The Playgrounds

The Playgrounds at The Club at Carlton Woods in Montgomery was designed by Tiger Woods and opened in 2016 as a 10-hole par-30 layout measuring 792 yards. Woods' TGR Design team created the compact short course as a creative short-game challenge for members, with imaginative hole designs that demand a wide variety of chip, pitch, and bunker shot techniques.

The Playgrounds is a ten-hole short course at Bluejack National in Montgomery, Texas, designed by Tiger Woods and opened in March 2016. It was the first golf facility in the United States to carry Woods's design credit, preceding the debut of the Bluejack National championship course—also a TGR Design project—by one month when the full 18-hole layout opened in April 2016. Together, the two courses established Bluejack National as the inaugural American site of Tiger Woods's design practice. The Bluejack National property was purchased in 2014, and construction work began in 2015, with Medalist Golf handling the build. Woods and his TGR Design team conceived The Playgrounds as a deliberate counterpart to the championship course rather than simply a warm-up facility.

Where the championship layout demands the full spectrum of professional shotmaking across 7,000-plus yards, The Playgrounds was designed around a single governing principle: maximum fun with minimum complexity. The holes max out at 110 yards, placing every shot within the range of a pitch or short iron, and the course was intentionally conceived as a space where unstructured play, creativity, and enjoyment could take precedence over score and competition. The ten-hole format—departing from the standard nine-hole short course convention—allowed Woods to design a routing that moved through the property without feeling constrained by a symmetrical loop. Each hole presents a distinct challenge at its compact scale, with green complexes varied enough to require different approaches despite the consistent short distance. The greens were designed to reward accuracy and imagination: a misread putt or an imprecise approach creates the same cascade of consequences it would on any championship green, just within a more accessible yardage framework.

The inaugural moments at The Playgrounds generated an account that became part of the course's identity. When Woods presided over the opening of the short course in March 2016, the first hole-in-one recorded on the layout was made on the very first shot—struck by eleven-year-old Taylor Crozier from Corpus Christi. Woods was on the hole to witness it and congratulated Crozier with a bear hug. The story circulated widely as an illustration of exactly what The Playgrounds was meant to create: memorable moments available to any player, not just accomplished golfers. Bluejack National as a whole was positioned as a residential golf community about 45 miles northwest of Houston in Montgomery County, aimed at families and at golfers who wanted a complete golf lifestyle rather than a single-purpose club membership.

The championship course drew attention from Golf Digest and Golf Magazine upon its opening, with both publications noting the quality of the TGR Design work and the visual character of the site. The Playgrounds served as the accessible, social heart of the facility—the place where members brought children, where guests encountered the property for the first time, and where the game's barriers to entry were deliberately lowered. Woods's design practice continued to develop after Bluejack, with additional TGR Design projects announced domestically and internationally in the years following the Montgomery debut. But Bluejack National's pair of courses—and specifically The Playgrounds as the first completed and opened—represent the foundational work of a design career that is still in its early chapters.