Augusta Municipal Golf Course — The Patch

The Patch opened on 20 December 1928 as nine holes with sand greens, expanded to eighteen the following year, and had grass greens laid in 1936 and 1937 through a Works Progress Administration project. It was officially integrated in May 1964; Clois Herndon, John Elam, Maurice Thompson and Raymond Jenkins are credited as the first Black golfers to play the course officially. For decades afterward it was the gathering place for the Black golfers, caddies and families whose connection to the game in this town ran alongside, and often against, the history being celebrated a few miles away.

The nickname has two explanations, and locals will give you either. One is a cabbage patch beside the tenth tee. The other is the leaner years, when there were said to be more patches of grass than fairway.

That second explanation is now out of date. Announced in 2023 and closed for sixteen months, the course reopened to the public on 15 April 2026 after a complete rebuild. Tom Fazio and Beau Welling redesigned the eighteen. Tiger Woods and TGR Design built a new nine-hole short course on the property, called The Loop. Augusta National was involved in making the project happen, which is the sort of sentence that would have seemed unlikely at any point in the previous ninety years.

What it asks of you

A municipal eighteen on Georgia clay and sand, now with modern green complexes and drainage on a routing that still follows the old ground. It was never a championship test and does not pretend to be one after the rebuild either. The design brief was clearly a course that a good player finds interesting and a beginner can finish, which is a harder thing to build than a hard course.

The short course matters more than a nine-hole add-on usually would. It is designed as a place to learn, to play quickly after work, and to bring a child without committing four hours, and it is priced to match. In a city where the most famous course in the world is closed to almost everybody, the significance of that is not subtle.

What players say about it

The notes below summarize recurring themes in public reviews and local coverage since the reopening, read across specialist golf sites, traveler review pages and player discussion threads. They are other people’s opinions, not ours: we have not played the course. We report what comes back repeatedly rather than isolated remarks, and we do not name or quote individual reviewers.

What comes up in its favor

• Reception since the April 2026 reopening has been strongly positive. Several accounts go as far as calling it the best municipal course in the country as it now stands.
• Conditions are the most frequently praised item, which is the sharpest possible break with the course’s own recent past.
• The resident pricing is repeatedly singled out. Locals pay a small fraction of the visitor rate, and reviewers treat that as the point of the project rather than a detail of it.
• The Loop draws its own praise as a genuine short course rather than a token pitch and putt.

What comes up against

• The visitor rate is several times the resident rate, and out-of-town players note the gap. It is deliberate policy, but it does mean the course reads differently depending on where you live.
• Demand since reopening is high and tee times in Masters week and the surrounding weeks are hard to get.
• Players who knew the old course express some regret at losing its rougher character, which is a familiar reaction to any restoration and worth reporting even so.
• The review record is still thin. The course reopened in April 2026, and there is not yet the depth of independent opinion that a decade-old course accumulates.

Getting there and when to go

The course is on Highland Avenue in Augusta, minutes from downtown and a short drive from Augusta National. Augusta Regional airport is fifteen minutes away, and Atlanta is a little over two hours by road.

Georgia golf runs all year here, with spring and autumn the best of it and midsummer hot and humid. The week of the Masters transforms the whole city, and a municipal course a few miles from the tournament is not the place to expect a quiet round in early April.

Green fees

Rates differ substantially for Augusta residents and for visitors, and tee times are booked through the course. See the course’s own site.

How this page was made

The factual frame comes from public sources: OpenStreetMap for the location, Wikipedia and published reporting for the history, the integration of the course and the 2023 to 2026 rebuild, and the course’s own site for access and booking. The opinion section summarizes public reviews and local coverage read in September 2026; we report recurring themes rather than individual voices, and we do not reproduce or attribute quotes.

We have not played this course, and nothing here is a substitute for that. The course has not paid for this page, has not seen it before publication and has no say in what it says. If you know the course and something here is wrong or out of date, write to us and we will correct it.