, when the roadway leading to the new course is paved. The Kevin Tucker-design, already pronounced by some observers as far superior to the original Greystone track nearer state Highway 5, will top 7,300 yards.

Both Plantation Golf Club in Faulkner County and Bunker Hill Golf Course in Perry County should host their opening action by late summer or fall.

And Sage Meadows in Jonesboro, another Tucker design, is already drawing nods of recognition, even though the 6,901-yard, par-72 course hasn’t fully opened for play. The clubhouse should be completed in early June.

“The front nine opened April 9, and we should open the back nine on May 1,” says Don Lackey, director of golf and general manager at Sage Meadows and former head pro at Diamante in Hot Springs Village.

The front nine of Sage Meadows offers more of an open, Scottish-style setting, and the back nine meanders through rolling terrain with trees, creeks and ponds. The semi-private course features zoysia fairways, SR 10-20 bent-grass greens and Bermuda roughs.

The signature hole at Sage Meadows is No. 9, a par-4, dogleg right that plays at 447 yards from the championship tees. A second shot of about 165 yards will approach the green, which is bordered by a lake on the right and bunkers along the left.

Golfing legend Tommy Bolt consulted on the course, with Tucker, the acclaimed golf architect out of Nashville, Tenn. Jonesboro businessmen Kent Arnold and Bob and Ed Troutt are the owners of this 496-acre development, which should yield 500 homesites.

Backers of the 137-acre Plantation Golf Club are shooting at a Labor Day opening for their $2.5 million project. The 7,100-yard course, splashed with seasonal color from azaleas, dogwoods, crepe myrtles and magnolias, will feature SR 10-20 bent-grass greens and 419 Bermuda fairways and tee boxes.

“We’ll have nine greens ready for planting shortly, and the other nine will follow right behind,” says Mark Ramer, partner, course designer and director of golf at Plantation. “Fairways will be sprigged this month also.”

The driving range and 2,700-SF clubhouse should open by June. The fee structure for members and visitors is incomplete.

The signature hole of the par-72 course is No. 7, a 138-yard par 3 along the Arkansas River with a gorgeous view of Pinnacle Mountain in the background.

The semi-private course is on state Highway 365 at the southern tip of Faulkner County, about four miles west of the Morgan-Maumelle interchange on Interstate 40.

Dennis Grady, landowner/developer of Bunker Hill Golf Course, hopes to have his $2.3 million project ready for fall play at the latest. “We’re going to try and open up some time in August,” he says.

Greens and irrigation work are all that remain on the 6,558-yard par-72 course, 12 miles west of Conway on state Highway 60. The 115-acre course features Bermuda fairways and tift dwarf Bermuda greens.

Greystone debuted its initial 18 holes in the fall of 1995 with plans to open two more 18-hole courses. The second is about to be unveiled east of the original course.

“We realized where we made our mistakes on the first course, and the new course is going to be outstanding,” says Dustin Ralston, Greystone’s golf professional.

The new course will be dubbed Cypress Creek for a stream that meanders through the front nine. No. 3 is a par-5 that crosses the creek twice. Most of the natural look of the creek was maintained other than problem areas where rocks were added to stop erosion.

The back nine will feature an island green, No. 16, and a finishing par-5 that can be reached in two shots with a daring second over water.

“The land we had to work with on this course is better than what we had for the first course,” Ralston says. The new course will have zoysia fairways and tee boxes and bent-grass greens, with Bermuda rough.

Having to rebuild greens on its first course, Greystone apparently learned its lesson and went for the best this time around: the C.E. Sanders Co., which rebuilt greens at Augusta National and has worked on a number of top courses in the U.S., was hired to build the greens for Cypress Creek.

Cypress Creek eventually will have its own clubhouse.

The older course, which will be called Mountain Springs, has had a number of greens reworked since its opening, and the course appears to be maturing. Greystone has lots platted throughout its property, but the focus on home-site sales will remain around the older course until that is filled, Ralston says. Roadwork around the new course was still far from complete last week.

Greystone is also making a push to enhance membership and an eventual move to private status after opening as a daily-fee facility. Golfers can join the club solely to play Mountain Springs for $300 and monthly dues. Paying $4,000 and paying dues of $100 a month beginning in June will allow golfers to play both courses.

New Look at Older Places

Hardscrabble Country Club in Fort Smith and Little Rock’s Pleasant Valley Country Club and Country Club of Little Rock decided in the past year that an upgrade was in order.

Hardscrabble membership OK’d a $1 million expenditure to rebuild greens and prime the course into good enough condition to host a Nike Tour professional event in August.

Other than a change of grass for its greens, Pleasant Valley has generally gone untouched since it was opened 30 years ago. The club chose to expand its greens and plant a newer, more heat-resistant version of bent grass. The project is taking place over the next several months a few holes at a time so the membership can still use most of the 27-hole course. The first phase of the project began April 6.

Currently, the 16th, 17th and 18th holes and the driving range have been wiped out for reworking. In June, the course will move to temporary greens as construction company Landscapes Unlimited begins its work in earnest.

“They will be the best temporary greens you’ve every played on,” PVCC superintendent Greg Hansen says.

The construction work is expected to be finished by Aug. 1, and the new greens will be planted Sept. 1.

PVCC has been testing a variety of grasses for three years, and a type called A1, also used at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, proved to be the most consistent in the test.

Tees are being realigned and leveled, along with a new set of tees being added. Bunkers are being rebuilt and filled with white sand from Sheridan. The lake in the middle of 16-18 is being dredged, and a new filtering system being put in place to keep silt from being put back on the new greens.

The Country Club of Little Rock, with the oldest course in Arkansas, decided to go all out last fall. The reworked greens and fairways at CCLR are coming along nicely, club officials say.

El Toro Zoysia has replaced Bermuda as the fairway grass of choice. The more heat tolerant and smaller leafed SR 10-20 bent grass has replaced the Penncross Bent grass with an eye toward smoother putting and easier maintenance. The membership, it’s said, was assessed $5,600 per person for the work.

“Everything is in good condition,” says Bobby McGee, golf course superintendent at CCLR. “We just need some good hot weather, and we should be in excellent condition.”

Newer Courses in the Works

McGee’s work on the Glenwood Country Club course led to design work for Cooper Realty on an as-yet-unnamed project near Melbourne (Izard County).

“We’re just doing the rough grading now, and I’m still doing preliminary design,” McGee says. “If we don’t hit 7,000 yards, we should come in at over 6,900 yards from the championship tees.”

He is working on paper with the yardage of the par-72 course, slated for a late summer or fall 1999 opening. Zoysia fairways and tee boxes with bent-grass greens are planned.

The 300-acre site, featuring rolling terrain and some woods, is on the north side of state Highway 69 just east of Melbourne.

Five miles north of Sage Meadows, a 700-acre golf course project is in the early stages of development along Crowley’s Ridge. Beckwood Ridge Golf Course, the preliminary name of the project, is located at the northeast corner of state highway 351 and the Greene County line.

The wooded property is expected to produce an 18-hole course, with the possibility of expanding to 27 holes, as well as an undetermined number of homesites. Robert Wood, a Bono-based builder, is the owner/developer.

“We hope to break ground on the course by the end of summer,” says Mark Sexton of Fairway Golf Course Development Inc. Fall 1999 is considered the earliest possible opening.

Sexton and partner Greg Clark are also working on three other courses shooting for a hoped-for 1999 opening. These courses and Beckwood all will feature tift 419 Bermuda fairways and SR 10-20 bent grass greens.

Progress on Mallard Point Country Club in Lonoke is a year behind what was anticipated, but an ownership change is expected to lead to an official groundbreaking by Memorial Day.

Developer/owners Ronnie Shrader, former owner of Arkansaw Meter Co.; and Jack Wilson, owner of Woodhaven Homes; will purchase the 327-acre property and make Mallard Point happen. MMM Farms, owned by the Mamae Morris family, had looked at developing the project but will instead sell.

The 6,970-yard, par-72 course will have a half dozen lakes, including one that will all but surround a signature par-3 hole. Sexton cites a planned opening of next spring.

Once the course is finished, North Carolina-based Golf Planning Associates will buy and manage it. The project is located about a mile south of Interstate 40 on state Highway 89 at Hamilton Road.

Two less defined projects are a 450-acre project on state highway 94 between Rogers and Pea Ridge and a 150-acre project in Greers Ferry near the Narrows.

The Benton County course will have 18 holes with yardage in the 6,500-7,000 range. The Greer’s Ferry course will have nine holes, with an expected opening in fall 1999.

The second of two would-be golf course projects near Scott went on hiatus. The Steele Bend Country Club followed the Scottland development in failing to materialize as planned.

Optimists expected construction to begin last fall on Steele Bend. However, the Steele Craig family has slowed down the timetable.

The proposed semi-private country club development was to be located in east Pulaski County on the west side of Old River Lake near Scott. About 400 acres were earmarked for a 7,000-yard, par-72 course with several phases of homesites. The first phase will encompass 92 lots.

“It will still happen, but it’s probably at least a year away from happening,” says Mark Sexton of Fairway Golf Course Development Inc.

The proposed Scottland development originally surfaced in 1995 as an 835-acre project on the east side of Old River Lake. Depending on final lot sizes, 500-1,000 homesites were planned to flow around a semi-private golf course.

Details of the course never got beyond the preliminary drawing board stage. AJ&M Properties LLC was the would-be developer. The limited liability company bears a corporate monogram for Jim Alexander, Gerald K. Johnson and Charles “Chip” Murphy III.

Last Year’s Openings

Three impressive daily-fee courses around the state and a private course in southwest Little Rock were among the new additions during the last half of 1997. Several other courses such as the Malvern Country Club added nine holes to an existing nine.

Fayetteville welcomed Stonebridge Meadows, built on more than 300 acres of farmland southeast of town on state Highway 16. Golfers in the Fort Smith area began flocking east to Alma to try Eagle Crest. And Danville banker John Ed Chambers unveiled his much anticipated Chamberlyne Country Club. While Stonebridge Meadows and Eagle Crest were built for the daily-fee player, Chamberlyne is eventually gearing to go private, Chambers told Arkansas Business last year.

Eagle Crest in Alma, which opened this spring, is an 18-hole, par 71 course running 6,400 yards long from the middle tees.

Eight lakes dot the 140-acre spread of rolling pasture and woods at Chamberlyne, which plays at 7,067 yards. The par-72 course is three miles north of Danville at the intersection of state Highways 27 and 154.

The Jim Lindsey-led Lindsey Management Inc. brought a long-awaited country club and course to the Otter Creek area with Eagle Hill Golf & Athletic Club, accompanied by an apartment complex. The course opened with nine holes in November and soon opened the second nine. By the end of the year, the club was nearing 500 memberships, many who took advantage of a bargain entry fee and affordable monthly dues.

Eagle Hill has Tifton Bermuda fairways, sodded zoysia tee boxes and bent-grass greens. The course is long even from the mid-tees, some greens are small and difficult to hit, not to mention putt, and water comes into play on many of the holes. Lyndy Lindsey, who has designed a number of par-3 courses inside Lindsey-built apartment complexes and the architect of Lost Springs in Rogers, was the course designer at Eagle Hill. Lindsey incorporated a number of pro-style course features on Eagle Hill.

The signature hole is the par-3 14th, with a green shaped and contoured like the state of Arkansas.

Meadows Enterprises Inc., led by Bill Meadows, opened Stonebridge Meadows, which was already written up by the Professional Golfers’ Association of America before it debuted. The PGA ran a full-page article on the course in an edition of the association’s South Central Golf magazine under the headline “New gem of the Ozarks.”

“You tell people that it is nice, or that it has all of these beautiful features, and they don’t really believe you,” Meadows says. “But then they come out here and take a tour, and they get done and just say ‘Wow!’”

The golf course is on 303 of the 1,000 acres that comprise Dash Goff’s picturesque farm. A deal was worked out in which the Meadows family could choose which parcel of land they wanted to purchase, with an option to buy more in 200-acre increments during the next four years.

Randy Heckenkemper, a professional course designer from Tulsa, was brought in to design Stonebridge Meadows. Aerial photographs of the entire farm were taken, loaded into a computer and then converted to three-dimensional images. After the 300 acres had been chosen, Heckenkemper designed hundreds of holes in hundreds of different layouts until he found the exact 18 that he wanted. After the design phase, a team from Golf Works in Houston was brought in to construct the course.

Although the course was designed to offer a variety of challenges to golfers, Heckenkemper says the 195-yard, par-3 No. 17 is the course’s signature hole.

“The green is elevated on a ridge, with bunkers all around the back edge,” Clay Henry writes in the PGA magazine article. “Huge trees overlooking the west fork of the White River frame the back of the green.”

Water hazards are common at Stonebridge Meadows, where natural streams and ponds were already in place on the farm. But Heckenkemper also designed an elaborate series of 16 water falls that pour a thousand gallons of water each minute through 2,500 feet of creeks and ponds.

The course is unusually long, measuring 7,150 yards from the tips. But, Meadows says, the course measures 5,200 yards from the front tees and is designed for golfers of every skill level. The bent-grass greens are large; fairways have Bermuda grass that will be overseeded with rye in the fall and winter.

Bill Agler, who was with Paradise Valley for more than 15 years, is the club’s golf professional.

“If you are an average golfer, or even a bad golfer, you don’t have to beat yourself up playing this course. You can come up to the front tees to play,” Meadows says. “The idea was to create one of the top courses in the state, but let anybody come and play on it. If you look at the northwest Arkansas corridor, we have a lot of private clubs, but we do not have many upscale clubs where anyone can come and play.”

While the holes themselves offer a variety of challenges and interesting configurations, the first thing that most visitors notice is the course’s natural beauty.

“Where else can you go around here to play golf and get this kind of scenery?” asks an impressed Mike Nail, sports anchor for KHOG-TV, Channel 40, and a recent visitor to the course.

The downtown Fayetteville skyline is visible from one green, and at another point the cart trail runs 20 feet above the White River. The stone bridge for which the course is named was built around the turn of the century and supports the road just past the clubhouse. The remains of a carriage path that once ran through the farm can be seen at certain points as it crosses the cart path, and herons and deer still appear on occasion.

“It’s so quiet out here, it’s like being in the country,” says Delano Cotton, president of Northwest Electric Inc. and an early fan of the course.

The clubhouse is a remodeled farm house in the center of the course. The original building was first constructed in the 1840s and was used as a hospital in the Civil War. Over the years, it was renovated to become living quarters for the jockeys who came to the thoroughbred racing track and training center at Verma Lee Farms, as the land was previously known.

Now everything but the foundation has been renovated to create the course clubhouse, and the living quarters for the jockeys is Meadows’ office. The building also contains a pro shop, snack bar, indoor and outdoor eating areas and television room and two mascots: Goff’s dogs are frequent visitors to the clubhouse. Nearby, a renovated barn houses 60 golf carts and all of the greens equipment.

“In Arizona, this kind of course would be $150 a day, no question,” Meadows says.

Margaret Alsbrook of the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal contributed to this report.