Cherry Hills Country Club Is Already Rebuilding Ahead of the 2027 Arnold Palmer Cup

If you have driven down Cherry Hills Drive this year, you have probably seen the dirt piles. Earthmovers parked near the clubhouse. A cart path rerouted around orange fencing. Maybe a new sign near the turn that you did not remember being there last summer.

None of it is random maintenance. It is the first visible piece of a plan that connects a city council vote most residents never heard about to a golf tournament that will put Cherry Hills Village on Golf Channel for a week in 2027.

The Vote in January Nobody Was Watching

On January 6, 2026, the Cherry Hills Village City Council held a public hearing on Resolution 4, Series 2026, a site plan amendment for renovations to the chipping and putting area at Cherry Hills Country Club. The location is specific: just north and west of the existing clubhouse, on Lot 1 of the club's consolidation plat, between lots 11 and 14 along Cherry Hills Drive.

Community Development Director Workman walked the council through what was actually being built. New chipping and putting greens. Seven to eight bunker complexes. A garden wall designed to push grade edges and flatten the practice space into something more usable. The motion passed unanimously.

Read as a standalone item on a council agenda, this looks like ordinary clubhouse upkeep. Read against what got announced six months later, it looks like preparation.

The Sign Is the Real Story

The part of the minutes worth lingering on is not the bunkers. It is the signage.

Cherry Hills Drive is a private road the city does not control, but plenty of drivers treat it like the main entrance to the club because, functionally, many mistake it for exactly that. Councilor Eber asked directly about the new sign planned for the road. The answer: it will not block anyone from entering, but it will tell lost travelers this is not the way in. Right now, cars that miss the actual entrance end up turning around on the golf course turf or the driving range tee, because the current maintenance access is only about 15 feet wide. The new configuration gives them a place to turn around without driving onto the fairway.

The project also touches emergency access. The club is eliminating a hard surface on one side of the current cart path and extending pavement on the other to meet fire code requirements, giving South Metro Fire Rescue a usable route to the grounds maintenance facility. That matters beyond the everyday: it is the same access point used when fire crews stage there during events like the Fourth of July.

One more detail surfaced in the hearing that many residents driving that road have probably never thought about. There is a 14-foot bridle easement along Cherry Hills Drive, laid out in the original Cherry Hills Park plat. It runs from road edge to grass, the same as it does along other stretches of the street. City staff clarified it is a private easement, not one dedicated to public use, which is a distinction that matters if you have ever assumed those grass strips were city-maintained trail.

Here is what the January approval actually includes, in plain terms:

• New chipping and putting greens with seven to eight bunker complexes, built to give the short-game area more usable, flatter ground
• A garden wall to reshape the grade around the practice area
• A new sign on Cherry Hills Drive directing lost drivers away from the maintenance and turf areas, without closing the road
• A widened, code-compliant emergency access route to the club's grounds maintenance facility, used by South Metro Fire Rescue during large events
• Confirmation that the 14-foot bridle strip along the road is a private easement, not a public trail

None of this shows up in a golf headline. All of it shows up in the paperwork a resident can pull from the city's own agenda archive.

Fifteen Marquee Events, One Course

Cherry Hills Country Club has been staging national championships since 1938, and the frequency is easy to miss until you line it up.

That is 15 marquee events across 89 years, an average of roughly one every six years, on a golf course most residents will never play but drive past constantly. The 1960 U.S. Open is the one people still bring up first, the round where Arnold Palmer erased a seven-stroke deficit with a final-round 65. The 2027 Arnold Palmer Cup is a direct continuation of that thread, not a new relationship between the club and the Palmer name.

The Practice Green Is the Last Piece

The chipping and putting renovation is not happening in isolation. It follows a larger restoration completed in 2022, led by Tom Doak and Erik Iverson of Renaissance Golf Design, which reintroduced Little Dry Creek as a hazard running through the course and lengthened it to fit modern equipment. That project rebuilt the championship layout. The current work finishes the supporting infrastructure, the short-game space where players actually warm up before a round counts.

Put together, the timeline reads like a club working backward from a fixed date. Restore the course. Then rebuild the practice ground. Then host.

What Changes Between Here and June 2027

The Arnold Palmer Cup itself is unusual among Ryder Cup-style events. Men's and women's college golfers compete together as teammates, in mixed four-ball, foursomes, and singles matches, a format no other major tournament uses. The 2027 edition, set for June 7 through 13, will be the 31st playing of the event and the second time Cherry Hills has hosted it since 2009. Golf Channel will live stream every day of competition through its app and website, meaning a tournament played a few miles from Fiddler's Green will also be broadcast nationally.

Ticketing, volunteer opportunities, and the week's full schedule of activities have not been announced yet. Organizers have said those details will come later. What is already public is the fact that a private country club inside Cherry Hills Village is preparing its grounds for cameras well over a year in advance, which explains why the construction near the clubhouse started well before anyone outside the club had a reason to ask about it.

Reading Your Own Paperwork

The interesting part of this story is not that a well-known club is hosting another well-known tournament. Cherry Hills Country Club has done that fourteen times before. The interesting part is that the earliest, most concrete signal of a 2027 national broadcast event was sitting in a city council packet in January, months before any sports outlet had the story. The bunkers, the garden wall, the fire access, the sign on a private road most people never think twice about, all of it was on the record before the announcement made news.

If you live near Cherry Hills Drive, the practical upshot is simple. The construction you are seeing is not a random clubhouse refresh. It is the first physical step toward a week in June 2027 when this stretch of road will be on national television.

If you have questions about how a project like this, or any local change, might affect a property near it, Steph Watanabe is always glad to talk through what is actually happening on the ground in Cherry Hills Village and Greenwood Village. Let's Connect.