Golf Digest’s 2024 Best New Course List: Top Two Honorees Chose Bunker Solution

Two courses that are very different design-wise topped the 2024 Golf Digest Best New Courses List. But they had one thing in common: Bunker Solution.

The Covey at Big Easy Ranch in Columbus, Texas, was the top choice for Digest’s panelists in a very busy construction year. The new course, designed by Chet Williams, incorporated Bunker Solution into their construction. Here’s how Derek Duncan of GD describes The Covey:

“With no surrounding development, The Covey is a scenic journey through the Texas outback through groves of pines and hardwoods and cross-course views. Numerous specimen trees have been left standing in the fairways that must be maneuvered around, and Williams’ green complexes can be wicked, flanked and fronted with deep, staggered bunkers, with strong putting contours that create multiple internal levels and severe false fronts that eject any short approached 30 or 40 yards back down the fairway.”

At number 2 on the Best New list: Old Barnwell in Aiken, SC. It’s a Brian Schneider/Blake Conant design that’s been one of the most anticipated new builds in a long time. Duncan’s take:

“The course plays around and through a treeless basin at the center of the 500-acre site, shooting the occasional sortie of holes into thinned out sections of pine along a perimeter rim. The landforms surrounding the amphitheater are nakedly muscular and eight holes traverse and tumble off these fallaway ridgelines. First-time lead architects Brian Schneider and Blake Conant used those movement to prop up wide holes that skirt the edges, and handled the less suggestive parts of the property by constructing an assortment of contemporary and antique architectural features: old bathtub bunkers recalling hazards at Garden City Golf Club and Myopia Hunt; linear shaggy-grass berms that evoke military entrenchments; open waste areas and geometric chasms of sand; and vertical grass embankments protecting bunkers and greens.”

Morris Johnson of Bunker Solution worked with the winners on their installations. “Both clubs researched their options for bunker construction,” he says. “The patented Bunker Solutions lining system checked all the boxes they were looking for when it came to playability, performance and longevity.”

One more notable achievement: East Lake GC’s remarkable renovation by Andrew Green was runner-up in the Best Transformation category on the Digest 2025 list. Here’s how Charlie Aubrey and his team incorporated Bunker Solution into that project for a big win: https://www.bunkersolution.com/blog/?id=east-lakes-new-bunkers-include-a-solution-for-washouts.

Read the full Golf Digest Best of 2025 story right here: https://www.golfdigest.com/story/americas-best-new-courses-2025.