"I'm still nervous to see the reactions when the course reopens," Beau Welling admitted, and he would know better than almost anyone what those reactions might be. He learned to play golf on this exact ground, starting at age six on a kids' par-3 layout that no longer exists, working his way up through Greenville Country Club's junior program under longtime pro Paul Voyer before he ever touched the Chanticleer Course as a member. Now, at 55, he's the one who just finished rebuilding it.
If you've played Chanticleer for any real stretch of years, the thing to understand before your next round is simple and a little disorienting: the hole you call "nine" is not the hole you remember. Neither is eighteen. The nines flipped. What used to be the ninth hole is now the closer. What used to be the seventeenth is now the eighth. And the par-4 that used to end your round has been replaced entirely by a new par-3, which now opens the back side instead.
The Hole You Call "Nine" Isn't Nine Anymore
Chanticleer opened in 1970 as a Robert Trent Jones Sr. design, got an update from his son Rees in the early 2000s, and had settled into a familiar par-72 routing that members had internalized over five decades. That routing is gone.
Here's the actual swap, based on the renovation Welling's firm carried out:
| Old hole | New hole |
|---|---|
| Former 9th (closer moved) | Now the 18th |
| Former 17th | Now the 8th |
| Former par-4 18th | Replaced by a new par-3 9th |
The course also dropped from a par 72 to a par 71. If you've spent years thinking of the front nine as the "easy" side and the back as where the round gets decided, that mental map is now backwards. Muscle memory built up over decades of member-guests and Saturday games doesn't transfer cleanly to a course that swapped its own numbering.
Why Bent Grass Finally Lost
The renovation didn't start out this ambitious. According to reporting on the project, the club originally considered a modest greens refresh. What it turned into was a full accounting of what a 55-year-old bent-grass course can and cannot survive in an Upstate South Carolina summer.
Bent grass greens, the kind Chanticleer was known for, thin out and struggle once soil temperatures climb through July and August. The fix wasn't cosmetic. The greens are now Bermuda, and the fairways have moved to Tahoma 31, a heat-tolerant turf that also needs less water. Welling put it plainly when he said the goal was to "bring back some of its lustre," but the mechanism behind that lustre is agronomic, not aesthetic. A course that couldn't reliably hold consistent putting surfaces past June had a real problem, and the renovation exists because an early-2000s update from Rees Jones hadn't solved it.
The Numbers Behind "Biggest Renovation in Decades"
The scale of change here isn't just the nine flip. Chanticleer's maximum length grew from 6,722 yards to roughly 7,000, mostly by adding distance on the former 5th, 11th and 17th holes. That number matters more once you set it next to what else is already in the ground locally. The Preserve at Verdae plays 7,021 yards from its longest tees, and Thornblade Club, one of the area's other prominent private courses, reaches 7,024. For most of Chanticleer's history, it was a shorter, more compact test than either of those. Now it sits in the same length bracket.
That's a meaningful shift for anyone who's played all three courses and assumed Chanticleer would always be the shorter, tighter round. It isn't anymore. The added yardage plus the new par-3 finishing sequence means low-handicap members and visiting competitors are looking at a course engineered to play harder than the one they grew up on, even though the acreage and the setting along the Reedy River haven't moved an inch.
The Architect Who Grew Up Here
What makes this renovation different from a typical country club facelift is who the club hired to do it. Greenville Country Club didn't bring in an outside name with no history at the property. Club president Michael Fletcher said the choice was simple: the club had "a world class designer right here in Greenville who grew up on the course," which made hiring him "pretty much a no-brainer." Welling went on to build a career designing golf courses around the country, including current work revitalizing the Augusta Municipal Golf Course, funded in part by Augusta National.
Chanticleer has already produced a handful of PGA Tour players, among them Lucas Glover, Bill Haas and Ben Martin. Welling's read on the changes is that for elite players, the course is simply going to play harder now, a direct consequence of the added length and the more demanding closing stretch. For a club whose leadership reportedly framed the project as an effort to restore something that had faded, hiring someone whose own golf memory was formed on that same turf is a specific kind of continuity you don't get by hiring a firm with no ties to the place.
Proof It's Back in Play
Big renovations create a real gap in a club's competitive calendar, and Chanticleer's is no exception. The Chanticleer Invitational, an event the club has hosted for its 48-team field, did not run in 2025 because of the ongoing construction, and the club's own tournament page had not yet posted a new date as of this writing.
What has already returned to the new layout is the club's own Club Championship, played August 22 and 23, 2026, with 44 members competing across two days on the rebuilt course. Gary Brauns won the Gross Division by four strokes over reigning champion Mike Coling Sr., closing with a 3-over 75 after opening with a 2-under 70. In the net competition, Larry Bingham held on for the title while John Helige mounted a serious final-round push, carding an 8-under 64 to finish just one stroke back. Gayla Brauns took the Ladies Division championship, adding a second title to a strong weekend for the Brauns family.
That's the clearest evidence that Chanticleer isn't a course still wrapped in construction fencing. It's a course that just hosted a full member championship field, under its new par and its new routing, roughly two years after the first shovels went into the ground.
What This Means for Your Next Round
If you've been putting off a round at Chanticleer because you assumed it was still torn up, the Club Championship results say otherwise. If you've played it recently and felt like something was off about where the round seemed to build toward its climax, that's not you misremembering the course. The finishing sequence you knew for years has genuinely moved. The ninth hole you used to think of as a warmup is now where your round ends, and the closing hole you used to save something for now comes early.
For a neighborhood built around this club as much as any street or school zone, that's not a small adjustment. It's a change to the shared reference point that generations of members have used to talk about their best rounds, their worst collapses, and the hole where a particular member-guest match turned. The scorecard changed. Give yourself a round or two before you trust your old instincts on where the pressure actually sits.
If you're curious what else has shifted in the neighborhoods around Augusta Road and the club, or you're weighing a move into this part of Greenville, Thomas Tamrack knows this area from the ground up, not just the listings in it. Let's Connect.
