A golf course that sat abandoned for more than a decade in Mobile’s Riviere Du Chien neighborhood is on track to reopen in the coming weeks under a new name and a substantially different footprint. The former Linksman Golf Course is being rebuilt from the ground up as Cypress Creek Golf Course, with new ownership, new management and a construction budget that has already topped $20 million.
Shane Allen, the golf professional overseeing the project, said the new course bears little resemblance to a simple facelift of the old layout.
“This is not a renovation. This is a brand new golf course on top of the old one,” Allen said, describing a rebuild that began more than two years ago and has drawn steady interest from residents who remember the property’s earlier life. For years, locals asked Allen and others involved in the project when the long-shuttered course might reopen, he said, a sign of how visible the abandoned property had become in the surrounding neighborhood.
One of the driving forces behind the rebuild was drainage. The old Linksman course was notorious among longtime players for staying wet well after rain, a persistent maintenance problem that limited playability for much of the year. Allen said the new course was designed specifically to avoid those issues, incorporating updated grading and drainage systems as part of the ground-up construction. On Mobile’s Gulf Coast terrain, where heavy rain is a fixture of most months and summer downpours can drop inches in an afternoon, drainage failures are among the most common reasons municipal courses decline — standing water kills turf, softens fairways into cart-rule-only conditions and pushes play away.
The course itself was designed by golf architect Jerry Pate, whose work Allen credited for making the most of the property’s existing terrain. Pate, an Alabama native and former U.S. Open and Players Championship winner, has built a second career as a course designer and renovation specialist with deep ties across the Southeast, making him a familiar name to Alabama golfers who have followed his firm’s projects around the region.
More than a golf course
Cypress Creek is being built as more than a golf-only facility. Along with a full 18-hole golf course, the property will include tennis courts, pickleball courts and a fishing pier, rounding out a recreation complex aimed at drawing more than just golfers to the site.
That mix reflects a broader trend among newer golf developments nationally, which increasingly pair a course with amenities meant to appeal to families and non-golfers alike, helping a property generate activity throughout the week rather than relying solely on tee times. Pickleball in particular has become the fastest-growing racket sport in the country, and public recreation departments across the Gulf Coast have scrambled in recent years to convert underused tennis courts to accommodate the demand. Folding courts for both sports into one campus gives the county flexibility as usage patterns shift.
The fishing pier extends that logic to the water features on the property, giving residents who will never swing a club a reason to visit. Recreation planners have increasingly treated multi-use designs as a way to justify public investment in golf facilities that in earlier generations might have been built for golfers alone.
Opening timeline comes into focus
The opening timeline has come into sharper focus in recent weeks. During a Thursday morning meeting, the Mobile County Commission approved construction of a new driving range canopy that officials expect to finish within two weeks, according to District 3 Commissioner Dueitt.
“I hate to give dates, but I hope that the golf course is open by the end of this month or the middle of August,” Dueitt told fellow commissioners.
He said the canopy will give the county a place to park a recent delivery of golf carts, which the commission had previously approved purchasing, until a permanent clubhouse structure is built.
“That’s what this canopy is for. Until we get a permanent structure, the clubhouse, [the golf carts will] be parked underneath it after that point, but we needed something to keep them out of the weather,” Dueitt said.
The sequencing says a good deal about how the project is being staged. A fleet of golf carts represents a six-figure investment vulnerable to Gulf Coast sun and storms, and county officials were unwilling to leave it exposed while permanent buildings finish construction. Opening the course first, with the canopy sheltering the carts, lets play begin months before a permanent clubhouse rises — revenue and goodwill now, bricks and mortar later.
A temporary clubhouse and food vendor will be available when the course opens, with permanent versions of those amenities planned for later construction phases, along with the tennis courts, pickleball courts and fishing pier.
A home course for school teams
The 100-acre course is designed to support both local youth golf development and everyday golfers, and will be managed by Mobile County’s Golf Course Department once it opens.
Dueitt said he has focused much of his attention on the facility’s potential for area schools.
“My vision for it throughout this entire project has been for middle and high school kids that play on a golf team to have a home golf course,” he said. “They could practice, they could play, and also host their tournaments and bring people from all over down here to play.”
The point is a practical one for Mobile County families. High school golf teams across the metro area typically practice and compete wherever they can secure tee times, bouncing between public courses on a first-come basis with no guaranteed access. A course designed with school teams in mind — and managed by the county department that runs it — would give those programs a fixed home for practices, matches and postseason tournaments, and visiting teams traveling to Mobile for those events bring spending to nearby restaurants and shops.
An idle decade comes to an end
Golf has long been part of Mobile’s recreational identity, with several public and private courses scattered across the metro area, but a facility sitting idle for more than ten years represented a rare stretch of prime, already-developed land going unused. Abandoned courses pose their own problems for the neighborhoods around them: overgrown fairways, unmanaged water features and a gradual drag on nearby property values that residents feel even if they never played a round.
Allen said watching the site rebuilt from scratch has been a distinct experience compared with a typical renovation, and he expects strong local interest once the course opens.
“I really think the people of Mobile are going to be excited when they see the new golf course,” he said.
County officials also said they intend to keep rates at the new course affordable so that residents throughout the area have the opportunity to play. Affordability has been the central tension in public golf nationally — municipal courses must generate enough revenue to maintain themselves without pricing out the everyday players who are their reason for existing. With a $20 million construction budget to recover and a permanent clubhouse still to build, the county’s promise of accessible rates will be tested against those books once the first tee times go out.
What began as a derelict parcel in Riviere Du Chien is now, by the county’s own timeline, weeks from welcoming its first players back — a new name on the sign, a new design underfoot, and a decade of questions about the property’s future finally answered.
What players will find at the new course
Golfers returning to the property will notice the differences the ground-up rebuild produced. New grading reshapes how shots bounce and roll on fairways that once pooled after storms, and modern drainage infrastructure moves rain off playing surfaces quickly enough to keep carts rolling and greens firm in the days after weather passes. The design work by Pate’s firm concentrated on using the property’s existing terrain — the creeks and low ground that gave the course its new name — as features rather than obstacles.
The driving range, now shaded by the canopy the commission approved, serves both as a warm-up facility for daily play and as the practice home the county envisions for school teams. Range access is often the binding constraint for junior programs, which need space for dozens of young players to hit balls simultaneously during after-school practice; a dedicated range on-site addresses that directly.
For the surrounding neighborhood, the reopening restores a landmark. Longtime residents who watched the property decline from a working golf course into silent, overgrown acreage will see maintenance equipment, mowed fairways and traffic at the entrance gate return — visible proof that the $20 million the county and its partners spent produced something in daily use rather than a promise on paper.
The county has not announced a firm grand-opening date beyond Dueitt’s end-of-the-month-to-mid-August window, and officials caution that weather can move construction schedules in either direction. But with the canopy under contract, carts on site and a food vendor lined up for the temporary clubhouse, the pieces short of permanent construction are in place. Barring a setback, Mobile County golfers will play a round at Cypress Creek before summer ends — the first rounds played on the property in more than a decade, and the first under a name chosen for the water that once made the old course famous for all the wrong reasons.