Q&A: What PGA Tour Fans Can Expect From Philadelphia Cricket Club

Joseph LaMagna: How would you describe the personality of the golf course and the test that is the Philly Cricket Club Wissahickon Course?

‍Dan Meersman: Our architectural guidelines and standards call for a Pennsylvania rural setting, so it’s very much what you would see in our region: green grass, beautiful fescue. It’s classic in nature, it’s elegant, and it’s simple. 

And it’s a very stout test of golf. We only have two par 5s, so we're eight shots harder to par in a four-day tournament just based on the numbers. Our par 4s are really varied. And then it's a very intimate walk. Green and tee connections are pretty close, being a classic golf course.

The topography is gentle in that it gives you enough topography to be interesting, but not too much to where it's treacherous or you get tired of walking up and down hills all day. There's out of bounds in a couple key spots, but there’s not a tremendous amount of out of bounds. There's a creek that meanders through the property. It's just an extremely pleasant piece of ground and a great walk.

And then to have an A.W. Tillinghast-designed golf course on top of that – he was a member of our club back in the 1920s – you just feel fortunate to be able to take care of something like that for a membership of our size and what our location means to Philadelphia golf and the world of golf.

‍Joseph: In 2013, you were part of a restoration in conjunction with architect Keith Foster. Was hosting high-profile events a goal of that restoration? And if so, how did that goal inform decisions?

Dan: We knew that if we did great work, it would be capable of that. I was thoughtful about making sure some infrastructure-related things could accommodate a lot of that. But a lot of it was: what are driving distances at the time? Let's make sure our landing zones are appropriate. Keith (Foster) did a great job with that.

On my end on the agronomic side, it was really the first true full-scale sympathetic restoration of an existing golf course at the time. We broke ground the Wednesday after the U.S. Open at Merion in 2013 (June 19) and the last piece of green sod was laid September 28th. That’s a pretty small window where every single green was rebuilt. Every bunker was rebuilt. Every blade of grass, the entire property was done. The irrigation system was done. New cart paths. 

The flagpole up around the clubhouse didn't move, but basically everything else was fair game. Although I should say, we tried to do it in the most respectful nature you can.

We were really at the forefront of some of the green-scan technology that we did. We factually showed our members how the greens functioned at the time. We did some studies where, although the stimpmeter wasn't invented until much later, we had mowing height records from the 1920s. Based on those mowing heights, you could produce a predictable green speed of, let's say six or six and a half in the 1920s. And from that, we could run simulations with modern technology of where balls started and stopped on those greens back in the 1920s. 

Then the question was: how much of that playability could you regain if you soften some slopes at current speeds? And while you can't regain all of that playability with current speeds, by stretching a green 10% or so, you can bring back a lot of those slopes very much on par with how it used to be without making it feel chippy or artificial.

Joseph: You mentioned taking into account modern distances: was there an effort to narrow some of the fairways at PGA Tour or elite player lengths?

Dan: No, no fairway narrowing necessarily. Keith did a nice job where, let’s say in order to lengthen a par 4 where you might be a little landlocked, you can angle it out and not have it play as much on a straight line. It helps you creep up your yardage a little bit and then you can position the bunkers to where they are more in the line of play and you have to play away from them, which semi-lengthens the hole and makes it more interesting at the same time. 

So for the Truist Championship, if you look at what will be the 18th hole, if you were to draw a straight line from the tee to the green, now those bunkers are in play and you have to play slightly away from them. And it’s already a very long par four that plays into the wind. 

With the Senior Players Championship, Bernhard Langer won at 1 over, which is extremely rare for a Champions Tour event to finish over par. But at the same time, the players really loved the golf course. And so I think the Tour gave us some rope to take conditions up to a high level with green speed and some other things to where as long as our players were enjoying it and it felt like a major and they weren’t getting criticized in any way, (the Tour) kind of let us go with that. And we've had really strong championships and good champions, so it seems like the Wissahickon Course has the track record of identifying the best player in the field over four rounds. 

Joseph: Do you feel any pressure, either from the Tour or membership, about what the winning score will ultimately be? Do you care what the winning score is? What's the perspective of the club? 

Dan: With each governing body, you want to find out what their goals are. The goal for the USGA trying to identify a national champion might be different than, let's say the PGA Tour, who's trying to highlight a group of players. They obviously want to peel out a winner too, and they do want a stern test of golf. 

Ultimately, I don’t think you ever want to trick players, but you just want to have a good stern test of golf, which we do. We have great quadrants in our greens, and they're very fair. It's not a course where you're trainwrecking and making eights on holes, and that's another reason I think golfers that play here love the golf course because you don't feel like you're getting an unfair shake at any point in time. It’s a stroke here, it’s a stroke there. The bottom half of the field tends to have a good time as well as the middle of the field. You have a tight field usually, with your best players identified by the end, but I think everybody leaves having had a great time here.

The membership is really jacked up for this.

Joseph: If the Tour’s calendar wasn't a factor at all, what would be the ideal date to host this tournament? Is mid-May a suitable time to present this golf course? 

Dan: Yeah, it's not far off. I would say our Senior Players Championship (early June) or U.S. Open Father's Day, that's when our fescue will go bright gold. With the May championship, you don't get that. Our fescue is probably five or six inches tall or just over that, and it's still green. For this championship, we left up our Little Bluestem, which is a summer grass that comes up and turns gold in the fall, and then we have hand-mowed around every single little piece of Little Bluestem, which gives us our gold texture and height difference instead of having just a muted green golf course. So we will have some color and texture variations, but that's from a warm-season grass from last year called Little Bluestem, not our fescue. 

But I still like the date for the championship in that if you think of mid-Atlantic tournaments in the summer, those can often be hot and dreary and have evening thunderstorms.

In May, it’s 70 degrees: who wouldn't want to come out and walk a beautiful piece of property all day long on a 70-degree day in Philadelphia? Spectators should have a phenomenal time.

Joseph: With fewer than 80 golfers competing this week, how appealing is that field size for your club? Not just in terms of the stress on the golf course, but other logistics like practice area space. Would you be able to host 120-150 PGA Tour players? 

Dan: Our USGA Four-Ball Championship last May had 312 players – we have two golf courses at this facility (156 on each). You have no time for weather delays. For those qualifying rounds, you're using the same hole location for two days, so that's 312 players going through the same hole location. You also have pace of play to worry about, which will then dictate some setup as well because you're trying to make sure you get all the rounds in. 

Having a 70-player field allows you to go off the first tee. That allows you to do even more maintenance out ahead of them if you wanted to. And from inside the ropes, our course will probably recover better than during normal member days because it's only 70 players. Wissahickon is a pretty popular place when it’s open. 

Cross our fingers we don't get too much rain, but even if we do it looks like the humidity on the back end drops and we’ll dry up pretty quick.

Joseph: What part of the golf course are you most eager to see shine? What are you most excited to watch?

‍Dan: Our finish is just spectacular with the reroute we’ve done for the tournament. The 14th hole is a 100-yard par 3 where you’ll get a chance to maybe see a hole-in-one or some really exciting golf. They finish that and come play our Great Hazard, which is a Tillinghast key feature.

That will be exciting because you'll see some really great long iron shots into that green. Then they come across to our member fifth hole, their 16th hole, a great par 3 over water with pretty bunkers. There are some really good options for the setup guys to either pick hole locations that reject shots or funnel shots based on the day. 

Our 17th hole is fantastic. It goes up a hill with a pretty firm green that will dry out throughout the day. And then they come down on our 18th hole, which is our strongest hole on the entire golf course, a very long par 4 that often plays into the wind. 

At the Senior Players Championship, Bernhard Langer had a long club into the 18th green, hit it in the bunker, and got up and down to win the tournament by one shot. So you get that hole-in-one opportunity at 14, then you kind of have to hang on the rest of the way. 

When we came up with that tournament reroute for the Senior Players, one of the Champions Tour executives said it was the strongest finish on their tour all year at that moment. It’s just a good test of golf, and I think the players are really going to enjoy it.

‍This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.