Jarosz and his neighbors did what people who live along a golf course do when something worth watching shows up on it. They pulled chairs onto the grass, set them along the fairway, and settled in together. "We'll have chairs set out, and we will watch this thing together," he told a reporter for WLOS during tournament week, describing a scene that could have happened on any Saturday at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove except for one detail: the players walking past those chairs were competing in a PGA Tour event, and a national television audience was watching the same shots from the same fairway.
That contrast is the actual story of the tournament, more than the leaderboard. A neighborhood built around privacy just spent four days on Golf Channel and PGA Tour Live, and the way it handled that exposure says more about how Walnut Cove works than any score will.
Two Gates, One Course
The inaugural Biltmore Championship Asheville ran from Thursday through Sunday on the Jack Nicklaus Signature Course at Walnut Cove, a par-71 layout stretching 7,249 yards from the championship tees. It's the first PGA Tour event in the Asheville area since 1942, when Ben Hogan won three straight Land of the Sky Opens before that tournament faded from the schedule. Eighty-four years is a long gap, and the club understood exactly what kind of week that gap created: thousands of spectators, national broadcast crews, and a course that normally exists behind a guarded entrance suddenly visible to anyone with a ticket or a remote.
What didn't happen is just as telling. In a WLOS report, club general manager Jason Zeller explained that standard PGA Tour ticketing policy still applies to everyone, members included, though immediate Walnut Cove members were offered tickets for each day of play. The community also set up a members-only entrance running alongside the main tournament gate, so residents could come and go on their own terms while the public used a separate way in. "It's really special for us," Zeller said. "To have our own community and backyard be exposed on the national stage, it's something that we get to share, what we get to enjoy every day, with the world." The neighborhood opened its course to the world without opening its gate to it. Those are two different things, and Walnut Cove kept them separate all week.
The Course Has Hosted Pros Before, Just Never Like This
One detail gets lost in the "first PGA Tour event since 1942" framing: the Nicklaus course at Walnut Cove has seen professional golf before. From 2005 to 2007, it served as part of the multi-course rotation for the BMW Charity Pro-Am, then part of what's now the Korn Ferry Tour. That history matters for how residents should read the tournament. The Biltmore Championship isn't the community's introduction to competitive golf. It's a jump in altitude, from a developmental circuit stop two decades ago to a full PGA Tour purse, national broadcast rights, and 500 FedExCup Fall points on the line. The course itself hadn't changed in any dramatic way between those two eras. What changed is who was watching.
What the Rain Decided
Tournament week weather turned out to be its own storyline. Heavy rain moved through western North Carolina and forced the PGA Tour into a decision it doesn't make often: preferred lies for all four rounds. Round 3 tee times and broadcast windows were adjusted because of the forecast. For residents watching from lawn chairs or from their own windows, this meant the golf on display wasn't the pristine, fast-and-firm version of the course that shows up in the club's own photography. It was a wetter, softer version, played under rules designed to keep the competition fair when the ground itself wasn't cooperating. Anyone who has walked those back nine holes after a hard rain, through the streams and mountain laurel that Nicklaus built the routing around, knows the course changes character quickly once the sky opens up. During the tournament, the pros found that out on television.
The Popcorn, the Ice Cream, and the Post-Helene Math
The tournament organizers made a deliberate choice to route concession dollars and attention toward businesses that had nothing to do with golf before tournament week. A WLOS report said Poppy Hand-Crafted Popcorn, founded and run by Ginger Frank, created a Biltmore Championship Signature Mix combining pimento cheese and salted caramel popcorn, sold at concessions throughout the course as the tournament's official popcorn. The limited-edition bag it comes in features artwork from Asheville High School students, a detail Frank described as pulling together three or four different young artists' work into one design. The collaboration also carried a charitable component: a $6,000 contribution to MANNA FoodBank from Poppy, the tournament, and The Cliffs at Walnut Cove together.
A WLOS report also covered The Hop Ice Cream's chocolate "Hole-in-One" flavor, built around marshmallow golf balls and caramel swirls; co-owner Greg Garrison said the recipe was originally created about six years ago for Lakeview Putt and Play. Garrison described the week as a ripple effect, one local business getting exposure and passing it to another, framed explicitly around western North Carolina's recovery from Tropical Storm Helene. Beyond the course, a WLOS report said more than 20 member restaurants of the Asheville Independent Restaurant Association were running deals and events tied to tournament weekend. A WLOS report also quoted Taco Boy general manager Laura Militello and Woof Gang Bakery owner Jaime Coley describing a noticeable jump in foot traffic in nearby Biltmore Park during a month that typically runs slow between the end of summer travel and the start of leaf season.
None of that happened because Walnut Cove opened itself up. It happened because the tournament pulled outside dollars and outside attention toward businesses the neighborhood already touches every week, from the popcorn stand to the ice cream counter to the restaurant strip a few minutes down the road.
A New Ridge Line Went Up for Sale While the Cameras Rolled
One announcement landed with almost no fanfare in the middle of tournament week. On September 16, the day before the first tee shot, The Cliffs released a new offering at Southridge at Walnut Cove: 13 homesites positioned atop one of the highest points in the community, with views framed by the rock outcroppings that give that ridge its character. For residents, the practical takeaway is simpler: new neighbors are coming to one of the highest points in the neighborhood, and the ridge that's been quiet for years is about to have construction traffic and, eventually, new houses catching the same views the rest of Walnut Cove has built its identity around.
What Doesn't Change Next Year
The Biltmore Championship arrived under a multi-year agreement between the PGA Tour, Biltmore Estate, and Explore Asheville as co-title sponsors, which means this isn't a one-time appearance. If the arrangement holds the way the club has described it, Walnut Cove residents should expect some version of this week to become an annual fixture rather than a novelty. That's worth sitting with, because the pattern the tournament established, national exposure without an open gate, tickets required even for the neighborhood's own backyard views, a separate entrance that kept resident life running on its own track, is probably the template going forward. The course will keep showing up on television. The community around it will keep deciding, gate by gate, how much of itself it wants the cameras to actually see.
That's not a complaint. It's just how a private club absorbs a very public week, and Jarosz and his neighbors, chairs already folded up and put away by Monday, understood that better than anyone watching from home.
If you're curious about what a new release like Southridge means for property values inside the gates, or you're weighing a move to a community that just proved it can host the PGA Tour without losing what makes it private, Marilyn Wright can walk you through what's actually for sale at Walnut Cove right now. Request a private consultation to start the conversation.
