The best part of any golf trip is all the golf – of course – followed by more golf, with a high chance of still more golf tomorrow. More shots, more greens, more of everything. Wake up before the sun, launch the day off the first tee, keep swinging until the cart attendants round you up in the dark.
If the courses are of high quality, even better. Should they be ranked among the best in their state, greater still.
But few resorts offer seemingly endless great golf within their confines. One or two courses are the norm, then players are forced to book elsewhere for that more-golf-all-the-time fanaticism. Only a handful of properties include enough golf to keep players swinging on highly rated and fresh-to-them courses for days on end. It’s not overly difficult to jump around from resort to resort if golfers plan well in advance, but there’s much to be said for the ease of use in finding one golf vacation spot with great holes stretching for days.
Examples in the U.S. include Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon, home to five top-ranked 18-hole courses. Pinehurst and its smorgasbord of golf holes – anchored by the famed No. 2 – with five courses ranked inside the top 15 public-access layouts in North Carolina. Destination Kohler in Wisconsin and its four highly ranked courses that include Whistling Straits.
And Reynolds Lake Oconee in Georgia, home to five of the top 15 public-access courses in Georgia on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list.
A massive Central Georgia property sprawling across some 12,000 acres on the shores of its namesake lake about 85 miles southeast of Atlanta, Reynolds Lake Oconee offers five courses open to guests of the on-property Ritz-Carlton hotel or cottages operated by the community, and club members have access to a sixth layout. That makes it 42,336 yards of golf in all, more than 24 miles.
And after leaving the luxurious lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, none of it feels like a resort. That’s by design, and it’s a good thing.
Despite having the AAA Four Diamond/ Forbes Four-Star hotel and 50-plus multi-bedroom cottages, Reynolds Lake Oconee is at its core a residential community with more than 4,000 members. In recent years, 88 percent of total rounds on the courses consists of member-related play, leaving just 12 percent of tee times for short-term guests of the hotel and cottages, with no regular outside daily-fee play. That means players can be rewarded with a private-club experience on the five courses open to guests.
Unlike many resorts, tee times are never rushed, going off in 12-minute intervals that help maintain pace of play instead of the industry’s frequent 9- to 10-minute intervals that can bog down a course. Reynolds’ practice ranges are uncrowded, the clubhouses never overrun, the courses typically in pristine condition. Throw in the Kingdom – an elite TaylorMade fitting and instruction center on property not far from the Ritz – and players have more golf options than would fit in a two-day trip.
It’s an old cliché from 1980s golf marketing to call daily-fee players a “member for the day,” but Reynolds actually delivers such a relaxed experience. The courses are operated for their members, and the hotel and resort guests are given a taste of that life.
“We’re always going to be more club than resort,” said Dave Short, senior vice president of marketing, sales and strategic planning for Reynolds Lake Oconee. “You know, high-density resort play, it’s just not what our members are here for. We’re not in that game. We just happen to have in the center of our club one of the best hotels in the country.”
Owned by MetLife Inc. since 2012, the resort community is home to some 4,000 members and features everything from forested houses that start around $700,000 all the way into the realm of lakefront mansions on multi-acre lots that cost more than $9 million, Short said. About 40 percent of real estate transactions involve buyers from the Atlanta area, and Short said the other 60 percent represent a vast geographic range as the resort has trended younger in recent years with active professionals embracing a work-from-home ethos.
It can be a huge change for big-city folks moving to what once was middle-of-nowhere rural Georgia, but Short said MetLife’s continuing capital improvements – new restaurants, leisure amenities, marinas and more – have made it a most-inviting lifestyle swap. “Our members will tell you,” Short said, “we’re 40 minutes from a Walmart but only five minutes from a Ritz-Carlton.”
And, seemingly, never even that far away from the next tee box.
The six total courses stretch across the property: Great Waters designed by Jack Nicklaus and recently renovated; The Oconee by Rees Jones and closest to the Ritz-Carlton; The National with 27 rolling holes by Tom Fazio; a members’ favorite at The Preserve by Bob Cupp; The Landing by Cupp, just up the road from the main property; plus the members-only and quirky Creek Club by Jim Engh.
Each of the five public-access layouts plays at times along the shore of the massive Lake Oconee, a massive reservoir constructed by Georgia Power in 1979 with 374 miles of shoreline. Great Waters features the most holes along the lake and receives much of the attention, ranking No. 2 among all public-access layouts in Georgia. But each of the layouts has received restorations and renovations since MetLife took over the property, and to focus only on the highest-ranked Great Waters – or The Oconee based on its easy proximity to the Ritz – would be a mistake.
“For a hotel guest, it’s easy to walk out the front door and go over to The Oconee, so that’s pretty popular, and Great Waters is very popular with guests because of its notoriety and profile as a Nicklaus Signature course,” said Short, a single-digit handicapper. “But once you get beyond those two, you can find a lot to like about The National, you can find a lot to like about The Creek if you know a member who can get you there, and I think The Landing is one that doesn’t get nearly enough recognition. It’s an extraordinary golf course.”
Short spent an afternoon chasing birdies and telling jokes at the Creek Club with this writer during my recent sampling of all six courses in three days – that’s a lot of golf, and I wouldn’t necessarily suggest such a trip because to focus only on golf is to miss too much else of what the resort offers. But golf is what I do, and following are my takes on the resort’s five public-access courses.
