REMBERT, SOUTH CAROLINA | Over the past decade, South Carolina has become one of the more alluring places for golf in America, especially for discerning players who are interested in course architecture and appreciate Golden Age-inspired designs. In fact, they have been flocking to the Palmetto State like hippies to Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s. But the attraction in this case is not free love and Owsley LSD. Rather, these pilgrims are drawn by the new layouts that have recently opened, with several of them now regarded as among the best modern tracks in America.
Congaree is one such place, and it boasts a terrific Tom Fazio course. Old Barnwell and The Tree Farm are two others, with the former having been crafted by Brian Schneider and Blake Conant and the latter by PGA Tour player Zac Blair and architects Tom Doak and Kye Goalby.
Another addition to this increasingly enthralling bill of golf fare is Broomsedge. Located in the South Carolina sand hills some 40 miles east of the state capital of Columbia, its course was fashioned by Kyle Franz, who cut his architectural teeth working with Doak some 20 years ago at Pacific Dunes outside Bandon, Oregon, and Mike Koprowski, a Notre Dame graduate and Air Force veteran of the war in Afghanistan who had toiled as a shaper for Franz before buying the Broomsedge property and co-designing the course with his old boss.
The elevation changes are one of its most compelling features. Ditto the spacious greens and cavernous bunkers that along with the stands of cathedral pines endow the place with a sense of bigness even though the site is only some 200 acres in size. The architects made terrific use of the chasms and ridgelines that abound as well as the hummocks and hollows – and according to Koprowski moved very little earth in the process.
Koprowski and Franz have described the course as a “flexible design,” and quite appropriately. A golfer has to hit all the different shots at Broomsedge – which takes its appellation from the plant that grows throughout the property – and use most every club in the bag. Club officials make a point of mixing up the yardages so, for example, the par-4 first that measures 434 yards on the card from the white tees will sometimes play longer or shorter. In a move that architect George C. Thomas, the man who initially advocated the “course within a course” design concept a century ago when he built the layouts at Los Angeles Country Club and Bel-Air, would have loved, they may even alter the distance on a given hole so much that they have to change its par as well.
Having a trio of holes with alternate greens, in the par-3 sixth and 11th and also No. 13, which is a 4-par, reflects that thinking. And with a dozen par-4s, a pair of par-5s and four par-3s, the par-70 track puts a real demand on shot-making, just as the Captain, which was Thomas’ much beloved nickname, would have wanted it.
Broomsedge is also capable of testing players of all abilities, with back tees measuring a tick more than 7,500 yards and the forwardmost coming just less than 5,000. There are six sets of tees, and if golfers play the right ones, they will have fun, too, as I discovered when I used the whites on my three loops here. I never lost a ball and posted rounds in the high 70s and low 80s that were commensurate with my handicap index.
As New World as it may be in many ways, Broomsedge also has some very strong roots in the old country. Its firm-and-fast conditions make it play like a proper links. And the minimalist design evokes that part of the golf world as well. Then, there is the structure of the club itself, which began offering preview play in the fall of 2024 and officially came on line in the spring. It’s private, to be sure. But the founders are allowing limited access to non-members throughout the year.
That very welcoming ethos is what enabled me to come to Broomsedge last spring for a match called The Sweep between the Outpost Club, an international golf group of which I am an ambassador member, and the Silver Club Golf Society, a national organization for competitive golfers founded by Steve Scott, a PGA professional best known for taking Tiger Woods to 38 holes in the final of the 1996 U.S. Amateur. The tournament was a one-day, 36-hole affair, and I arrived a day early for a practice round. That gave me a chance to check out the course without having to worry how I played or how often I paused to take notes.
Now 41 and the married father of two children, Koprowski took a circuitous route to becoming a golf course owner and architect.
“Designing a course is something I have wanted to do since I was 8 years old and growing up in South Florida,” he said. “My dad was a golfer. In fact, he had played in college at Notre Dame and captained the golf team there. I remember him taking me to TPC Sawgrass to play when I was a kid. I had teed it up on muni courses near where I live, playing holes that ran between the condos, palm trees and ponds. But that Pete Dye layout was the first one I saw that really felt different to me.”
Koprowski become pretty proficient in reading topographical maps in the Air Force, a skill that certainly helped when he got into the golf business.
Not long after that, Koprowski bought Pete Dye’s memoir, “Bury Me in a Pot Bunker”. At that point, Koprowski says, he was officially bitten by the course design bug.
It was years before he acted on that impulse. After Notre Dame, from which he graduated in 2006 with a degree in political science and history, he spent four-and-a-half years in the Air Force, a hitch that included a tour in Afghanistan.
“I was ROTC at Notre Dame and stationed in Alabama and West Texas before ending up at Bagram Air Base in that country,” he said. “I was an intel officer attached to a F-15 fighter squadron. And no, I did not fly.”
He did, however, become pretty proficient in reading topographical maps, a skill that certainly helped when he got into the golf business.
But Koprowski did not find his way into the game for a few more years. First, he earned master’s degrees from Duke and Harvard, in international relations and education, respectively, after which came stops in Tennessee and Texas for jobs and eventually Washington D.C. “I did a lot of policy development and analysis work there,” he said. “Mostly things involving economics and housing.”
Only at that point did he decide to finally scratch the course architecture itch he had first felt as a kid.
Scenic Broomsedge joins a collection of strong South Carolina courses.
In 2019, Koprowski sent Franz what he calls a “nothing ventured, nothing gained” email out of the blue to the up-and-coming architect. A few weeks later, Franz offered him a job on the crew that was redoing Southern Pines outside of Pinehurst.
“The first thing Kyle asked me to do was probe around the greens and determine the size and shape of the original ones, which had shrunk a lot over the years,” Koprowski said. “Not long after that, I was sitting on a bulldozer, excavating and shaping. It was great to be involved with bringing that golf course back to life.”
Koprowski worked with Franz on several other projects, among them a new course construction at Cabot Citrus Farms in Florida and a restoration job at Eastward Ho! in Massachusetts.
In 2022, he decided to go out on his own, buying the property for Broomsedge, putting together a founders’ group and then engaging Franz to design the course with him.
“I fell in love with the land,” said Koprowski of the parcel that had been used for timber and also as a hunting preserve due to its healthy populations of bobwhite quail, turkey and white-tail deer – and that he secured for $630,000. “I thought it was a perfect place for a course, especially as it was in the same sandy vein connecting Pinehurst to the Aiken area (where Old Barnwell and The Tree Farm are situated) but in a region where there was a dearth of golf.”
He says it took a little more than a year to “get everything in order,” with construction starting in late 2022.
“The golf course itself cost around $9 million to build,” he said. “But taking everything into consideration, the total price was around $13 to $14 million.”
There is more money to be spent, as Broomsedge has yet to build a permanent clubhouse, restaurant and bar or build any of the cottages that Koprowski hopes will become a popular part of the club experience.
That meant that there was little more for those of us competing in The Sweep to do but experience the golf course. Which was a delight to do.
“Every time I play Broomsedge, I see something new. A little hump here. A dip there. And those things make it a course I cannot wait to play every day.” – Trevor Murphy
I appreciated the quirkiness of the start, with four 4-pars of varying lengths and back-to-back par-3s on Nos. 5 and 6 – and another 3-par at the eighth (a meaty hole that played roughly 240 yards from the whites). Both the front and back nines ended with par-5s, with the 18th a particularly testy finisher, calling for a precise approach to an angled green fronted by a lake. As for the holes with the alternate greens, they made me think of the eighth and ninth holes at Pine Valley – and made me smile when I recalled that the architect of that great layout, George Crump, was another inspiration for Koprowski. I also loved how the club changed them up from one day to another.
Oh, and I chuckled at the faux broomsedge tufts that Koprowski has installed on the tops of the flagsticks, and the broom brushes he employs as tee markers.
At the end of my third and final round, I thought of how the head golf professional, Trevor Murphy, had described the course to me the day I arrived.
“I liked the natural contours of the land as soon as I saw it,” he said. “And Mike and Kyle used them so well to create a lot of deception, and to keep things interesting. Every time I play Broomsedge, I see something new. A little hump here. A dip there. And those things make it a course I cannot wait to play every day.”
I felt the same way and also concurred with what one of my OC teammates had said when our round was done.
“While Broomsedge reminds me of many of the truly great places I have been able to play, it is also like nowhere else I have ever seen,” he said. “I cannot wait to come back.”
Me, too.