Inside Alabama’s $47,000,000 Golf Facility

Inside Alabama’s $47,000,000 Golf Facility

In 2018, the Alabama Crimson Tide finished as runner up at the NCAA Golf National Championship on both the men’s and women’s side. And while that would qualify as an unbelievably successful season for any program, a mark of why this team has been so great is that JC Sewell, the men’s coach, and Mick Potter, the women’s coach, put their heads together with Greg Burn, the AD, and asked, “How can we make our practice facilities even better?” and they came up with an idea that may sound simple, but that even at the highest levels of golf is still extraordinary. They wanted a way for their players to measure in real data whether they had a good practice. Not a good tournament, a good practice. That kicked off a six-year process that culminated in the Crimson Reserve, a 47 million facility that opened just last fall in September 2024. And it’s no exaggeration to call this one of, if not the best practice facility in all of college golf. This is on campus at the University of Alabama. The facility you see here is a 164 acre marvel that sits just a mile north of the Alabama campus. And it’s the product of the coaches of the AD, of a lot of high level fundraising, input from former players including Justin Thomas and Trey Mullenax, and a design team led by Davis Love III and Scott Sherman of Love Golf Design. The very first thing Coach Sewell talks about, what he calls the coolest thing we have and the best teaching tool for the players is this river green. And it’s not called the river green because it’s on a river, but because it looks like a river. Rather than build eight or nine separate greens for target practice, this is one continuous 25,000 ft green that snakes like a lazy river at the back end of the range. And not only does it function as a putting green and a chipping green and has bunkers for the sand game, but more importantly to both teams, it can be used to hit approach shots on any kind of pin, tucked, open, left, right, small landing areas, big landing areas, anywhere from 50 yards to over 200 yd. And what’s brilliant about this is that if you notice the ridges in the landing areas, various parts of this green are built to where they are exactly the PGA Tour average for proximity from certain distances. So if you can keep it on a certain ridge from say 150 yards, you know you’re inside the tour average for that distance. And ultimately, if you play golf at Alabama, you do want to play professionally. So the standard for how good you have to be to jump to the next level is built right into this river green. And that’s what Sewell means by measuring how good a practice is. You can tell by where the ball lands on these greens if you’ve gained or lost strokes from a certain yardage. And from there you can get instant feedback on what parts of your game are up to snuff and which parts need work. That theme continues in the wedge facility which operates under a similar concept. There are eight targets here and the landing areas, the width of them conform to tour average proximity from eight different yardages. And these guys make a game of it where they try to hit three balls to each of the targets before moving on and see if they can complete all eight targets. That’s 24 shots within 40 balls. Again, we’re talking strokes gained, strokes lost. Justin Thomas was one of the people who insisted they absolutely needed a fairway and they ended up getting two. As you can see on these fairways, there are bunkers along the side and those are almost visual cues. Can you draw the ball over this bunker? Can you fade the ball over that bunker? Can you work your ball in both directions over these targets and still land it on the grass? You’ll notice it’s fairly wide aside from a few trees, but the brilliance of it is that by selecting your targets, it tightens up considerably. As you’ll see, there are two areas here on the TE’s that are pretty vast themselves and give players a lot of options. In all, they have 410 yards to work with. Not even Brace Dambo could use up all of that real estate. All of this is what Sewell calls situational practice. And it’s not easy in golf. In football, you could have the two-minute drill. In basketball, you can practice being down one with 10 seconds left. But in golf, everything happens on a course, and it’s tougher to simulate that. But the Crimson Reserve is designed not only to test various elements of your game, but to reproduce tournament conditions so that when these teams end up competing, it all feels very familiar. Now, when it’s time to actually play, where do they go? Well, they walk through this $7 million tunnel underneath Kicker Road. Seabwell joked that one of his ambitions is to get the song Thunder Struck playing as his team walks out to the Crimson Reserve course, a nine-hole facility where the holes can be played at different lengths. For example, the same hole can be a par five or a par three depending on the setup. There are two flags every day on every green, so you can loop it twice and get different looks. And the third hole even has two separate greens. They call them little three and big three. And everything was designed to test players on shot shapes, on approach angles, driving strategies. All of it with the same end goal of situational practice. How do you maintain all this? Well, it takes a team of 10 at minimum, including a full-time Greenskeeper and his assistant. They keep it looking beautiful from the Tiff Eagle Bermuda on the Greens to the Toma 31 Bermuda on the fairways and roughs. And what’s mind-blowing is that all of this is exclusive to these two teams and 30 other donors who contributed $14 million between them. No public, no walk-ons, just some of the best college golfers in the country. Now, let’s take a look at the team building. This is 25,000 square ft. It’s Georgian revival architecture through and through. You’ll notice that brick that is designed to look like the buildings on the rest of Alabama’s campus. And in fact, the bricks are reused from old buildings that were on campus. So, they take the aesthetic to the extreme. Many cases, these are 100-year-old bricks. And check out the back here. It’s designed to look just like the facade of the Gorgus building, the oldest structure on the Alabama campus. The east wing is for the men. The west wing is for the women. And it has the usual features starting with the trophy room here where you can see the 2013 and 2014 national championship trophies for the men, the 2012 trophy for the women. Move on and you see the spacious locker rooms, exercise room, a lounge. Here you see a putting studio with the Zen green stage technology. And pretty uniquely in college golf, they actually have their own workout facility in the building with a cold tub. As Sewell said, this is a one-stop shop. This is a place they consider a second home. And when these players head to any tournament venue across the country, they are as prepared as they can possibly be. Thanks to the Crimson Reserve, where the constant testing and the difficult but educational challenges of what they’ve built mean that when it’s time to really compete, they’ve been there before and they’re ready to win. Roll Tide.

In 2024, the University of Alabama opened the Crimson Reserve golf facility. Built on 164 acres, at a cost of over $47,000,000, it could be the best practice area in golf. With design input from Justin Thomas as well as Davis Love III, the Crimson Reserve features a 400-yard long driving range, a custom-designed 9-hole course and a 24,000 square foot clubhouse, complete with a gym, putting studio, hitting bays and locker rooms.

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