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Crimson Reserve
The University of Alabama built its golf course on steep, wooded ground in Tuscaloosa. The bunkers had one job above the rest: keep bright white sand clean on top of red clay.
Some of the bunkers at Crimson Reserve sit six or seven feet below the green. Steep turf faces drop to flat floors of white sand, and in the low morning and evening light the shadows run straight across them. Underneath all of it is red clay.
Crimson Reserve is home to the University of Alabama's men's and women's golf teams, less than a mile from campus. It was dedicated in September 2024 with a single purpose: training players for national championships and, for some of them, the professional game.
Davis Love III, Mark Love and Scot Sherman of Love Golf Design walked the site again and again during construction, marking every tree to keep or remove and rerouting several holes as the clearing opened up. “We build our golf courses in the field,” Sherman told Golf Course Architecture when the facility opened. Former Alabama player Justin Thomas and tour coach Darren May helped shape holes that measure players against tour statistics.
The ground did not give much away. Around 100 of the site's 164 acres were moved during shaping and utility work, and 75,000 cubic yards of fill were brought in.
“The land where the course was built is pretty extreme, especially for a nine-hole course,” says Matthew Devine, CGCS, the golf course superintendent. “There is a lot of movement from tee to green and many uneven lies in the fairways.”
The nine holes include three each of par 3, 4 and 5, playing from 2,777 to 3,557 yards, and the 3rd has two greens that play differently each time round. With no member play to work around, the crew sets the course up for the teams' next event, changing green speeds and moving tees to copy the shot angles of the course they are travelling to.
That makes consistency the whole point. A player rehearsing a bunker shot for next week's event needs the bunker to play the way it did yesterday.
Sherman wanted the course to feel timeless, held together by flat-bottomed bunkers, pines, oaks and southern native grasses. Devine compares the result to Macdonald and Raynor. “A large part of the aesthetic of the property is the contrast of the white bunkers against the green turf around them,” he says.
The red clay of the American Southeast takes its colour from iron oxides, and it stains whatever it reaches. Once it washes into a bunker, it darkens the sand and fills the gaps between the grains, so the sand holds more water and plays heavier. The USGA notes that even a little contamination is enough for golfers to notice.
Courses in the region know the pattern. At Carolina Golf Club in Charlotte, red clay subsoil had badly contaminated new bunker sand within six years, and the club went on to line its bunkers to seal the clay off.
Devine wanted to avoid that from the start. “One of our biggest worries for long term bunker maintenance was contamination from the native soil entering the bright white bunker sand,” he says. “Without a barrier the native soil can quickly contaminate the sand.”
He had seen how the usual methods age. “In the past I have dealt with bunkers that were built with sand over clay or over a fabric liner. Initially, they work with varied levels of success. Eventually, either system will fail and allow soil to contaminate the bunker or drainage or both.”
The team chose the Capillary Bunker liner, for how easily it goes in and how long it lasts. The liner is a layer of Capillary Material across the bunker floor and walls. Water drains through its whole surface, and the soil below stays away from the sand above.
Wadsworth Golf Construction built the bunkers just before grassing. Drainage went in first, a loop about three feet in from the edge with a main line down the middle, followed by the liner. Sod was laid around each bunker straight away to keep loose soil out, and a bunker crew followed behind with the sand.
The slopes shaped the rest of the grow-in. Most of the course was sodded rather than sprigged, 45 acres of Tahoma 31 bermudagrass, because one heavy storm could have washed sprigs off the hillsides. The greens were sprigged with TifEagle and the native areas seeded with little bluestem and broomsedge.
Tuscaloosa averages about 53 inches of rain a year, and much of it arrives in bursts. In 2021, Tropical Storm Claudette dropped 7.4 inches on the city in a single night. Crimson Reserve had its own test in January 2025, when eight inches fell on the course in 24 hours.
The bunkers needed one extra blower to clear leaves and clippings ahead of the rakes, and nothing more. “We were able to rake all bunkers in the same amount of time as normal and reallocate that labor into other storm cleanup tasks,” Devine says.
Standing water has not been an issue at all. “We have never had standing water in a bunker. That is not something we even consider having to deal with after a rain event.”
A few of the bunkers also have a Capillary Wash Box for washing the sand in place. So far the crew has rarely needed it.
When the course opened, Sherman said he hoped it would train turf professionals as well as golfers. Two years on, five of Devine's team have moved on to assistant positions at high-level clubs.
Bunkers that look after themselves are part of that. Devine calls the liner “a great barrier between our red clay native soil and bright white bunker sand”, and the hours it saves go into the rest of the course and the people working on it.
“Our main focus is to create the best playing conditions for national championship level collegiate golf and eventually professional golfers,” he says. “We try to provide sound agronomic conditions that can both elevate the golfers and provide agronomy team members with the tools to make them successful in their turf careers.”
Want to know more about the Capillary Bunker liner? See how it works on our bunker liners page, or get in touch.
“We have never had standing water in a bunker. That is not something we even consider having to deal with after a rain event.”
