The Origin
Rob Collins and Tad King met in 2006 on a Gary Player Design project in Naples, Florida. Collins was a design coordinator with an art history degree from Sewanee and a master's in landscape architecture from Mississippi State. King was a construction guy, the one who made drawings real. They bonded over a shared frustration: the architect-contractor model was broken.
The traditional setup goes like this: an architect draws plans. A separate contractor builds from them. The architect visits periodically, points at things, leaves. The contractor builds what's on paper — even when the paper is wrong for the land. Two teams, two incentives, one result: compromises everywhere. The architect's vision gets watered down in the handoff between office and dirt.
Collins and King thought there was a better way. Bring construction in-house. Same team, same payroll, same goal. Architect and shaper working side by side, making decisions in real time as the land reveals itself. Less waste, more craftsmanship, better golf. They talked about it over dinner at a Carrabba's.
Then 2008 happened.
Collins remembers the exact moment: "We were grassing the third fairway in September of '08 when Bear Stearns collapsed. I went up to the guy who was seeding the fairway and said — it's over. We're done. The world is coming to an end."
For the golf industry, it nearly did. Course construction stopped. Jobs vanished. Collins moved his wife and daughter back home. King was in the same boat. What looked like a disaster turned out to be the push they needed. With nothing to lose, they formalized the partnership they'd been talking about. In 2010, King Collins Golf Course Design & Construction was born.
They had a philosophy, a business model, and zero projects. Then they got a phone call about a failed nine-holer in South Pittsburg, Tennessee.
Sweetens Cove: The Manifesto
Sequatchie Valley Golf & Country Club was a dead-flat nine-hole course on a Tennessee Valley Authority floodplain. Nothing special. Nothing promising. To most architects, it would've looked like a renovation job — clean it up, collect a fee, move on.
Collins and King saw something else: a blank canvas with nothing to lose. The owner, Bob Thomas Jr., knew the course needed to be different to survive. He gave them permission to be bold. They took it.
The result — renamed Sweetens Cove — opened in 2014 and became something no one predicted: a destination. A nine-hole public course in South Pittsburg, Tennessee (population: 3,100) that golfers drive six hours to play. The New York Times wrote about it. Golf Twitter made it a pilgrimage. A group of investors led by Peyton Manning and Andy Roddick bought in. The cult of Sweetens Cove was real.
What did they actually build that was so different?
"Reece Thomas, the guy who brought us on, knew we had to do something different. We had to think outside the box and take chances — it's a 9 hole course in the middle of nowhere. It helped to open our creative floodgates."
Sweetens Cove is King-Collins in concentrated form. Every design principle they believe in, executed on 300 acres of floodplain with almost no budget:
- Wall-to-wall short grass. No rough. Everything is mowed tight. Miss a fairway and you're not hacking out of Kentucky bluegrass — you're assessing your next shot. The penalty for missing is the angle, not the lie. This is Pinehurst No. 2 logic applied to a public nine-holer.
- Greens as the main event. The putting surfaces at Sweetens are enormous, wildly contoured, multi-plateau affairs. A single green might have six distinct pin positions, each demanding a completely different approach. Hit the wrong plateau and you're facing a 90-foot putt across a ridge. Hit the right one and you've got a tap-in. The green is the strategy — everything else is setup.
- Embrace quirk. Blind shots. Diagonal cross-bunkers. Features that look "wrong" on paper but work in practice. Collins cites Mike Strantz — the architect behind Tobacco Road and Caledonia — as a major influence. Strantz broke rules because he understood them. King-Collins do the same.
- Fun over difficulty. Sweetens is not trying to host a U.S. Open. It's trying to make you want to play it again tomorrow. Wide fairways, playable misses, greens that reward creativity over perfection. The course doesn't beat you up — it invites you to try things.
- Culture is part of the design. The "clubhouse" is a shed. The vibe is relaxed. You can play in jeans. The architecture is serious but the experience isn't stuffy. This isn't incidental — it's intentional. King-Collins build courses for people who love golf but don't love golf's institutional baggage.
Sweetens became the proof of concept. Not just that a small firm could build something special — but that the market wanted something different. Golfers were starving for courses that prioritized fun, strategy, and memorability over yardage, difficulty, and convention.
No Tee Times. No Problem.
One of the quietest but most radical things about Sweetens Cove: there are no tee times. You buy a day pass, show up whenever you want, and play as much as you can. Morning, afternoon, sunset — it's all the same pass. Some people play 36 holes. Some play 54. The course loops differently with different pin positions, so you're never playing the same course twice.
This isn't just a pricing decision. It's a design philosophy that extends to the architecture. When there are no tee times, you don't need a pace-of-play police state. You don't need marshals. You don't need the anxiety of a 10:07 am slot ticking away while you wait on the group ahead. The entire rhythm of the day changes. Golf becomes leisure again — something you do until you're done, not something you schedule, rush through, and flee.
The day-pass model does something else, too: it makes the course feel less transactional. You're not buying 18 holes. You're buying the day. You're buying the shed, the fire pit, the hang. You're buying the right to stop for lunch between loops, to try that putt from 90 feet one more time, to sit on the bench behind the 8th green and watch groups come through. It transforms a golf course from a factory into a place.
This model — all-day access, no tee times, architecture designed for repeat play — is arguably King-Collins' most important idea. It's one they'd refine on a much bigger canvas a few years later, on the grounds of an old gravel pit in the Hudson Valley.
The Design Philosophy
King-Collins are often called "minimalists." That's half right.
They share the minimalist values: width over narrow corridors, strategy over penal punishment, ground game over aerial-only golf, short grass as the primary hazard. They believe, like Doak and Coore & Crenshaw, that the land should dictate the holes — not the other way around.
But they're not minimalists in the classic sense. Coore & Crenshaw move very little dirt; their courses look like they've always been there. King-Collins will move a mountain of dirt if it creates something unforgettable. Sweetens Cove has greens that would make a Golden Age architect blush. Landmand, their first full 18-hole course in Nebraska, features features so large and bold they look like earth art from the drone shots.
They're better described as post-minimalists. They absorbed the minimalist playbook — strategy, width, short grass, firm and fast — and then asked: what if we cranked the volume to 11? What if the greens were bigger? What if the contours were wilder? What if we built features that made purists nervous but made golfers smile?
"All things in golf architecture can be distilled down to what you find on The Old Course at St. Andrews. It's my favorite course in the world." — Rob Collins
Collins starts from St. Andrews (like every good architect) but ends up somewhere closer to Strantz. His influences, by his own account: the Old Course for routing and strategy, original Augusta National for ground contour, Pinehurst No. 2 for short grass as hazard, and Mike Strantz for the permission to be bold. "Put all those things in a blender and spit out something original."
The philosophy in practice:
- Variety is non-negotiable. "If we have 18 holes, we want 18 distinctive holes. We want people to come off at the end of the day and when someone asks what you thought about hole 13, you remember which hole they're talking about." A course where every hole blends into the next is a design failure.
- Match play as the default format. Collins favors match play's rhythms — half-par holes, trap doors, holes where birdie is a big deal and holes where par is a win. The architecture should create drama, not just accumulate strokes.
- Multiple routes for multiple players. The 14th at the Old Course is Collins's favorite hole. MacKenzie drew a diagram showing four distinct routes to play it. That idea — different classes of players finding different paths through the same hole — is the through-line of every King-Collins design.
- There are no rules. "Fairway doesn't have to go 'this way.' Blind shots are allowed. Greens can be tiered in ways that break old dogma if it makes golf more interesting." When you realize the rules of architecture are just conventions, the possibilities open up.
- In-house construction isn't a cost decision — it's a quality decision. When the architect and the shaper work for the same company, decisions get made in the dirt, not in an office 500 miles away. The builder can say "this green would work better if we shifted it 15 yards right" and the architect can say "do it" without a change order.
Landmand: Scaling the Idea
Sweetens proved the concept at nine holes. Landmand Golf Club in Homer, Nebraska — which opened in 2022 — proved it at eighteen, on a much bigger canvas.
The site is rolling farmland in northeastern Nebraska, with dramatic elevation changes and long views across the prairie. Where Sweetens was about doing more with less (a flat floodplain, a tiny budget), Landmand was about doing big without losing the philosophy.
The greens at Landmand are enormous — some are among the largest in American golf. The fairways sweep across the landscape like giant ribbons. The scale is cinematic. But the principles are the same: width with consequences, greens as the strategic engine, variety across all 18 holes, and an experience that prioritizes fun and memorability over difficulty for difficulty's sake.
Landmand also proved something else: the King-Collins model works on projects with real budgets. This wasn't a scrappy renovation. It was a full-build 18-hole course on a dramatic site, and the result landed on every best-new-course list in the country. The firm had graduated from cult favorite to serious player.
Inness: The Hudson Valley Statement
If Landmand was about scale — proving King-Collins could go big — Inness was about integration. Built on the site of the old Rondout municipal course in Accord, New York, the land had served as a gravel pit before it was a golf course. The bones were rough: scrubby hillsides, worked-over terrain, the detritus of extraction. Another firm might have scraped it clean and started over. King-Collins leaned in.
Inness opened in 2021 as part of a broader resort — lodging, pool, tennis, restaurant, spa — and immediately became one of the most talked-about nine-hole courses in America. Like Sweetens, it's nine holes designed to be played as an 18-hole double loop, with different tees and pin positions creating two distinct experiences. Like Sweetens, there's no stuffy dress code and no pressure to keep score. But Inness takes the model further.
The greens. This is what everyone talks about, and for good reason. The crown jewel is a shared green complex — serving the 2nd hole, the 9th hole, and the practice putting green — that clocks in at roughly 55,000 square feet. That's larger than a football field. It heaves and rolls in all directions, with swales that funnel balls toward certain pins and ridges that repel them away. A putt can travel 100 feet across multiple plateaus, break three times, and rise or fall several vertical feet. Stimpmeter readings are kept at 9-10 because anything faster would be unplayable.
There's also a 30,000-square-foot double green shared by the 3rd and 6th holes — a reverse Redan on the upper tier, a classic "lion's mouth" bunker configuration on the lower. These aren't greens you putt on. They're greens you navigate.
The gravel pit heritage. The site's industrial past is visible in the shaping. Where some architects hide altered land, King-Collins incorporated it. The sculpted earth, the exposed ridges, the sense that the course was carved out of something rather than laid on top of it — these are features, not flaws. The inland-links feel comes from letting the ground play firm and fast, with connecting fairways that bleed into each other and deep fescue replacing conventional rough.
Day passes and the democratized resort. Inness sells day passes for around $130 — full property access including pools, grounds, and golf. You don't need to be a member. You don't need to stay at the hotel. You can drive up from the city, buy a pass, and spend the day. Walking is encouraged. Scorekeeping is optional. The course is open to everyone, and the vibe — like Sweetens but with better facilities — makes you want to stay longer than you planned.
The routing is compact and walkable. Tees sit next to greens. The 1st hole starts right outside the clubhouse. The whole thing feels like it grew there, even though much of it was aggressively shaped. Par 36, 3,361 yards from the tips, two par 3s, two par 5s, five par 4s. The 7th — a 443-yard par 4 with a narrow fairway jutting left and a multi-tiered green — is the signature. But every hole has something worth studying.
Inness is the missing link in the King-Collins story. Sweetens proved the philosophy at a scrappy nine-holer. Landmand proved it scaled to eighteen. Inness proved it could work as part of a luxury resort without losing the soul. The course doesn't feel like a hotel amenity. It feels like the reason you came.
Where They Fit
I've now written about three architects in this series. The arc is instructive.
Pete Dye was the rule-breaker who didn't know the rules. He built courses that looked wrong — railroad ties, island greens, pot bunkers in the middle of fairways — and somehow they worked. His genius was intuitive, not theoretical. He operated on feel and audacity.
Tom Doak was the systematizer. He took everything Dye did, everything Mackenzie and Ross wrote, everything he learned walking the British Isles on a scholarship, and turned it into a discipline. The Anatomy of a Golf Course is the textbook Dye never wrote. Doak gave the minimalist movement its intellectual foundation.
King-Collins are the next step. They absorbed Doak's framework, internalized the minimalist principles, and then asked: what if we broke some of the rules Doak just taught us? What if the greens were wilder? What if the contours were bigger? What if we didn't just preserve the Golden Age spirit but amplified it for the modern player?
It's no accident that in late 2024, King Collins Design became King Collins Dormer — adding Trevor Dormer, who spent over a decade with Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw. They're now bringing Coore & Crenshaw's discipline directly into their bolder, more expressive framework. The result should be fascinating: the minimalist establishment and the post-minimalist experimenters under one roof.
Their upcoming projects — Bounty Club near Nashville, a second course at 7 Mile Beach in Tasmania — suggest a firm that's hit its stride. They've proven the indie nine-holer works. They've proven the big-canvas 18 works. Now they get to prove they can do it consistently, across different sites, different budgets, different parts of the world.
"I knew how good it was. If it saw the light of day it would be successful — and I never stopped believing in it." — Collins on Sweetens Cove, before anyone else believed
What to Play
If you want to understand King-Collins with your own feet, here's the priority list:
Sweetens Cove (South Pittsburg, TN) — The essential text. Walk it, play it twice (morning and afternoon, different pins), hang out at the shed. The course changes completely with different pin positions. Play it in a day, then play it again the next day. You'll see things you missed the first time.
Landmand (Homer, NE) — The evolution. Same philosophy, bigger canvas. See what happens when the Sweetens principles get applied to a full 18 holes on dramatic land with a real budget. The greens will make you laugh out loud.
Inness (Accord, NY) — The resort evolution. King-Collins on a reclaimed gravel pit in the Hudson Valley with 55,000 sq ft greens, day passes, and a no-pressure ethos. See how the Sweetens philosophy adapts to a luxury setting without losing its edge. The 7th hole alone is worth the drive.
Crossroads at Palmetto Bluff (Bluffton, SC) — The experiment. A 60-acre reversible nine-hole course with multi-pin greens. Forward one day, backward the next. This is King-Collins at their most playful — architecture that literally changes direction.
Red Feather Golf & Social Club (Lubbock, TX) — The sleeper. Opened 2023, less written about, but showing what they can do on flatter, more conventional sites without losing the signature boldness.
Final Thought
There's a moment in the King-Collins story that captures the whole thing.
During construction at Sweetens, money ran so tight that Rob Collins had to take over the lease and become the owner/operator of the golf course — just to keep the project alive. The architect became the owner because if he didn't, the course would die before anyone ever played it. That's not normal. Architects don't do that. They design, they hand off, they move to the next project.
Collins did it because he knew what they had. He'd seen it in the dirt. He believed in it before the New York Times called, before Peyton Manning wrote a check, before Golf Twitter made it a pilgrimage site. He believed in it when it was just a floodplain, a skeleton crew, and a vision that most people in golf architecture would've told you couldn't work.
That's the new minimalism, really. Not just a design philosophy — a way of working. Small teams. Direct involvement. Belief in the product before the market validates it. Willingness to do things your own way because you know the conventional way leaves too much on the table.
Doak gave us the textbook. King-Collins are writing the next chapter — in the dirt, with a shovel, on a floodplain in Tennessee. The book isn't finished yet. But you can go play the rough draft.
Want to go deeper? The definitive book on King-Collins and Sweetens Cove:
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