"An underutilized, virtual afterthought in the local golf market." That is how Bobby Jones Links founding partner Steve Willy described the course on Northside Drive before its rebuild. It is an odd way to describe a place that now shares a fence line with Collier Hills and connects the neighborhood to Haynes Manor next door. But it is accurate. For years, the course sat there the way a lot of infrastructure sits in a neighborhood: known, driven past, rarely used by the people closest to it.
That changed on paper in February 2025, when the National Golf Course Owners Association named Bobby Jones Golf Course its Jemsek National Course of the Year, chosen over regional winners from Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and Palm Desert. What hasn't changed as fast is neighborhood behavior. A national award for course quality and management doesn't automatically send people two streets over to use a facility. Most of what makes this course worth mentioning to Collier Hills residents isn't the trophy. It's what the trophy sits on top of: a set of practice facilities that cost nothing to use and a restaurant that was built, deliberately, for the people who live within walking distance rather than for tournament crowds.
The Turnaround Happened Without Anyone Having to Leave the Neighborhood
The course dates to 1932, built to honor the Atlanta-born golfer whose name it carries. By the 2000s it had the profile of a lot of aging municipal courses: heavy play history, thin maintenance budgets, a layout that had outgrown its usefulness. The Bobby Jones Golf Course Foundation raised more than $33 million starting in 2011 to rebuild it from the ground up, reopening in 2018 with a reversible nine-hole design from the late Bob Cupp. Played one direction it's the Azalea course. Played the other, it's the Magnolia. Combined as eighteen holes, the routing stretches past 7,400 yards, all from a footprint that used to hold one tired 18-hole loop.
The Golf Business Conference in Orlando, where the 2025 award was presented, drew more than 33,000 attendees to the same week's PGA Show. Bobby Jones Golf Course Foundation President Marty Elgison, Bobby Jones Links partners Steve Willy and Whitney Crouse, general manager Joshua Deal, and head golf professional Kayla Jones were the ones who flew down to accept it. None of that changes anything about how the course functions day to day. What it confirms is that the rebuild wasn't a one-time press release. The NGCOA's award criteria specifically weigh community contribution and operational model, not just course conditioning, which is the part of the story that actually touches Collier Hills.
What "Free" Actually Means on Northside Drive
Here's the detail that gets buried under award coverage: several of the best practice facilities on the property don't require a tee time or a green fee at all.
| Facility | Cost | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Dan Yates Putting Course | Free | Full-scale putting green open to walk-up use |
| Cupp Links | Free | Five-hole par-3 loop, also a Bob Cupp design |
| Practice putting and chipping greens | Free | Standard short-game practice areas |
| Outdoor Trackman-equipped range | Pay per ball bucket | The only publicly accessible outdoor range in Atlanta running Trackman technology, added in 2024 |
None of this requires club membership. None of it requires booking ahead the way a full round does. A resident who wants to hit a bucket of balls after work, or bring a kid out to putt for twenty minutes before dinner, can walk in and do it. The course's junior programming backs up that this isn't theoretical: the PGA Junior League drew more than 250 children in its 2024 season, with matches scheduled on Sunday afternoons specifically because that's when families are free. Separately, the course runs PGA HOPE, four six-week golf clinics offered free to active-duty military and veterans. Neither program requires a country club membership fee that most public courses in this price range can't offer at all, let alone one within walking distance of a residential street.
Boone's Was Built for the Neighborhood, Not the Clubhouse Crowd
The restaurant inside the Murray Golf House, the property's clubhouse, wasn't originally supposed to be a restaurant at all. Early plans called for a standard grab-and-go halfway house, the kind of snack counter most golf courses have at the turn. Bobby Jones Links general manager Brian Conley pushed back during construction, arguing it would be a mistake not to build a real kitchen. That decision produced Boone's, named for Augusta businessman and golfer Boone Knox, serving new American food with a rotating seasonal menu on a patio that looks out over the course and the Atlanta skyline.
The restaurant's own opening staff put a number on who actually shows up: roughly 1,000 homes sit within walking distance of the building, and the crowd running through the door skews heavily toward those addresses rather than toward destination diners. Families who've never picked up a club walk over for burgers built from a chuck, short rib, and brisket blend. Golfers bring spouses and kids who've been waiting for an excuse to see the finished clubhouse. The Georgia Golf Hall of Fame occupies part of the same building, alongside the Georgia State Golf Association and Georgia PGA Section offices, which means a short walk from a Collier Hills front porch puts you in a building that doubles as the administrative home of golf in the state.
The Trail Doesn't Stop at the Ninth Green
Collier Hills' own footprint already includes Tanyard Creek Park, Spring Valley Park, and a stretch of the Northside Trail, which is the same corridor Bobby Jones Golf Course fronts along Tanyard Creek. That's not a coincidence of geography. It's the reason the course and the neighborhood share pedestrian traffic in the first place, and it's why the property reads less like a gated amenity and more like an extension of ground residents already cross on a normal walk.
For anyone using that trail system to reach the Atlanta Beltline, the golf course sits directly in the path rather than off to the side of it. A dog walk that starts on a Collier Hills street and ends near the putting green isn't a special trip. It's the same loop a lot of residents are already running, just with a stop most of them have never made.
What Actually Changes This Fall
None of the facilities above are new this season. The putting course, the par-3 loop, the Trackman range, all of it has been sitting there since the redevelopment finished in 2018, expanded with the range technology in 2024. What's new is the national attention, and attention has a way of changing who shows up somewhere, even when the facility itself hasn't moved an inch.
The practical takeaway for anyone in Collier Hills isn't that the course got better this year. It's that it got better years ago, quietly, while most of the neighborhood kept treating it as scenery on the drive down Northside. A national award is a reasonable moment to stop doing that. The putting green doesn't check for a Bobby Jones Links membership card, and Boone's doesn't require a tee time to seat a table on the patio.
If Collier Hills' mix of walkable amenities, tree cover, and quiet residential streets has you thinking about what buying or selling here might actually look like, Sonny Jones works this corridor closely enough to talk specifics rather than generalities. Request a private consultation when you're ready to talk about it.
