Cherokee Was Supposed to Close in 2026. It Isn't.

Golf trade press said the Big Canoe Golf Club's decade-long renovation would wrap up this year. The community's own planning document says something different, and if you tee off at Big Canoe this fall, the difference matters more than a magazine footnote. It decides whether all three nines are open, whether your regular Creek/Cherokee pairing still exists, and whether the fairway improvements everyone's been talking about since 2021 are actually finished or just paused on the newest of the three courses.

Big Canoe's 27 holes were never one project. They're three separate nines, built decades apart, by different architects, and renovated on three different clocks. Sorting out which clock applies to which nine, and which source to trust when they disagree, is the only way to know what you're actually walking onto this season.

Three Nines, Three Timelines

Creek and Choctaw both date to the early 1970s, designed by Joe Lee as part of the original Big Canoe course. Cherokee came later, added in 1992 by architect Rocky Roquemore as the community grew. Each nine has its own personality and, it turns out, its own renovation schedule.

Creek fronts Lake Sconti and includes the uphill, water-lined par 4 at hole six that longtime players still call the toughest tee shot on property. Choctaw runs along Blackwell Creek for its first four holes before climbing into the hillside, and now closes with a downhill par 3 ninth reshaped in the 2024 work. Cherokee is the outlier: built on steeper ground, with a nearly 200-foot elevation drop from the second tee, it's the nine everyone assumed was next in line.

The Schedule That Kept Sliding

Here's where the public record gets messy, and where it's worth being precise about who said what and when.

In November 2021, Golf Course Architecture reported that Big Canoe's superintendent, Lydell Mack, had completed the Creek nine bunker work and that Choctaw and Cherokee would follow in 2023 and 2025 respectively. That's the schedule that circulated for a couple of years.

By 2023, the timeline had already shifted. A feature on Big Canoe's renovation, describing an interview with Mack, put it differently: nine holes done in 2021, another nine "scheduled for 2024, followed by the final nine in 2026." Choctaw, not Cherokee, moved to 2024. Cherokee got pushed to what the piece called "the final nine," implying 2026.

Big Canoe's own golf page today confirms half of that: Choctaw was "recently renovated in 2024." No language on the Cherokee page says anything similar. If the 2026 completion date from that trade feature were accurate, you'd expect the association's own site to at least be teasing it by late September. It isn't.

What the Community's Own Planning Document Says

The clearest answer doesn't come from golf trade press at all. It comes from Big Canoe's own capital-planning FAQ, published on renewbigcanoe.org, the site the Property Owners Association uses to explain its longer-range projects to residents. Asked directly about Cherokee's timeline, the FAQ states that because Cherokee is newer than Choctaw, it's "estimated to be 3-5 years until a rejuvenation of those nine holes is needed," with the course evaluated regularly and folded into the maintenance cycle when the time comes.

That's not a 2026 completion date. That's a wide, unscheduled window that could start well past this year and hasn't been formally triggered yet. When a magazine feature and the association's own long-range planning language disagree this directly, the planning document is the one written by the people who control the budget and the construction calendar. It's the more reliable read on what actually happens next on the ground, not the one built for a golf industry audience looking for a tidy three-phase story.

What That Means on the Tee Sheet This Fall

Practically, this settles the question golfing residents have been asking each other at the Sconti Clubhouse all season: is Cherokee closing? Not this fall, and probably not next year either, based on the association's own stated window. All three nines remain in the fall rotation, which means the full range of pairings, Creek/Cherokee, Cherokee/Choctaw, and Choctaw/Creek, are still on the tee sheet exactly as they've been.

That matches what's showing up in the community's own coverage of golf operations this year. In a pace-of-play piece the Marshals of Big Canoe published in the community newspaper this past May, the guidance was aimed at a full 27-hole course running at capacity heading into the busiest stretch of the golfing season, not a facility working around active construction. The club's long-running tournament traditions, the Member-Guest and the Mountain Laurel Member/Guest among them, have historically run as multi-day, all-27-holes affairs with practice rounds, flighted competition, and the social events that go with them. A course managing an active construction zone on one of its three nines doesn't usually have room for that format.

If Cherokee's Turn Ever Comes

When Big Canoe did tackle the Creek nine in 2021, the association turned the construction itself into a resident perk. Sunday evening golf cart tours of the work in progress, first announced that May, filled up almost immediately and stayed booked solid through the summer, giving property owners a running look at how Bergin's redesign was taking shape hole by hole. If Cherokee eventually gets its turn, that's the kind of rollout residents should expect again: a defined start date, visible construction, and probably another season of cart tours rather than a quiet closure.

For now, none of that has been announced. The FAQ's own three-to-five-year estimate suggests Cherokee's rejuvenation isn't even fully triggered yet, let alone scheduled. Anyone budgeting a fall of golf around an assumed closure, or wondering whether joining now means missing part of the course during a renovation year, can plan around all 27 holes being open.

The 2026 date traces to a 2023 trade feature, and the three-to-five-year estimate comes from the association's own planning FAQ. Until the POA announces a start date for Cherokee, that FAQ is the better guide to when work on the nine will begin.

If you have questions about how the golf course schedule and Big Canoe's other amenity plans fit together, reach out to North GA Properties.