Jumping to Play The Frog

The Frog was easily one of the top two or three public venues in the greater Atlanta area until a few years ago when a large multi-club organization acquired it and put into mostly private rotation.

I haven’t met too many people who enjoy driving long distances through heavy traffic to play disjointed, real estate cart-ball courses for $75 a round, and that’s mostly what passes for quality public golf around here. But The Frog was the rare course worth the 45 or so minute drive.

It stood out because it’s routed on a property welcoming to golf, forested but not overgrown, with relevant but never extreme elevation changes that sheet toward a marshy area of Sweetwater Creek.

There’s not much travel between green and tee — a precious commodity in North Georgia — and there are no homes or other developments on the property either, another rarity (the course was originally meant to be an amenity to a hotel and conference center that was never built. Now is also a good time to talk about the name: supposedly the original developer thought the course routing map looked like a squatting frog, so…).

The first hole is a more than most players want right off the bat, a par-4 up to 457 yards that rumbles toward a big, convex-shaped green, but some of that is offset by the short par-4 2nd, a 305- to 370-yard par-4 to another big green set behind a U-shaped bunker. From there the routing goes down to the lower section, back up, then takes a spin around a wetland area with a stout downhill 223-yard 8th that must carry a marsh.

And so it goes, a nice blend of long, mid-length and short holes, with ups and downs and different bunkering patterns and green shapes. The course occasionally runs into trouble (the par-4 9th, which feels like an add-on; 15, which can’t quite commit to the strategy it alludes to; and the awkward tee shot on the downhill 4th) but throughout there’s sense of calm and expanse that’s hard to find in the competition.

Fazio hits all the right major notes on the design, giving the players wide landing areas off the tee, greens spacious enough to allow for pin placements that give the holes a certain elasticity, and large, artfully shaped bunkers. The holes themselves, however, lack the extra degree of detail or thought-provoking architecture (especially on the second nine) to make the course truly exceptional, though if I had 10 public rounds to play in Atlanta, I’d choose to play 4 or 5 of them here. (89)