2025 Tour Guide: U.S. Women’s Open at Erin Hills

Beautiful Erin Hills, located 45 minutes northwest of Milwaukee, is a relatively young course, having opened in 2006.

Course superintendent Zach Reineking (pronounced rye-nuh-kin) has been there at the course every step of the way.

He considers himself lucky to have been in the right place at the right time on multiple occasions. He caddied at Pine Hills CC in Sheboygan, Wis., which earned him a Chick Evans Scholarship (he graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.) Being local to Sheboygan, he had easy access to Whistling Straits and Blackwolf Run. He interned at Whistling Straits during the 2004 PGA Championship. It was a connection made there that led him to Erin Hills.

“I had aspirations to move out-of-state, but I got a call from the Straits Course that there was an opportunity at Erin Hills and I should try it because it was a new construction,” Reineking recalls. “I made a call and got a tour of the course; it was only stakes in the ground at the time. The superintendent left a few years later. I was very fortunate to get that position. I was in the right place at the right time, and I’ve been here ever since.”

Goodbye, fine fescue fairways

Erin Hills has previously hosted the 2008 U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links; the 2011 U.S. Amateur; the 2017 U.S. Open and the 2022 U.S. Mid-Amateur.

A significant change was made at the course in 2020. They closed the course and converted the fairways to bentgrass.

“Erin Hills was a fine fescue fairway facility, and we don’t have the greatest soil conditions to be conducive to performing at a high level. Our fairways were a collage of grasses; it was fine fescue, there was some ryegrass in there. There was some bentgrass and Poa,” Reineking says. “It performed well, but it was hard to manage all those styles and varieties.”

The bentgrass is thriving, and approaches are being mowed at .250, maybe even .200 come championship time. They’re aggressively topdressed and rolled along with greens.

“A defense to the golf course will be these green surrounds. We’ve got a lot of elevated greens with some roll-offs, and when a ball kicks off of a green, it’s not going to just roll three or four feet — it’s going to roll 20 feet,” Reineking says. “If we can get some dry conditions, we feel like that’ll be a fun aspect of the golf course.”

Reineking says the weather leading into the tournament has been rather cooperative. It was so nice that a lot of the set-up was done last fall. It was a dry winter, but their aggressive topdressing program for fairways, approaches and tees, along with covering all their greens in the winter, has them in a great position.

“We’re well positioned and eager to see some warmer temperatures,” he says.

Plan for every contingency

A tool that Reineking has at his disposal that he didn’t previously have is the USGA’s GS3 golf ball. He calls it a “cool tool” that allows him to gauge course conditions better than he ever.

“In previous years, we’d track our organic matter and our green speeds, but it was hard to really gauge firmness, and if we topdressed, how did that impact the smoothness of the greens the day after? How about three days after?” Reineking asks. “Now, with this tool, we can go out and topdress or brush, and we can get real-time feedback that tells us if the golf course has gotten better or worse.”

The plans for any of Erin Hills’ championships are started well over a year out. Reineking and his team like to do a test run on the golf course exactly a year out of the tournament.

“We did, I think, an excellent job in 2017. We had some storms that season and we needed to have a plan for every contingency,” Reineking says. “Everything that we’re doing culturally on the golf course is in preparation for that one event. But even your best-laid plan usually goes to pass at some point.”

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