RSM Classic Week Isn't the Traffic Problem on St. Simons. Frederica and Sea Island Road Is.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Every November, somewhere around the second or third week, island regulars start saying the same thing to each other at the Harris Teeter checkout line: it's tournament week. They don't mean they're going to the golf. Most of them aren't. They mean the drive to the north end just got longer, the lunch crowd at the usual spots thinned out in favor of a different crowd altogether, and the whole rhythm of getting around the island shifted for about seven days.
The RSM Classic returns to Sea Island Golf Club November 16 through 22, 2026, with tournament play on the Seaside and Plantation courses. It's the last event on the PGA TOUR's fall schedule, hosted by Davis Love III, and it has run here since 2010, back when it carried the McGladrey name. The Davis Love Foundation has given more than $42 million to charity through the tournament's run, and last year's champion, Sami Välimäki, closed with a 66 to finish 23 under and become the first Finnish golfer to win on the PGA TOUR. That's a genuinely good story. It is not, however, the reason your errands take longer that week.
The reason is two miles inland, at an intersection most residents already have strong feelings about.
For anyone who wants the practical shape of it, the 2026 event breaks down cleanly. The course and tournament grounds are closed to spectators Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday is the Pro-Am, and it's free to attend, with gates opening at 7 a.m. Thursday through Sunday run on paid admission with continuous shuttle service from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Patron parking sits at St. Simons Island Airport, known locally as McKinnon Airport, off Skylane Road, with the shuttle ride to Sea Island Golf Club taking somewhere between five and ten minutes. The Golden Isles Green, the tournament's entrance village, has the merchandise tent, a putting green for spectators, and food and beverage stands before you even reach the course.
None of that touches Frederica Road directly, and that's worth sitting with for a second, because the traffic story locals actually complain about during tournament week has almost nothing to do with the golf course itself.
Glynn County's own traffic studies have named the intersection of Frederica Road and Sea Island Road the one with the highest crash count on St. Simons Island. That finding didn't come from a tournament-week fluke. It came out of a 2016 St. Simons Island traffic study, was reaffirmed in a 2020 sector study, and was tested again in a 2021 engineering review that compared a roundabout against a signal upgrade and found the roundabout came out ahead on both flow and safety. A follow-up 2022 review by an independent firm then refined that roundabout design into its current configuration. This is a bottleneck the county has been studying for over fifteen years, tournament season or not.
What tournament week does is take an intersection that's already tight during a normal Tuesday lunch rush and layer a week of destination traffic on top of it. Anyone driving north toward Christ Church or south toward the Brunswick causeway during RSM week is funneling through the same chokepoint that already frustrates commuters, school pickup lines, and grocery runs the other fifty-one weeks of the year. The tournament doesn't create the problem. It just puts a magnifying glass over one the county's own data has flagged for a decade and a half.
Longtime residents have said as much in public comment for years. One letter writer to The Brunswick News, arguing against removing the traffic signals at that intersection and routing everyone into a roundabout instead, put it plainly:
"It is the only avenue available to all of us to get south on Frederica."
That sentiment, not the leaderboard, is the actual pulse of tournament week on St. Simons.
Here's the part that surprises people who've heard the roundabout is finally happening. It's been approved since June 2022, funded at $6 million through Glynn County capital project funds, and it's sat in final design for a while now, with utility coordination and property acquisition as the last major hurdles. Southeastern Engineering, the same firm that designed the Kings Way and Frederica Road roundabout, is leading the design work.
But the timeline has moved. As of this summer, county officials expect construction to begin in the second half of 2027, not this year and not next spring. And even that date carries real uncertainty. The Glynn Environmental Coalition filed a lawsuit challenging whether the roundabout falls within the scope of the deed under which the land at that intersection was originally left to the county by a private landowner. If that challenge succeeds or drags on, the 2027 start could slip further.
This is one piece of a larger plan county officials are now calling the Frederica Road Improvement Plan, which also includes future roundabouts at Frederica and Atlantic Avenue, Frederica and McIntosh Avenue, and, further out still, at Demere and Sea Island Road and at Kings Way and Sea Island Road. County staff have said those last two are three to five years away. More than 170 public comments came in during input sessions held in March 2025, which tells you this isn't a quiet background project. People on this island have opinions about it, and they've been sharing them.
What that means in practical terms is straightforward. The intersection that backs up every November during tournament week is going to look exactly the same next November, and most likely the November after that. Anyone hoping the roundabout will thin out RSM Classic traffic before the 2027 or 2028 tournament is planning around a timeline that keeps moving.
None of this requires a heroic workaround. It requires the kind of small scheduling adjustments longtime islanders already make without thinking about it much.
None of this is complicated. It's the same adaptation year-round islanders already make around school drop-off, summer tourist season, and the Georgia-Florida football weekend crowd. Tournament week just asks for a little more of it, for about seven days, and then the island goes back to its normal pace until the next thing fills the calendar.
The roundabout will eventually change this calculus. When construction actually starts, expect a real disruption of its own for a while, the kind that comes with any project touching a road this heavily used. But that's a 2027 conversation, not a 2026 one. For this November, the smart move is the same one longtime residents have quietly followed for years: know the intersection, know the alternates, and build in the extra fifteen minutes before you need it.
That kind of texture, the difference between what a calendar says and what actually moves through a place, is the sort of thing you only pick up by living here long enough to watch the same intersection get studied for fifteen years running. If you're weighing a move to this island, or you already call it home and want a second opinion on how a piece of property here actually fits your life, Page Aiken is always glad to start the conversation.
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