Brothers Justin and Thomas ‘Ty’ Young had humble beginnings in golf while growing up in eastern Tennessee.
They started with yard sale clubs and would hit balls at a neighborhood baseball field.
They stopped playing for several years as life took over before a neighbor got Ty back into the game shortly after the birth of his daughter and only child 19 years ago.
He played only occasionally due to medical school followed by his career, but got into the game heavily during the coronavirus pandemic.
That’s when he and his brother got to thinking about creating something in the game.
Within a couple years, they became more heavily involved in the social media aspect of the sport, founded the Create Tour for themselves and other content creators, and added friend and founding member Jeremy Wisotsky as director of event logistics.
“I just got that bug and started playing literally all the time,” Ty Young said. “This [tour] happened within a year of really getting into golf and it’s been madness ever since.”
Now a firmly established entity four years after its initial event, the Create Tour is returning to the Myrtle Beach area for its flagship tournament.
The Southern Invitational is scheduled to be played Oct. 1-4 at four courses in Pawleys Island: Pawleys Plantation, True Blue Golf Club, Litchfield Country Club and Caledonia Golf & Fish Club.
The tournament will feature 48 players consisting of tour members and invited players who are largely golf content creators, though not necessarily entirely.
“This is the Comic-Con of golf,” said Ty Young, referring to the popular fan convention celebrating comic books, movies, TV shows, and pop culture. “It’s a content creator tour as in they create content, but they may be famous for being a comedian or reviewing food of just their personality.”
The Southern Invitational was the first Create Tour event in 2022, and after three years in Tennessee it moved to the South Strand last year when the tour played Pawleys Plantation, TPC Myrtle Beach, Heritage Club and True Blue.
“It’s our Masters,” Young said. “We had 64 people come from all across the country and Canada [in 2022]. I had never run a golf tournament before in my life, and it was such a success we immediately threw another one in Orlando and called that the Flamingo Invitational, and we had 76 people come to that one.
“Then we scaled it back because we like the more intimate kind of relationship vibe.”
Ty Young said the Myrtle Beach area will be the Southern Invitational’s permanent home moving forward.
Building the brand
The Youngs began with golf-related TikTok accounts and also utilize Instagram, Facebook and a website (https://createtourgolf.com/), and have a Create Tour channel on YouTube.
Justin Young’s Tiktok handle is “Dreadful Golfer”, while Ty is “T.Y.” and “Tomahawk Young.”
Their tour aims to provide a platform for content creators to showcase their skills, share their experiences from the course, connect and collaborate with other creators, and help grow the game.
“Because we were two brothers starting this, it was like, ‘How do we throw a golf tournament?’ ” Young said. “Then it was, ‘How do we throw a golf tournament with content creators?’ Which is a whole different animal. Then after that we learned how to work with courses and work with sponsors and all those things.”
The upcoming Pawleys Island event is the tour’s 12th.
Tournaments have largely been in the Southeast, including a pair of events in Florida at Innisbrook and the Orlando area, Atlanta and Cherokee, N.C.
The tour has broadened its reach as it held an event last year in Colorado and will go west again for a major in 2027.
“That one is going to be absolutely huge for us,” Young said.
Tour representatives scouted a site in Utah last weekend and both Phoenix and Las Vegas are being targeted.
“We’re getting more notoriety and we have a very good reputation for working with courses and also our players take care of the course,” Young said. “It’s kind of how you build it. It’s like building a job resume.”
Tour sponsors and affiliates include Gopher Golf Club Apparel, NJF Golf, the Bogey Bros Texas-based golf apparel and lifestyle brand.
Players who are participating in the Southern Invitational include Tommy Clark and his wife Mandy Inman Clark, who regularly post lighthearted short videos about married life; Bogey Bros Golf co-founder and COO John Koehler; HeyErock (Eric DeSoto), who has 441.2k followers on TikTok; Jordan Gilbert; and BattyGolf (Drew Bobo), who is looking to sweep the three majors this year.
Past participants include comedian Josh Mancuso and Birdogey (Brady Nuss), who has more than 850k followers between Instagram, TikTok and his YouTube page.
“We have players who drive 18 hours from Michigan, west Texas or wherever to play in this because it matters so much to them,” Young said.
The tour is beginning a scholarship fund to offset expenses for participants who travel long distances to play in events.
The Youngs plan to expand the tour’s major tournaments from three in 2026 to five next year, along with some smaller tournaments. The other bigger tournaments this year were Golf the Bayou in Louisiana and The Jam in Alabama.
“We want to play nicer places of course, kind of like bucket list golf,” Young said. “Of course down here we’re playing a great ticket.”
In addition to leaderboard awards and long drive and proximity to the pin honors, the Create Tour also hands out the Drip Award for the best dressed participant, Spirit Award, and others.
“There’s all sorts of little things that we have that nobody else does,” Young said.
Discovering Myrtle Beach
In 2024, Justin Young was coming to Myrtle Beach to join his family on vacation and invited Ty to join him for a couple weekend rounds at True Blue and Caledonia.
“I had never played in South Carolina before,” Ty Young said. “After that I was hooked. I was like, ‘We’re playing here. This is it.’ There are so many great courses, who would not want to play the [Barefoot Resort] Dye course, Tidewater, King’s North and a million other ones?”
In the Pawleys Island event, two longstanding participants on tour will captain and select teams of 24 to compete against each other.
The format at Pawleys Plantation will be a two-person four-ball being called Marsh Madness, True Blue will host individual match play, Litchfield will host 12 four-person scramble teams – tournament winners will be crowned through three rounds – and the final round at Caledonia will be individual stroke play.
The awards ceremony and banquet will be Saturday night at Sara J’s restaurant in Garden City Beach and another gathering event will be held at The Aero Club Short Course.
The overall tournament is called the Douglas Griffin Cup in honor of a founding member who died in his early 30s due to cancer.
“We have such a core membership group, we always offer it to them for a couple weeks before we go public with it, and essentially all the spots were pretty much taken right off the bat,” Young said.
Local invited players include Teddy McPheeters of the Select Sales auto dealership as well as the Teddy Mac Gives Back charity campaign, The Salty Golfer Wes Loman, and Cristina Lynn Golf.
McLeod Health cancer research has been selected as the charitable beneficiary, with the donation being generated through a percentage of sponsorships, which will largely be from local companies. “If you build a community you’ll have a community to come back to,” Young said.
“We’re creating the hardest ticket to get in golf, the best group of people to play with in golf, and everything else will come organically,” Young said. “. . . We want to create our own full tour that runs 12 months a year or close to that, and it gives us a chance to kind of show that golf is a diverse sport.
“Golf kind of brings a lot of people together anyway. It kind of connects everybody. . . . It’s the leveling field, I think.”
eMYRge names participants
eMYRge, the nonprofit Entrepreneurial Support Organization (ESO) based at the HTC Aspire Hub in Myrtle Beach, has named the first seven companies selected to participate in the inaugural eMYRge Golf Tech Accelerator Challenge (GTAC).
It’s a national event designed to identify and elevate companies influencing the future of golf while advancing innovation.
The program is supported by Golf Tourism Solutions via Play Golf Myrtle Beach, Coastal Carolina University, and Golfweek, and is made possible through a Relentless Challenge grant from the South Carolina Department of Commerce.
The three-day showcase will take place Oct. 6-8 at the HTC Aspire Hub in downtown Myrtle Beach, bringing the selected companies together with investors, industry leaders, students and media for an agenda of mentorship, industry dialogue and investor connections, culminating in a pitch showcase.
The first seven named participating companies are Groove Golf, Coursecast, Smash Swing, Courserev.ai, Clubhaus, Golf District and Leaderboard Golf.
Some Coastal Carolina students will connect with the participating companies through programming, networking, and hands-on exposure.
Golfweek serves as the event’s production and media partner and will provide national editorial coverage.
