Rob Collins & Tad King · United States · The Cult Builders
Rob Collins and Tad King are the most exciting underdog story in modern golf architecture — two shaper-builders from Tennessee who spent years moving dirt for other architects, saved their money, bought a failed nine-hole course, and turned it into a cult phenomenon that changed how people think about public golf in America. Sweetens Cove, their first and for a long time only design, opened in 2014 on the bones of a bankrupt Sequatchie Valley course. It has no driving range, no cart paths, no irrigation beyond the greens, and a porta-potty for a clubhouse. It is also one of the most beloved golf courses in the country — a 9-hole match-play paradise where every green complex is a puzzle box and every round feels like an adventure.
Part of Sweetens Cove's mystique comes from its ownership group: Peyton Manning and Andy Roddick bought into the club in 2019, giving King-Collins the capital and credibility to expand. But the architecture was already iconic before the celebrities arrived. Collins, a former Division I golfer at Wofford College who studied landscape architecture, handles routing and strategy. King, a master shaper who learned earth-moving on construction crews across the Southeast, builds the features and brings Collins's concepts to life. They're a genuine partnership — not a name-brand architect with a construction crew, but two equals whose skills complement each other perfectly. Together they've built fewer than 10 courses, but each one has been an event.
King-Collins designs are built on two principles: width and drama. Their fairways are enormous — 60, 70, sometimes 100 yards wide — giving every player room to find the short grass. But the width is a trap. Different lines produce wildly different approach angles, and the "right" line is different every day depending on the wind and the pin position. The ground game is central to every King-Collins design: approaches are meant to be run up, slopes are designed to feed balls toward or away from targets, and the firm-and-fast conditions they insist on mean you're never just flying the ball to the flag. You're calculating roll, bounce, and ground contour from the moment you pick your target.
Their green complexes are the main event. King-Collins greens are enormous, wildly contoured, and loaded with internal movement that turns a 20-foot putt into a miniature golf journey. At Sweetens Cove, the 9th green is 17,000 square feet with a nine-foot internal ridge — you can hit the green and have a 150-foot putt. The greens often tie three or four holes together, with different quadrants serving as targets from different angles on different holes. The result is a course that plays differently every time: the front-left pin on a King-Collins green might be accessible from one tee angle and borderline impossible from another. It rewards repeat play more than any architecture style in the game.
Their aesthetic is deliberately rough — scrubby waste areas, native grasses, ragged bunker edges, and a "found" quality that makes their courses look like they've been there for a century. This is the anti-Augusta. Nothing is manicured. Nothing is precious. Everything is functional. King-Collins courses feel like places where golf was invented, not where it's been polished into a luxury product. For a generation of golfers raised on the minimalist revival — the Tom Doak / Bill Coore / Gil Hanse school — King-Collins represents the next evolution: same principles, fewer pretensions, more fun.
Rank #29 · South Pittsburg, TN · Inland
Landmand Golf Club (2022) in Homer, Nebraska, is King-Collins's first 18-hole design built from scratch, and it is an absolute monster — 7,600 yards from the tips on enormous scale, with 200-yard-wide fairways and greens that look like they were dropped by a glacier. Built on dramatic Loess Hills terrain overlooking the Missouri River Valley, Landmand is one of the most talked-about new courses in America. Old Barnwell (2023) in Aiken, South Carolina, a private club with a strong caddie program and match-play culture, represents their most refined work — a course that channels the spirit of the great English heathland clubs through a Southern lens. Red Feather in Texas, their newest project under construction, promises to continue their run of must-see public designs. King-Collins also redesigned Sewanee Golf Club near their home base in Tennessee, turning a sleepy nine-holer on the University of the South campus into a charming, strategic routing that punches well above its weight.