For about a decade, Nick Hinton’s competitive golf has started with a long drive. Greenville, Charlotte, Hickory: Wherever the next tournament was, it meant a full day away from his wife and son.

“Why did you drive two and a half hours to shoot 80?” he remembers asking himself after more than one of those trips. With only a few Carolinas Golf Association events in Western North Carolina, he kept signing up anyway. The long drive was the cost of competing.

This Sunday, he gets to do something about it. The Smoky Mountain Shootout, the tournament series Hinton founded with his business partner, Ben Schoenberg, opens with the Grove Park Invitational at the Omni Grove Park Inn on October 18, followed by the Asheville Classic at the Country Club of Asheville (CCA) on October 26. The two events are a fall pilot, with a full schedule planned for 2027.

Hinton grew up in Los Angeles playing basketball, football, and volleyball, and golf never took, no matter how hard his dad pushed it. Music took over in college, and he spent years touring with original bands before he and his wife left the entertainment world behind and settled in Asheville in 2013.

The game finally won him over after a 2015 charity scramble. He became what he calls a “Muni rat,” playing evening loops at Asheville Municipal Golf Course and chasing green-fee specials at Broadmoor Golf Links and Reems Creek Golf Club.

He entered his first Carolinas Golf Association tournament — a mid-am qualifier — as a 10 handicap around 2016 and remembers his stomach dropping as he watched the better players tee off. Once he put his ball into play, though, the experience “wasn’t quite as intimidating as I thought it was going to be,” he recalls. That’s the feeling he wants first-time entrants to have at the Shootout.

In 2019, he joined CCA, and it took some convincing. He had waited tables at a country club growing up and spent years as “a rock and roll musician” with long hair and tattoos, sure he knew exactly what private-club golf was like.

What he found surprised him. The buttoned-up club world he expected was there, but so was another side of it: A group of competitive players who simply loved the game. Playing and practicing alongside them, he started to improve quickly.

One of those players was Schoenberg, a competitive basketball player who, like Hinton, hadn’t grown up anywhere near club golf.

“You can kind of tell when you look at us,” Hinton says. “We’re misfits in that club for sure. We get in trouble quite a bit, but we respect the game.”

After he couldn’t find room for a golf simulator at home, Hinton set out to build the place he’d always wanted in Asheville: A spot for golf, games, and community. In 2025, he and Schoenberg opened Ace & Eagle, a social sports club with four golf simulators, three pickleball courts, and billiards on Hi-Wire Brewing’s River Arts District campus at 284 Lyman Street, rebuilt after Helene flooded the district in 2024.

Ace & Eagle started as a passion project: The kind of place they wished they’d had when they were learning the game. “Making money is, of course, important, but it was never really the goal,” Hinton says. In a region with few places to practice year-round, the goal was a spot where golfers could work on their games and find each other.

When summer arrived and the Ace & Eagle simulators saw less traffic, Hinton kept coming back to what golfers in the area actually want when the weather is good: A round outdoors in the mountains, on a course that is worth the trip. Many of WNC’s most admired courses are private or hard to get on, and a tournament series could open those gates for a day. “We’ve got really good golf courses here,” he says.

Schoenberg didn’t need convincing. “When Nick brought me the idea of creating the Smoky Mountain Shootout, I was all in,” he says. “We both love to compete, and our goal is to give golfers across Western North Carolina and East Tennessee more opportunities to play meaningful, competitive golf at great courses without having to travel hours from home.”

For Katrina Matza, Ace & Eagle’s head of marketing, the Shootout grows out of what the team was already doing. “Ace & Eagle has always been about creating more ways for people to play, compete, and connect,” she says. “The Smoky Mountain Shootout feels like a natural extension of that — taking the community we’ve built indoors and giving golfers a new way to compete out on some of the best courses in Western North Carolina.”

The Smoky Mountain Shootout is a tournament series for golfers who love to compete, and it’s built around three promises. Every flight plays for guaranteed cash, rounds are set up to keep moving so a tournament doesn’t swallow the whole day, and the venues are courses golfers actually want to play, starting with two Donald Ross designs this fall.

The initial fall events are geared toward amateurs and will follow a two-person best ball team format: Each partner plays their own ball, and the team counts the better of the two on each hole. “The most fun golf tournaments I’ve ever played in are best ball tournaments,” Hinton says. “You get to play your own ball, but you’re competing with a friend.”

Teams are flighted by combined handicap, with gross scoring within a flight, so every team competes against teams at its own level. Hinton built the format for golfers of all levels who miss competing. Many of them, he says, “want to play tournaments, but they get scared that you have to be a scratch player.”

Players are encouraged to register with a partner, but single entrants will be paired with another solo player. The target pace is four and a half hours, and golfers will compete from tees that match their handicaps.

The Grove Park Invitational will be scored with Stableford points instead of total strokes. Each player earns points on every hole based on their score, the team takes the higher of the two point totals, and the team with the most points in each flight wins.

The format suits a field with a wide range of handicaps. A blowup hole won’t ruin a team’s round, birdies pay off, and a player who can no longer score on a hole can simply pick up, which keeps the shotgun field moving. There’s no math to do on the course, either: Players enter a gross score for each hole, and Golf Genius, the series’ scoring platform, calculates the points automatically.

The first event tees off with a noon shotgun start on Sunday, October 18. Golf has been played on the Grove Park property since 1899, and Donald Ross redesigned the course in 1926. There’s no driving range on site, so plan to warm up in the resort’s outdoor hitting bays and on the practice putting green.

The Asheville Classic follows with a morning start on Monday, October 26, giving most entrants a rare chance to compete on a private Ross course. The 1928 design at the Country Club of Asheville climbs Sunset Mountain, and Richard Mandell’s 2016 restoration brought back its firm, fast, heavily contoured greens. CCA Head Golf Professional Ross Lally and Director of Golf Luke Lovell are sharing tournament director duties for the Shootout fall series.

Hinton sees the two fall tournaments as a starting point. He hopes to grow the Shootout into a points-based series that ends with a championship, with The Cliffs at Walnut Cove at the top of his list as the venue. For 2027, Springdale Resort has committed to hosting, with conversations underway at Waynesville Inn & Golf Club, Mimosa Hills Golf Club, and Bright’s Creek Golf Club, all part of a lineup built around private and resort courses most golfers rarely get to play.

“The courses will be the star of the show,” he says.

A stroke-play division for professionals is planned for 2027, pending sanctioning from the Carolinas Section of the PGA. Hinton, who has played in several local tournaments, including the Skyview Open, is clear that the Shootout isn’t meant to compete with the region’s established tournaments. He wants to add to the competitive calendar, not take from it.

You don’t need a partner, a low handicap, or tournament experience to enter the Shootout. Registration for the Grove Park Invitational is open through Friday, October 16, and the Asheville Classic and a two-event package are open as well.

Entry is $225 per player for one event or $400 for both, and members of Ace & Eagle and Georgie’s Bunker pay $200 per event or $340 for both. Most of the registration fees go back into the prize pool, which is guaranteed at $1,000 per flight, with the number of flights set by how many teams sign up.

The goal of the Shootout is to build a community of golfers who want to compete close to home. For golfers who have spent years driving across the Carolinas to put something on the line, the next tournament is now a short drive away. “It’s for those people that are craving that sort of competition,” Hinton says.

In two-person best ball, only the better score on each hole counts, so the smartest teams split the risk instead of doubling it. The first ball in a safe spot sets the strategy for the second.

If you get to pick your partner, start with a complementary profile: A steady player who makes a lot of pars frees an aggressive partner to chase birdies. Look for someone who scrambles and putts well, because a partner who can save par from anywhere provides much-needed insurance. And it’s always great to pair with someone who keeps things light, since a team that can laugh off a bad hole recovers faster than one that goes quiet.

Stableford scoring, which the Grove Park Invitational will use, rewards that team approach and changes the math on risk. With the worst score per hole capped at zero points, aggressive lines on short par 4s and reachable par 5s have less downside than in stroke play, especially when your partner is already safe.

Grove Park gives best ball teams a few places to put all of this into practice. The 4th, the No. 1 handicap hole, calls for a drive into a fairway that banks toward the right. With two demanding bunkers guarding the green and a penalty area stretching for most of the right side of the fairway, a team’s shorter hitter may be better off playing for bogey, with a controlled tee shot and a layup short of the green.

The 6th hole asks for patience in a different way: It’s short, but members rank it among the toughest holes on the course, especially from the back tees, where aggression rarely pays. Out-of-bounds runs down the right, and a drive pulled left can leave a longer hitter blocked from the green. This is a hole where two conservative tee shots to the flat bottom of the fairway are warranted.

The short par-4 15th is reachable from the tee for longer hitters, and it’s a good place to gamble. Let the steadier partner find the short grass with a controlled club before the other takes a more aggressive swing for the green.

The collection of short par 5s (the 3rd, 8th, and 12th holes) is where to cash in at Grove Park. Once one partner is in position for a par, the other can go for the green in two, knowing the team’s points are likely already on the board.

Wherever you play, the best teams lean on each other’s strengths, pick each other up after a bad hole, and keep the mood light from the first tee to the last. That’s the point of best ball, and of the Shootout itself: Two golfers, one score, and a good time getting there together.

Special thanks to Nick Hinton for agreeing to be interviewed, to Ben Schoenberg and Katrina Matza for their time and insight, and to Melodic Sorbet for providing photos for this article.