TPC River Highlands in Cromwell plays the long game to be absolutely certain that a major course improvement is executed perfectly, well ahead of the 2025 Travelers Championship
For 73 years, professional golf has made a yearly tournament stop in Connecticut, the last 41 of them at TPC River Highlands, a facility owned and operated by the PGA TOUR. In 2007, Travelers became the event’s Title Sponsor, and the Travelers Championship was born. Today, the Travelers Championship is a PGA TOUR Signature Event with a limited field featuring top players, a $20 million purse, and 700 FedEx Cup points awarded to the winner. Its economic impact on Connecticut’s economy is considerable: a 2022 study put it in excess of $60 million. To say that the Travelers Championship is a high-profile big deal is no exaggeration. Where it is played is a stage that must be carefully set and as close to perfection as can be.
The issue, the fix, and the challenge
Golf Course Superintendent Jason Cannata leads an agronomy team at TPC River Highlands, keeping the course in top condition. Erosion around a large irrigation pond was, year upon year, creating more of an unsightly, irregular fringe next to the 16th green and along the 17th hole. The elongated pond isn’t just a water hazard for golfers – it’s also where the iconic Travelers red umbrella, done in grand proportions, floats in the middle of the pond for the duration of the event for the world to see.
Milan Moore is PGA TOUR Design Services’ Director of Golf Course Design and Construction. She is a Massachusetts transplant to Florida and has been in the business of designing and managing golf course construction projects since the early
2000s. Moore concurred with the assessment of Cannata and club management that a stone wall should ring much of the pond to halt erosion, define the edges, and create “a pleasing aesthetic condition.” She would oversee the design and construction, taking great care that the new wall not only be the resolution of a problem but an enduring solution with a settled, New England air.
Building such a wall, at 1,000 linear feet and ringing most of the pond, takes on an altogether different urgency when the wall must blend into its setting as if it had always been there, when it needs to be built through the winter to meet a pre-spring completion, when the disturbed ground needs to be restored and playable for club membership by early April and, especially, when the handiwork will be seen by millions of broadcast viewers as the Traveler’s Championship gets underway this June.
Putting together the right foursome
Faced with these challenges, Cannata and Moore reached out to O&G. They had a very positive experience with O&G’s fast-paced emergency repair of a giant sinkhole on the course in 2021 and two years later with a large-scale paving project (see sidebar). They trusted that they could depend upon the company to perform again. Cannata and Moore already had their eyes on a landscape and masonry contractor, but wanted to lock down stone having the texture, cut and hues that would belong at River Highlands, and a supplier who could commit to their deadlines. They ended up in the capable hands of Masonry Division Vice President Bob Rizzo
Early in the stone selection process, a series of sample boards was made. With the general look Moore wanted in mind, O&G prepared these boards to show variations in stone selection and cut. The choice landed on a popular stone medley called Brooklawn Blend with its handsome midtones in a rectangular “mosaic” cut and assembly, but modified with an additional percentage of other native stone. Everything moved quickly: the boards, the requests for variations in the stone, even the final selection. O&G immediately began preparing the chosen blend in one-to-three-inch, four-to-six-inch, and six-to-twelve-inch thicknesses and palletized them separately for the masons.
Work on the wall began in mid-November, targeting late-winter completion. That would give ample time for the springtime grow-in of replacement turf before the Championship. The wall would stand three feet high, but with an exposure varying from 14 to 32 inches above the pond’s water level – the rest would be submerged.
The art of building the wall went to top-tier Landscape Creations. Three separate, three-man mason crews were dedicated to the build, with another site crew preparing the ground and then backfilling and settling the soils as the wall went in. Because it is a dry stack wall with no mortar holding it together, masons were able to “lay it fast and furious,” says Hayden LaForge, Operations Manager for Landscape Creations, who ran the installation. “Our concern, the biggest thing was, would O&G be able to keep us supplied at that pace?”
To reliably supply all that stone – 900,000 pounds of it in all the cuts, thicknesses, and hues Moore and the club had specified – the Masonry Division turned to Getty Granite, a business owned and operated by the Julian family with whom O&G has had a long and successful relationship. It was Dan Julian Jr. whose team quarried, prepared, and palletized the material. “This project dominated my life for two months,” recalls the affable Julian, keenly aware of the unrelenting schedule
and that, with national coverage of the Championship, there would be more eyes on the wall than any other project he had ever been a part of. “Working on it was exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. Bob [Rizzo] put his trust in us and guided us through. He’s a master at balancing the client’s desires while knowing what’s feasible.” With his decades of experience, Rizzo was the liaison between Julian, Landscape Creations and Moore and Cannata. Rizzo could not have been more pleased: “Dan and his team really came through. They did a tremendous job keeping up and delivering on time.”
“The material was beautiful, and it went up quickly,” says LaForge. “It came off the pallets and was set in place with hardly any stone rework at all. We received trailer loads every other day, full trailers, and we never had to slow the pace.” It wasn’t Landscape Creations’ first time working with O&G, and the implicit trust LaForge says he places in the company was rewarded again.
Moore was pleased: “The wall has that fantastic New England look we were after. We considered everything, from the width of the joints, the blend percentages, and getting stones with extra character, and it really paid off. There will be lots of television action in the area of the pond throughout the Travelers Championship, so aesthetics was a big component. We also wanted to deliver for all of our stakeholders, including the membership, to enjoy.” The positive culture of O&G, she added, permeated the project.
In the midst of construction, Moore and Cannata led representatives from Travelers on a tour to take in the process as it unfolded. “They were genuinely excited about the improvements and very much looking forward to seeing it on television,” she says. “This project is a win for everyone involved.”
“Kudos to O&G,” Cannata adds. “I worried that getting all that stone would be the limiting factor. That never happened. Dan and O&G kept pumping out the stone throughout the winter.”
To lean into a golf idiom, it just took the right foursome at TPC River Highlands – Moore and Cannata, Landscape Creations, Getty Granite, and O&G – to hit it long and straight and win the day.
