A busy season is wrapping up at the Anchorage Golf Course, and the offseason will be busy too

Ice and snow are hastening the end of a busy summer at the Anchorage Golf Course, but the municipal course in southeast Anchorage isn’t about to go into hibernation.

An approach shot by winter closed the course for a couple of days this week but it could re-open this weekend, weather permitting.

And even after snow and colds halts play for good, the offseason will be a busy one spent planning and fundraising for the biggest golf event to ever come to Alaska.

AGC will host the 60th U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur Championship in the summer of 2022, an event that will mark the U.S. Golf Association’s first championship event in Alaska. The tournament for women 50 and older will bring 132 players to town, plus caddies, family members and USGA staff and officials.

Set for July 30-Aug. 4, the tournament is almost two years away, but AGC general manager Rich Sayers is already deep in the planning stages. About $500,000 needs to be raised in dollars and in-kind donations to stage the tournament and make necessary improvements to the course, Sayers said.

The USGS is the national governing body of golf, and Alaska is the only state that has never hosted a championship event.

“It’s cloud nine for everybody,” Sayers said.

News that the par-72 course will host the 2022 senior women’s amateur came during one of AGC’s busiest summers, at least on the golf side of things.

The pandemic hurt AGC’s food and beverage business, but Alaskans looking for socially distant activities played more than 34,000 rounds of golf, Sayers said.

“There was a lot more people wanting to get out and exercise,” he said. "There was a lot who came back who had not played for awhile.“

The 34,000-plus rounds is "comparable to some of our better years,” Sayers noted. The most rounds the course has had in a single year is 36,000-plus, including employee rounds, he said; this year’s number doesn’t include employee rounds.

Recently as the number of players dropped along with the temperatures, work on the course picked up.

The biggest project happening is a bunker renovation that will provide golfers with a green where they can practice longer pitches. It comes with an excellent bonus: by taking fill from a hill near the 18th green, a new view was created for golfers: On a clear day, they can see Denali from the 18th tee.

“When I first came here a couple of things bothered me about the course setup,” said Sayers, who has been at AGC since 1988, a year after the course opened. "There was no place with a practice green with bunkers, and you (didn’t) see Denali from anywhere but the clubhouse.

“... So now Denali is right on the horizon as you play the 18th tee.”

The tournament will put golfers on the men’s white tees, and a couple of those will be expanded and improved. Last year, in anticipation of being awarded the tournament, renovation of the green on No. 5 began to facilitate more pin placements. It’s a six-day tournament — two days of stroke play to winnow the field for four days of match play.

Sayers said the USGA’s interest in bringing a tournament began in earnest in 2017, when two key directors of the USGA came to Anchorage — CEO Mike Davis and John Bodehamer, the senior managing director of championships events.

"Mr. Davis said, ‘Well, when I became the executive director of the USGA, we had conducted national championships in 44 states, and we have now hosted them in 49 states,’ " Sayers recalled. “They played the course and they liked it, and they invited me to go watch the 2017 women’s senior amateur (in Oregon).”

AGC signed an agreement with the USGA in February, and although the pandemic shook up some of the USGA calendar, it didn’t cost Anchorage the chance to host the tournament.

Neither did a pace-of-play warning Davis and Bodenhamer got when they played AGC three years ago.

“We were on the 13th hole ... and we spotted a moose and calf so they stopped and were taking pictures,” Sayers said. "One of my player assistants came up and he had no idea this was Mike Davis, the CEO of the USGA, and he said, ‘You know you guys are about a hole behind?’ ''

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