Early Gil Hanse Design in Alabama Comes Back from the Dead

After 13 years of ownership roulette and financial turmoil, the Capstone Club in Brookwood, Alabama—one of Gil Hanse’s earliest original designs—closed down in 2014. Now it is being revived with a new name, Coal Club, and a new business model. Whereas the Capstone Club was a private facility with a marketing connection to the University of Alabama, Coal Club will be a destination golf club with 295 members and 48 rooms of lodging.

“Initially, Alabama wasn’t on our radar as a prime location for an exclusive private club,” new owners Corey Byron and Keith Giffin wrote in a membership packet, “but discovering that it was just 20 minutes from the University of Alabama and less than an hour from an international airport [in Birmingham] completely changed our perspective. Birmingham and Tuscaloosa both offer a rich southern charm, making the area an ideal setting for a world-class club.”

Byron and Giffin—who own Hole Out Golf Shop, one of the longest-running online golf retailers, as well as four public courses in Michigan—recently acquired several parcels surrounding the main property and began preparations for an irrigation system overhaul and a clubhouse renovation.

Gil Hanse and his design partner Jim Wagner walked the remnants of the golf course earlier this year, and they will visit the site again later this month to finalize their plans. Built on top of an abandoned coal mine (hence the new branding), Coal Club’s expansive routing traverses hilly, sandy, forested terrain. The hole corridors are still identifiable, though overgrown. Much of Hanse and Wagner’s work will involve simply uncovering what they did a quarter century ago. “They both got a little nostalgic when they first came back,” said Byron in a phone interview with Fried Egg Golf. “They were very pleasantly surprised by how good the course and the land were, and they were excited about the possibility of bringing back one of their first projects.”

Still, Hanse and Wagner are considering some design changes. They plan to reimagine the course’s finishing trio of holes, potentially replacing the par-3 16th with a long par 5, creating a new Redan-style par-3 17th, and coming up with a fresh concept for the par-4 18th. Their alterations to other holes will likely be more subtle.

“We have always been admirers of this site and we believe our original course here tackled the site in many creative and interesting ways,” Hanse wrote in a statement that appears in the membership packet. “Since the course closed, the landscape of the site has matured in such a marvelous way that it now serves to further enhance the course that we created. The rugged and rough original edges of the site have yielded to a softer, more graceful feel, allowing the course to sit more gently in the rolling terrain…. Rarely do you ever get two bites at the apple in course design, and working with Corey and Keith will allow us the resources to bring this course back to life in a meaningfully improved fashion.”

The Capstone Club began in 2001 as a joint venture between Arnold Palmer Golf Management and University Clubs of America. The course was Hanse and Wagner’s third new-build project to open in the U.S., arriving after Inniscrone Golf Club in Pennsylvania and Tallgrass Golf Club (NLE) on Long Island. While not owned or operated by the University of Alabama, the Capstone Club was meant to appeal to the Tuscaloosa campus community, and it briefly served as the home course of the university’s golf teams. By 2003, however, Arnold Palmer Golf Management had decided to sell the club, along with similar facilities near the University of Kentucky, the University of Louisville, and the University of South Carolina. “[These courses] have not lived up to the expectations of the original underwriting,” an Arnold Palmer representative told the Tuscaloosa News at the time. “They are each doing well on their own, but… they are not worth the capital investment we put forth.”

The Capstone Club never got back on its feet, changing owners and shedding staff before finally shutting down 11 years ago.

But 2025 is very different from 2014 in the golf course industry. The past several years have seen a proliferation of private, often remote clubs with national memberships and on-site lodging. Recent examples include Ohoopee Match Club near Cobbtown, Georgia; The Lido at Sand Valley in Nekoosa, Wisconsin; Old Barnwell* and The Tree Farm in Aiken County, South Carolina; the Dormie Network’s GrayBull Club in the Nebraska Sandhills; Fall Line Golf Club in the Georgia Sandhills; the resuscitated High Pointe Golf Club outside of Traverse City, Michigan; and Broomsedge Golf Club* in Rembert, South Carolina. (*Old Barnwell and Broomsedge don’t yet have lodging but will soon.) Joining this list in the next few years will be Childress Hall in Texas, Tepetonka in Minnesota, High Grove in Florida, and 21 Golf Club in South Carolina. Of course, the private destination model is not purely a post-Great Recession phenomenon. The modern progenitors of the genre were Sand Hills Golf Club in Nebraska, Kingsley Club in Michigan, and Ballyneal Golf and Hunt Club in Colorado, all of which opened between the mid-90s and the mid-00s.

Byron and Giffin believe Coal Club will stand out in this crowded market partly because of pricing. They have set initiation fees at $60,000 and annual dues at $5,900 for national members, $8,000 for those residing within 75 miles of the club, and $4,800 for juniors. While these are significant sums by any measure, they are lower than the rates offered by many new destination clubs. Byron explained that reviving a preexisting facility rather than building a new one has helped to keep costs in check. “One of the key advantages we have is that there’s an existing clubhouse in good shape,” he said. Retrofitting the building for Coal Club’s purposes will probably cost less than $1 million. Plus, labor and construction tend to be cheaper in Alabama than in other golf-rich states in the Southeast. 

Above all, though, Byron emphasized that he is not after massive profits. “We’re not trying to make money off of our friends,” he said.

One of Byron’s long-term goals is to bring an Evans Scholars caddie program to Coal Club. Administered by the Western Golf Association, the Evans Scholarship provides full tuition and housing for high-achieving caddies with financial need. Byron serves as a director for the WGA, and he is looking into the possibility of establishing Evans houses at the University of Alabama and Auburn University. 

Tentatively, Byron and Giffin hope to start golf course construction next year and open for preview play in 2027. For an official debut, they are targeting either the fall of 2027 or the spring of 2028.