Jonesboro, AR – Jonesboro Right Now – On Nov. 6, the Ridgepointe Country Club in collaboration with the Arkansas State golf teams and the Red Wolves Foundation broke ground on a new facility for both programs and the community.

In a combined effort over the past three and a half years, Ridgepointe worked with the administration at Arkansas State to plan out the foundation for an indoor golf facility.

Owned by Ridgepointe and operated under a privately funded lease agreement with the Red Wolves Foundation, the facility will provide year-round training for the A-State golf teams through a separate, no-cost use agreement with A-State Athletics. The building will contain multiple putting and chipping areas with a common area for both the team and country club members.

According to Arkansas State men’s golf head coach Mike Hagen, the reason for the facility’s construction came from the team’s need for a training location in case of inclement weather.

“It’s really going to help us move our programs forward when weather comes in,” Hagen said. “If you remember this past fall, we had about eight weeks of 105 to 115 [degree weather], and shoot, if we could just open up some doors and had some fans on us, we could have gotten a lot better work in.”

Cole Kirby, one of the Arkansas State men’s golf team members and a native of Jonesboro, said the indoor training will help improve the amount of work put in over the offseason.

“You may not practice as much, but it’s always good to get practicing over the offseason and stay where you’re at and keep the momentum going,” Kirby said. “We haven’t had that in the past, so a place like this is really going to benefit us.”

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Outside of serving its main purpose, the building will help the program rise up in other ways beyond training.

“This is going to help us move our programs even further up the ranks, be able to train our players better, help people come to Jonesboro, and keep making this a destination for college golf,” Hagen said.

While providing better training conditions for the team, the indoor facility also showcases and improves the local golf community’s support for the program at Arkansas State.

Brett Walster, Ridgepointe general manager and director of golf, noted how much the relationship between the golf teams and the country club means to the community.

“We’ve always been proud of our relationship with Arkansas State golf,” Walster said. “We’re fortunate to have them here at Ridgepointe and this facility is another great step in strengthening that relationship.”

Over the course of the period of planning, Walster’s main concern stemmed from how to tie the benefits of the facility to both sides of this connection between Arkansas State and Ridgepointe.

“Really, it wasn’t about what’s in the building [or] what the bricks are going to look like. A lot of it was ‘how is this relationship going to work,’” Walster said. “We had to figure out (how) to work this out to make sure that it’s beneficial not only to the club, but beneficial to the A-State golf team.”

The support of the community alongside the Red Wolves Foundation, according to Walster, will continue to maintain the facility in the long-term future.

“The Red Wolves Foundation stepped up in a big way to help get this thing over the finish line, and we’re going to continue to fundraise. There’s going to be ongoing expenses in the facility not in the near term, but in the long term,” Walster said. “This community really gets behind the university and those are the people we tapped into.”

While not giving a specific timeline on the project, Walster said he looks forward to seeing the community who helped push the facility plans forward at the grand opening in a few months.

“Every single year, we keep doing better. We keep growing and we keep breaking records,” Hagen said. “We do it for the school, do it for the university, but we also do it for our golf community here and our local clubs. So I hope you guys are proud of us, proud of the hard work these kids put in, and proud of this facility.”

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