SAS Championship director confident Prestonwood flooding won’t be an issue
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- SAS Championship director downplays flooding impact at Prestonwood course.
- Past storms, including Tropical Storm Michael, failed to derail tournament play.
- Ground staff experience and flexible routing bolster event readiness for October.
Jeff Kleiber saw the same videos as everyone else, of entire holes at Cary’s Prestonwood Country Club covered completely in rushing brown water during Wednesday’s storms. The longtime executive director of the SAS Championship has seen it before.
And as he looked out at the course from the clubhouse Thursday morning, he knows he’ll probably see it again.
“It looks fine,” Kleiber said. “There’s some puddling but as everybody knows all drains run to Prestonwood. If we get that much rain, it goes up, and as it always works, it goes somewhere. Would we be playing golf today if it was tournament week? Probably not. Could we be playing tomorrow on the 18 holes we need to get ready? Probably.”
As it stands, the 25th edition of the SAS Championship is still two months away, the final pre-playoff event on the PGA Tour Champions calendar from October 10-12, which still leaves plenty of time to get the tournament routing ready, even as Turkey Creek — which runs along several holes on the tournament back nine — returns to the confines of its banks.
The issue with that October slot tends to be hurricanes, not midsummer downpours. In 2018, Tropical Storm Michael dumped 3 ½ inches on Prestonwood in the space of a few hours on the Thursday of tournament week, the day before the first round. A few spots on the back nine were similarly inundated as they were this week.
Not only did the tournament go on as scheduled, Bernard Langer shot one of three 10-under 62s en route to a six-stroke victory.
“The course was in phenomenal shape considering the rain we had yesterday,” Langer told the News & Observer then. “I had some pictures from 13 and 14 fairway and the creek down there, and I didn’t think we were going to play on time.”
There are no permanent tournament fixtures to be damaged, and as Kleiber noted, Prestonwood’s ground staff is accustomed to taking care of 54 holes, which means there is a lot of staff and resources that can be directed at the 18-hole tournament routing if needed.
All of which means Wednesday’s rains, despite the shocking visuals, did nothing to deter Kleiber’s confidence in things going forward as planned.
“If you asked me that question 23 years ago when I first got here, yeah,” Kleiber said. “We’ve had three hurricanes in or around tournament weeks over the years, and the years we had them, we still played 54 holes of golf on the weekend. If I was new to town, yes, I’d be worried, but I’m not.”
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