Closed for nearly two years, the California golf course that once hosted The Skins Game will reopen soon

07/08/2024 22:00

LA QUINTA, Calif. — There is still work to do to make the greens at Trilogy Golf Club at La Quinta playable again, but the resurrection of the course is already amazing, one member said.

"Compared to what they were, which was dead, they look amazingly good," said Mark Reider, president of the Trilogy at La Quinta Maintenance Association board of directors. "As a golfer, they still have a long way to go, compacting them and mowing them. But the coverage is really pretty good."

Unwatered and unmaintained for close to two years, the result of a nasty squabble between three owners, loan defaults and an eventual Chapter 7 involuntary bankruptcy, Trilogy Golf Club, under a variety of names, seemed like a lost cause. Cracked putting surfaces, overgrown rough and landscaping, overgrown bunkers and gray fairways made a comeback for the former home of The Skins Game a longshot.

But with the Trilogy homeowner's association buying the property out of bankruptcy and taking over the layout in February, the course is coming back to life with the idea of being ready for membership and outside play for the upcoming season.

"That's our goal. We are shooting for mid-November," Reider said. "We are going to see how it goes with everything coming together at the same time."

"I think it is possible," said Matt Anzalone, vice president of golf and club operations for BlueStar Resort and Golf, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based firm that will manage Trilogy and is part of the restoration process. "We have to overseed by mid-October. We can't go any later than that. One of the biggest projects is again just growing the grass back. So yeah, I think it is realistic."

When Trilogy shut down in September of 2022, it had a history of hosting four Skins Games including appearances by Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Fred Couples, Annika Sorenstam and a moment when Fred Funk donned a dress after being outdriven by Sorenstam. But it also had two different name changes and then more than a year of not being maintained or watered until the HOA brought the 229-acre property for $6.17 million and took over in February this year.

Attention for the HOA and BlueStar then turned to the golf course, specifically the greens and the irrigation system.

"Irrigation is the heart and soul of a golf course, the bloodline," Anzalone said. "If you don't have proper irrigation flow to the golf course, if it is not timed, if it is not managed, you could have the proper tools in place, but if someone is not managing it, it is not going to get irrigated properly. And when a course closes, you don't have any employees there, no one managing it and the course starts to die and the pump station starts failing."

Anzalone said of the 2,200 irrigation heads on the course, all of the heads around greens were replaced and between 50 to 60 percent of the heads on the rest of the course have been replaced. In addition, the main pump station had to be almost completely replaced.

The late Gary Panks was the architect of Trilogy, but now the TLQMA is working with Gary Brawley, an Arizona architect who worked for Panks, to update the course. That includes taking off the top layers of the greens and expanding those Bermuda surfaces to their original size. A few bunkers have been taken out and a few others have been reshaped to make the course more playable, Reider said.

"He has been out many times to look at the course, look at the greens, look at the bunkers and it has made tremendous progress over the last four months," Reider said of Brawley. "We have a ways to go still, but we are growing a lot of grass."

Another challenge is re-doing the interiors of the bunkers. The bunkers must be cleared of grass and weeds before a spray liner is put down. Then new sand will be put in place.

As for the greens themselves, Anazlone said BlueStar considered nine of the greens salvageable, but nine greens were a lost cause. For the sake of consistency when the course reopens, the decision was made to renovate all 18 greens, with Integrity Golf Course Construction of Fallbrook doing most of the work. Lower layers of sand under the grass were still in good shape, Anzalone said.

"Now is it going to be like the Quarry (at La Quinta) or a golf course like that? Probably not,” Anzalone said. “It's a golf course that has been closed for two years. It will continue to get better and better. The good news is we have no play on it now, so we've got time."

With grass growing and greens reshaped, heavy work now is clearing weeds that have grown almost a foot tall, and taking out landscaping that had died for lack of maintenance. There is also work on getting the old restaurant and pro shop building ready, with Reider admitting the timetable for the restaurant is behind the golf course and the restaurant likely won't be ready for the mid-November course opening. The restaurant will be named Kitchen 1011, a nod to the 1,011 homes of the 1,238 at Trilogy that voted for assessments and to buy the property.

Reider said the course won't be just for the members who voted to buy the course and likely save their property values in the process.

"We also want to make it really attractive for outside play," Reider said. "We are out here right next to PGA West, golf heaven out here. So we want to position ourselves as a great alternative to some of those courses, or for someone coming out to California wanting to play several different courses. We want to be in that mix."