We recently shared some observations about deeply discounted public golf course memberships in the Myrtle Beach area. Along the entire 90-mile stretch of the Grand Strand, there are only four strictly private golf clubs. (Two of them, The Reserve at Litchfield and The Members Club at Grande Dunes, are managed by the same organization and, therefore, accessible to members of each.)

        Here is a brief rundown on private golf club memberships in the Myrtle Beach area.

Private Options

        Wachesaw Plantation is ideally sited a couple of miles west of Highway 17, the coastal route that runs through Brunswick County, NC, down through Myrtle Beach and Pawleys Island and, eventually, to Charleston and beyond. The Wachesaw golf course was designed by Tom Fazio in 1985, and its layout hits enough high notes to appeal to double- and single-digit players alike, with some narrow well-bunkered fairways framed by live oaks and tall pines. (According to local golf historians, Mike Strantz, the designer of the heralded Caledonia and True Blue layouts a few miles away, did much of the shaping of the golf course for Fazio.) Greens are generally large and undulating, protected by both bunkers and false fronts. Fazio shows his mischievous side with a split fairway on a par 5 and a par 3 green wedged between a dune and a lake.
        Wachesaw’s non-equity member joining fees and monthly dues programs are pegged to the ages of its members. Dues rise gently in five-year increments from the age of 30 to 46 where they top out at a reasonable $444 per month for a single member and $549 for a couple. Joining fees for a married couple living outside the gates of Wachesaw are just $1,250; property owners are required to purchase an equity membership at $5,000, which gives them voting rights on club issues.
        
Wachesaw Plantation, designed by Tom Fazio, features one of the best and most intimidating par 3s on the Grand Strand.
        I’ve written often about the McConnell Golf Group’s string of private golf courses throughout the Carolinas, but its membership plan warrants mention here. One of the group’s dozen courses is The Reserve Golf Club in Pawleys Island.  McConnell also manages the Grande Dunes Members Club about 35 minutes north of The Reserve, which gives members of The Reserve a strong second option nearby. (Note: Members’ rounds are limited to a maximum of three per year at any McConnell course not their own, and a total of 12 rounds combined.) Greg Norman designed The Reserve course to accommodate the sandy soil beneath the fairways and the forests of scrub pines beside the fairways, all just a mile from the Atlantic Ocean. It is one of the rare area golf courses that forces you to consider putting from as far as 15 yards off many of the greens.
        Best of all, members enjoy full access to all the other McConnell courses, including the famed Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, designed by Donald Ross and the site of the annual PGA Tour’s Wyndham Championship; Arnold Palmer’s Musgrove Mill in rural upstate South Carolina, perhaps one of the five toughest golf courses in the state; and the Country Club of Asheville, another Donald Ross classic layout opened in 1894.  The Reserve initiation fee and dues levels are impressively reasonable for all the golf available, as well as for the impeccable service standards John McConnell imposes. Currently, the joining fee at The Reserve is just $5,000, payable over a few years but discounted to $4,000 if you pay up front. Dues are just $345 per month for an individual and $500 for a family.
All elements of Greg Norman's layout for The Reserve Golf Club -- the pine-tree-lined fairways, yawning bunkers, well-placed ponds -- are on display at the finishing hole.
        Only Wedgewood, a well-worn public track just outside of Georgetown, is farther south among Myrtle Beach’s golf courses than is DeBordieu Colony, which stretches behind its front gate on Highway 17 to the Atlantic Ocean. DeBordieu –- locals refer to it as Debby Doo -– is the most upscale golf community on the Grand Strand, its homes ranging from around $500,000 a half-mile from the beach to nearly $4 million on the oceanfront. It is the only gated golf community from Wilmington to Georgetown in which residents have access to a beach without leaving their community. One of only two Pete Dye designed courses of the Myrtle Beach 100, this one shows all the familiar flourishes we recognize about Dye, including pot bunkers, railroad ties and fairway moguls. The first 16 holes are an enjoyable but not brutalizing experience, but the final two holes, typically played into a stiff breeze off the ocean just 100 yards away, might be the most challenging finishers on the Grand Strand. They are long, with water along the right sides of both, and the bunkers at front left of the 18th green at its narrow entrance are magnets for those seeking to avoid the water at greenside right.
A series of pot bunkers just left and at front of the 18th green at DeBordieu are barely noticeable from the fairway. The specter of water against the right side of the green put those bunkers very much in play.
        Befitting a golf course and club of this quality, and with a beach club as part of the membership, initiation fees at DeBordieu are the highest on the Grand Strand at $34,000 for an equity membership and a “capital contribution” of $21,000. (Most of the equity is returned to the members when they resell the membership.)  Dues are $454 per couple, which certainly meets our definition of “reasonable.” Other sports and tennis memberships are available at lower joining fees and with a few rounds of golf per year available. Creative golfers who crave easy access to an Atlantic Ocean beach could combine a lower cost DeBordieu membership (Sports or Tennis) with one of those public option memberships we wrote about in an earlier article and develop a nice hybrid private and public golfing lifestyle.
        For more information on golf real estate and golf memberships in the Myrtle Beach area or anywhere in the Southern U.S., don’t hesitate to contact me, Larry Gavrich, founder and editor of Home On The Course.

        Honest competition is always good for the consumer. And nowhere is the competition among golf courses greater than it is on the Grand Strand of Myrtle Beach, an area that runs about 90 miles from mid Brunswick County in North Carolina to Georgetown, SC. Filling that space are more than 100 golf courses, down from a peak of 120 a decade before the economic meltdown of 2008 but still as densely packed with golf clubs as any comparable area in the world.
        Most couples used to the perquisites of private country club membership decide to replicate that experience in their retirement. In the Myrtle Beach area, just four clubs, all in South Carolina, offer a strictly private experience: DeBordieu Colony in Georgetown; The Reserve at Litchfield, Litchfield Beach; Wachesaw Plantation, Murrells Inlet; and Members Club at Grande Dunes, North Myrtle Beach. (Nominally private clubs like The Dunes Club and Surf Club claim to be private but permit some golf package play in association with nearby hotels.)
        The following will help those on the fence about which type of golf club membership works the best based on frequency of play and costs.  We cover the public courses today and the Private Options in the next posting.

Public Options

        Although in recent years the buddy and family golf tourists that Myrtle Beach depends upon have returned to almost pre-recession levels, 100 golf courses are still at least a few too many for the volume of traffic. Since the recession, some companies have purchased clusters of area golf courses and are offering memberships that provide access to all the courses in the group. A Chinese-based company, for example, formed the Founders Group International after purchasing 22 area courses, including the Jack Nicklaus designed Pawleys Plantation, TPC Myrtle Beach, Long Bay and Grande Dunes. Members who join the Founders Group Prime Time Signature program for just $225 gain access to all 22 courses at deeply discounted prices, up to 70% off. Other companies own smaller groupings of courses in the area and offer similar annual memberships.
The par 5 8th at Caledonia Golf & Fish Club is all about the pin position on the two level green. If the pin is at bottom, putts from above could make the water below the green.
        As a member of the semi-private Pawleys Plantation –- my Prime Time membership is free with my Pawleys membership -– it makes little sense for me to sign up for an additional membership. But if I did, my choice could very well be the combined annual membership for Caledonia Golf & Fish Club and True Blue Golf Club (formerly True Blue Plantation). Caledonia, located in Pawleys Island, is arguably the best golf course of the Myrtle Beach 100. Designed by the late Mike Strantz (Tobacco Road, Royal New Kent and 10 others), the Caledonia layout is rare among area golf courses in that houses are virtually nowhere to be seen (a few behind the trees along the first fairway, one or two at the back areas of the course). Strantz, who is known for dramatic visual touches that include acres of waste areas and large and multi-leveled greens, restrained himself a bit at Caledonia, but the green complexes are still rife with eye-popping surprises, such as a rollercoaster green on the par 3 3rd hole, a severe two-level green on the par 5 8th, and the intimidating 60-yard long Redan-style green at the finishing hole, which forces an approach over water or a bailout to the front of the green that could leave a putt as long as 150 feet to a back pin position. To add even more drama, the porch of the clubhouse restaurant and bar virtually hangs over the green, providing the unsuspecting golfer an audience that only adds to the hole’s intimidation factor.
        True Blue is across the street from Caledonia, which makes it possible for more hearty and enthusiastic members to, in the words of the immortal Ernie Banks of the Chicago Cubs, offer to “let’s play two” easily in one day. Sand dominates True Blue, with wide fairways surrounded and interrupted by hazards. You are likely to never drive a cart through as many waste bunkers as at True Blue, where a ball on the compacted sand can often have the feel of a fairway lie (and, of course, you can ground your club behind the ball). Greens are huge and well protected by sand and, in some dramatic cases, water. At the par 3 3rd, for example, water from tee to the wide but not deep green laps up onto the sand directly in front.
Both Founders Group International and Myrtle Beach Passport include the Grande Dunes Resort course in their membership programs. Shown is the par 3 14th hole along the Intracoastal Waterway.
        Annual membership for a single player at the two courses is $1,895 and for a couple $2,695. However, members pay a $25 fee to play each time, cart included. As good as the courses are –- both rank comfortably in the Top 5 in the Myrtle Beach area -– such a membership only makes sense for those who can play the courses two or three times per week. Some quick math indicates that playing Caledonia and True Blue twice per week annually would cost around $4,400 for the year, or about $366 per month, still a better deal than at virtually all private clubs. And although the tee sheets at Caledonia and True Blue in peak season are jammed from early morning to mid afternoon, pace of play rivals that of a private course on most days.  For more information, see the Caledonia and True Blue website.
        The Myrtle Beach Passport is among the oldest of the “affinity” memberships in the area. For just a $49 membership annually, Passport holders who show proof of residence in one of 15 counties in North and South Carolina can play more than 70 of the area courses at deep discounts and bring along up to 3 friends who will play for just a little bit more than their hosts. All the best public golf clubs are represented, including Caledonia, True Blue, Pawleys Plantation, TPC Myrtle Beach, Grande Dunes Resort Course, Kings North and all four Barefoot Resort courses. The annual fee is typically paid for in savings after just one or two rounds. For the gourmand golfer who wants to sample virtually everything on the Myrtle Beach golfing buffet table, it is as good a deal as a conceded putt to close out a match.

Next: Private Club Golf Options in Myrtle Beach