This new-look muni is readying to host the game’s longest drivers

After several years in the wilderness, the World Long Drive Championship has found a new home in Reno, Nev.

That’s the short story.

The longer version involves the property that will host the event, a municipal facility whose evolution reflects the changing face of Reno golf itself.

Wildcreek Golf Course opened in 1978, at a time when Reno needed all the golf it could get. In those days, tour buses streamed over the Sierra from California, carrying throngs of visitors keen to hit the tables and the tee. Reno had casinos in abundance but was relatively shy on courses.

To help meet the demand, the Reno-Sparks Convention and Visitors Authority developed Wildcreek with funds from a hotel room tax, creating an 18-hole course, a 9-hole par-3 course and a practice facility — all a quick skip from downtown.

In its early life, Wildcreek was a wild success.

Its birth presaged the industry boom of the 1980s and ’90s, a period of exuberant optimism marked by the National Golf Foundation’s (now infamous) recommendation that a new course be built in the United States every day for a decade. Reno joined right in.

The resulting projects were mostly private clubs and high-end daily-fee courses.

“And those places took away the best customers,” says Mike Mazzaferri of Mazz Golf, a Reno-based course management company. “Municipal golf couldn’t compete.”

If that was a blow to business, so was the rise of Indian casinos in California, which staunched the flow of visitors into Reno. On top of that, golf faced headwinds of its own. Starting in the mid-aughts, the same market correction that shuttered courses around the country rippled across Reno and surrounding Washoe County. Munis were hit hard. In time, an area that at its peak offered 135 holes of publicly owned golf saw that supply shrink to just 36 holes.

Wildcreek struggled on, but in a different form. In 2019, the Visitors Authority, eager to relinquish its stake in golf, sold 87 acres of Wildcreek to the school district, which went on to build a high school on what had been the back nine and practice range.

The school, which opened in 2022, was a beautiful facility, a boon for public education.

But, Mazzaferri says, “it left Wildcreek in pieces.”

Ideas differed on what to do with the remainder of the course. One proposal called for turning the property into a dog park.

“We decided we couldn’t let Wildcreek go away,” Mazzaferri says.

By “we,” he means himself and his wife, Chris Mazzaferri, longtime director of First Tee Northern Nevada. Under her direction, the chapter had grown into one of the country’s most robust First Tee programs, with 14 locations around Reno. What it lacked was a headquarters, a home base that would allow the organization to increase the number of children it served.

The Mazzaferris pitched Washoe County on a trade: Deed what was left of Wildcreek to First Tee, and the nonprofit would take on the fundraising to refresh the property. It was a two-birds-with-one-stone solution: preserve Wildcreek as affordable, public-access golf while providing First Tee Northern Nevada with the anchor site it had never had.

Plans called for a two-phase revitalization, with a budget of just over $16 million, more than half of which was raised before the project broke ground. To handle the redo, First Tee tapped the architect Brian Curley, whose 40-plus year career, begun under Pete Dye, has given rise to more than 150 courses around the world. In addition to overhauling Wildcreek’s par-3 course, Curley reimagined the championship layout, crafting a 9-hole Goldilocks design — inviting to newbies and challenging for more seasoned players, depending on the tees. Peter Jacobsen, the Tour-pro-turned-broadcaster, got a sneak peek of the course and praised it as everything public golf should be. The par-3 course reopened this past April. The championship course is slated to open in September.

Even as earth was being moved, though, other developments were in the works. The World Long Drive Championship, once deeply rooted in Mesquite, Nev., had been bouncing around for years, falling under different ownerships and subjected to fluctuating sponsorship deals. Now, the Pinnacle World Long Drive Tour was eyeing Wildcreek as the new home for its biggest event.

Catching wind of those conversations, Chris Mazzaferri had another idea: The long drive championships should have a junior division.

The official announcement came last month: Wildcreek would host the championship for the next three years, beginning this October. Chris Mazzaferri’s conversations with the long-drive tour paid off, too — the event will include a junior division, putting big-hitting kids on Golf Channel alongside the sport’s most prodigious bombers.

“Kids these days hit it so far,” Chris Mazzaferri says. “They should be part of the competition, too.”

First Tee launched its programming at Wildcreek in April. It’s already serving 1,200 kids, and Mazzaferri says it will have the capacity for two or three times that number.

But finishing the job will take more money. The second phase of the project includes a state-of-the-art, multi-tiered practice facility built out of shipping containers — a configuration that will provide what amounts to private hitting bays, usable year-round. With costs climbing, Mazzaferri estimates the remaining work will run another $8 to $10 million.

The World Long Drive Championship tees off Oct. 14-17, with competitors knocking shots down the fairway of the par-5 1st hole. Wildcreek is locked in as host through 2028.

In the short term, it’s a win for long drive. In the long term, it stands to be a gift for golfers of all stripes.