The PGA Tour announced this week it will be moving the AT&T Byron Nelson from Trinity Forest to TPC Craig Ranch next year. For our readers that are outside of the Dallas area, let me give you a little background as to why this is such a good thing.

First of all, the course is anything but a forest. The Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw design was built with the idea of putting an English style links course in north Texas. The problem is that the links-style golf courses don’t normally have many trees on them and just like them neither does Trinity Forest.

In the British islands, that isn’t a problem because the temperatures don’t reach into the high 90s and 100-degree mark in the summertime like it does here in Dallas. What this means for players and spectators is that there is no shade there are very few spots for players and fans to escape the sun. In Texas that can not only be very uncomfortable but also life-threatening.  For example, at the first Byron Nelson held at the course back in 2018 fifty people had to be treated for heat-related issues and one was taken to the hospital.

Another reason this is a good thing because the building of this course was extremely controversial to begin with. The city of Dallas has invested $12 million of taxpayer dollars of the overall $82 million it cost to build the course. The city wanted to build the course in south Dallas with the hopes of revitalizing a rundown part of the city. It’s an area the needs this type of improvement, but building an $82 million dollar golf course on the top of an old landfill was not the way to do it. The city owns the course but leases it out to a private company called The Company of Trinity Forest Golfers for $10,000 a year for 40 years. What this means is that despite the use of public money, only a handful of public golfers ever play a round at the course. I have visited the course but I have never played there. It is a beautiful place, but it is not a place I want to be standing around in when we get into late spring and summer.

Another factor facing both of the DFW tournaments is getting big-name players to come to them. Before the new scheduling for the majors, you had the Byron Nelson one weekend and then the Colonial tournament out in Ft Worth the next. Now, you have a tournament in between, and it just happens to be the PGA Championship, the second major of the year. What happens is many of the big players spend time prepping for the PGA Championship and don’t want to come all the way to Dallas for the Byron Nelson. Then after the PGA Championship, guys may want to take a week off to recover and therefore don’t want to come to Ft Worth for the Colonial. Obviously, all this has been altered by the coronavirus-related schedule shakeup, but if this year’s schedule is a template for next year, the tournament(s) will face the same issues.

I want to see what the marketing teams for the tournament and the PGA do to get players to the event as well as fans. The new venue will make it easier to get fans to the event, but getting top named players there will still be tough.