In the Studio with Charlie Rymer: Myrtlewood GM Talks Up the PineHills Course

Charlie Rymer:

I’m with Dustin Powers, the GM at Myrtlewood. It’s a 36-hole facility, centrally located to all of Myrtle Beach, place that I’ve been going to since I was a little kid. (Well, that’s not really true. I never was little!). I absolutely love it, happened to have won a state junior championship that I always like to mention at the Palmetto Course there, but you guys have the two golf courses that I think Palmetto gets a lot of attention, but your PineHills golf course, you guys have invested in it. That’s a heck of a golf course. Talk to me a little bit about PineHills.

Dustin Powers:

PineHills is the original of the two. It’s probably the easier of the two. It’s the shorter of the two for sure, but it’s definitely a golfers’ golf course. And what I mean by that is it requires shots. A lot of doglegs, you’ve got to hit certain shots. You got to hit all the clubs in your bag. And I really enjoy playing PineHills, and we’ve redone the greens there recently. And we took them back to the original size and they were rolling tremendously with the new grass that we got on there.

Charlie Rymer:

Yeah. You’re sticking with Bermudagrass.

Dustin Powers:

Yep. The new, fairly new, Sunday Bermuda. We did that on both courses there, but yeah, it’s been tremendous for us.

Charlie Rymer:

Is it pretty good on the other days or is it just really good on Sundays?

Dustin Powers:

It’s good on the other days, but Sundays they really shine!

Charlie Rymer:

I tell you, there’s so many great new grasses out there. And when I was a kid, there was one kind of grass. It was like meadow grass. So we just cut it down to different heights, but these new Bermudas really are spectacular. For our friends that come down from up north, they’re used to just seeing the Bentgrass, and folks that are a little bit older, there was a stigma with Bermuda on the greens because they just didn’t roll very good at all. It was bumpy and nasty grain, but these new turfs, that’s not the case anymore.

Dustin Powers:

No, the blades are much smaller. We can cut them much lower. They’re easier to maintain and they roll them much truer. We can get them pretty much any speed we want to now. So that’s really good.

Charlie Rymer:

Yep. Absolutely. They even roll really good in the wintertime as well. So we’ve talked to you in previous show about the Palmetto Course. When you have two different golf courses, you really want them to have different character, and you guys have done a really nice job of pulling that off, I think, at Myrtlewood.

Dustin Powers:

Appreciate that. Yeah. You want to separate them so Palmetto’s the longer and what we call more challenging. PineHills is, like we just talked about, the shorter and more of a shot-shapers golf course, but they’re both very different. They both have different looks. We’ve put in some natural looking grass out on PineHills or bringing it back to what it used to look like 20, 30 years ago, it had all these natural grasses around it surrounding hills. So we’ve planted some of that recently and it really looks nice. It’s very aesthetically pleasing, gives you some separation from just a traditional fairway, rough, fairway, rough. You can break it up. And it really looks nice to the eye.

Charlie Rymer:

When I talk to golfers that travel, most golfers, they play 99.5% of the golf that they play in their whole lifetime, probably on one golf course. And so when golfers are traveling and they’re going to a new place for the first time, I always encourage them to talk to the staff when they’re checking in, “Tell me the thing about this golf course.” So if you’re playing at Palm Springs, it’s everything breaks towards Indio. If you’re fortunate enough to play Augusta National, and we all know it, if you hadn’t played it, everything breaks towards Raes Creek, and most golf courses have a “thing” like that. Do you have anything like that at Myrtlewood?

Dustin Powers:

Not that I can think of on terms of a specific breaking of the greens or anything. What I try to tell people is that we have a 150 post. If you can hit somewhere near to that, whether it’s a little bit longer, a little bit short, you’ll have pretty much the optimal shot into the green. The way that they designed that Arthur Hills, he wanted, if you can hit where he told you to hit it, the golf course plays much easier.

Charlie Rymer:

I’m glad you mentioned that because I love the 150 post. Most of the time I see them, they’re striped. They’re green and white or black and white striped.

Dustin Powers:

Yeah, that’s what we got.

Charlie Rymer:

Yeah, and the first time you play a golf course, it’s really easy to look down, do the math. If I’m playing 380 yard par four, wow, I do a little bit of math, all I got to do is hit it 230 at that post, and I’m right in the middle of that fairway. And in particular, first time you’re playing a golf course, that’s something that’s really, really helpful.

Dustin Powers:

Yeah. I want to guide you around. I don’t want to make it too challenging. It’s all right there in front of you, PineHills. There’s not really anything hidden out there that you can’t see. It’s all right in front of you. So if you just kind of play to where the holes are designed to take you and don’t try to get too greedy and cut anything off, you can score really well there.

Charlie Rymer:

That’s perfect. Great tip. Dustin Powers, he’s the GM at Myrtlewood, 36-hole facility. I know I’ve played a lot of golf out there over the years and enjoyed a bunch of it. And if you ever have a chance to tee it up there, you will too. Appreciate your time.

Dustin Powers:

My pleasure, sir. Thank you.