Tour Guide 2026: Sanford International

From the outside looking in, David Swift was living the dream, at least as far as golf course superintendents are concerned.

As a young turf manager, Swift landed a position at Whistling Straits a year after the famed Wisconsin complex opened for business. Almost immediately, he was asked to serve as the grow-in superintendent for the facility’s Irish Course. Once that layout was up and running, Swift moved back to the championship Straits Course and served as the host superintendent for the PGA Championship in 2004 and the U.S. Senior Open in 2007. 

“We had a bunch of great people working there at that time, had a ton of fun and two really successful tournaments,” Swift says. “Life was good.”

But as Swift is quick to tell you, just because you’re living one dream doesn’t mean that something better might be right around the corner. Newly married with a newborn son, Swift caught wind of an opening at Minnehaha Country Club in Sioux Falls, S.D., about 90 minutes from where he was born and raised in western Minnesota.

“I had a baby at home and a wife that I loved very much, but what I saw on the horizon (at Whistling Straits) was three more major championships coming down the road,” Swift says. “So, I had to ask myself, ‘Do I really want to keep doing this tournament thing?’ Those were really great, really fun, but they were also all-consuming. And I wasn’t sure an opportunity to go back to a place I knew really well would ever come around again.”

So, Swift exchanged one dream for another and took the leap to Minnehaha, becoming just the fifth superintendent in the club’s 100-year-plus history. “I feel very fortunate. It’s been a great move,” he says. “It’s a great club, and we have lots of friends and family close by.”

And in the end, the move didn’t mean the end of Swift’s professional tournament journey after all. Six years into his tenure in Sioux Falls, the club landed the PGA Tour Champions’ Sanford International. The 2026 event will be contested Sept. 11-13.

“We didn’t necessarily see that coming, but the club thought it would be a good opportunity to support the community, and the title sponsor (Sanford Health) is right down the street,” Swift says. “We thought it would be a short-term thing, but lo and behold, here we are heading into year nine.”

Slow and steady

If Swift being on a very short list of club superintendents didn’t already give it away, Minnehaha CC is a club that embraces and values its history. It’s proud of its golf course, which was designed by William Langford and Theodore Moreau and opened in 1922, and its prominent place in the region’s golf story.

But don’t confuse that with being stuck in the past. Minnehaha CC has never been shy about making improvements to the course as new trends and technology take hold in the game. Before Swift came on board, five different architects were brought in to make course changes, and since he’s joined the club, that momentum has only continued.

That includes a massive tree removal project that began shortly after Swift started. “When I walked in the door … this was a 100-year-old club with something like 1,500 trees. And I suppose 60 or 70 percent of those were old, stately trees — a lot of ash, a lot of silver maples. They were native trees, but they were just not very good trees,” Swift says.

“So, we underwent a massive tree removal program. And as we did that, we began to open up areas of the golf course. We started to realize that there was a lot of original Langford and Moreau out there that had never been touched, despite the club working with those architects over the years. We realized there were a lot of improvements we could make.”

Over the span of eight years, the club worked with golf course architect Ron Forse to make changes and improvements as time and budgets allowed. Most recently, architects Brian Schneider and Blake Conant have worked with the club to create a long-term master plan for Minnehaha that takes both regular member play and the club’s now annual hosting of the Sanford International into account.

“We’re hoping to line something up to start maybe this fall, but once we start work, we’re probably not going to stop for a while,” Swift says. “We want to start fixing what needs to be fixed on this golf course and take it to a level we’ve never really been before.”

Tournament tested

Swift is quick to admit that the scope of what he and his team at Minnehaha CC do to prepare for the PGA Tour Champions event pales in comparison to what went into preparing for a PGA Championship and U.S. Senior Open at Whistling Straits.

But the to-do list is still a long one in advance of the Sanford International, and checking all those boxes requires significant teamwork among the club’s full-time staff and the volunteers who lend a helping hand. At Minnehaha, Swift is quick to praise the efforts of Ryan Lehmann, his senior assistant superintendent, who started at the club a year before Swift joined the team.

“He’s the best guy I’ve been lucky enough to work with in my career, and there are a lot of great people I’ve been able to work with,” Swift says. “He’s like a brother and a best friend, and he’s a great leader for our team.”

Swift also noted the important role played by Tony Hayes, second assistant superintendent; Jared Gill, horticulturist; and Issac Johnson, assistant superintendent, in getting the course ready for the tournament.

“When I first got here in 2018, I was the only one who had ever really been around a tournament before,” Swift says. “Now here we are, eight years later, and we have all these guys who are now seasoned veterans in hosting a Champions event. It’s a really good team, and I’m proud of how they come together for this event.”

The local turfgrass community has also risen to the occasion to support Swift and his team during the Sanford International, dedicating their time and sweat equity to make the event a success. Swift notes the efforts of Kelly Eilers, the superintendent at nearby Brandon Golf Course, in organizing groups of local turfgrass professionals to help with the tournament.

“We call them ‘Kelly’s Heroes,’” Swift says. “He always has a group of volunteers ready to go and to lend a hand during the tournament.”

Minnehaha CC also gets a boost from a host of future golf course superintendents enrolled in the sports turf management program at Southeast Technical College in Sioux Falls. One of the program’s instructors, Cory Borgen, has been organizing groups of students to assist with tournament prep since the first year of the tournament in 2018.

“From day one, (Corey) saw an opportunity and really rescued us,” Swift says. “He brought in 14 guys the very first year, and he’s had about the same number of students or more volunteering ever since. They come out and help every morning, and a lot of them come back to do the same in the evening.

“It’s really been wonderful the way the local turfgrass community has come together to help with the Sanford. We couldn’t do it without them, and it’s getting to be more fun every year. It’s just a really good thing we have going here in Sioux Falls.”