Tour players are loving the Cricket Club, but the weather forecast might make the unfamiliar course easier

If this was a normal week, and the Philadelphia Cricket Club’s Wissahickon Course was like many PGA Tour stops, a repeated venue, Justin Thomas might have used some of the early week to escape over to Merion for his first-ever round there.

“But I feel like it’s in my best interest and my job to play the golf course that I’m playing this week,” Thomas said Wednesday.

The days spent leading up to an event usually are more about checking out the course conditions than learning a layout from scratch. The tour plays a lot of the same courses during its schedule, and Thomas, who has been on tour more than a decade, has seen a lot of them multiple times.

This week?

“I’m probably taking a little bit more notes,” Thomas said after his pro-am round sent him through the back nine.

Thomas and the rest of the field are playing the famed A.W. Tillinghast course for the first time during this week’s Truist Championship, which starts in earnest Thursday.

» READ MORE: Lots of laughs — and good golf — as Jason Kelce tees it up during the pro-am event at the Cricket Club

“Whether it’s with the amount of slope on the greens, you can kind of see differences of different angles that you look at,” said Thomas, who is coming off a win at the RBC Heritage, his first victory in nearly three years. “It’s all very in front of you off the tee. It’s just right there. It’s pretty forgiving, but it really is just kind of around the greens and if you get out of position, where you need to miss it. So I’m trying to learn those things, but fortunately for me, everybody else is kind of trying to do the same thing. So it’s just a part of it.

“I love these kinds of designs. They’re fun.”

Defending Truist champion Rory McIlroy, who won the Masters on April 13, played the back nine Tuesday and the front nine during Wednesday’s pro-am event.

“It’s very similar to a lot of these old-school courses that have been renovated over the past few years,” McIlroy said. “A lot of trees have been taken out. The green complexes are, for me, the interesting thing about the golf course. It sort of to me feels like a smaller version of Oak Hill [outside Rochester, N.Y., where the 2023 PGA Championship was played], not a lot of strategy off the tee because there’s no real hazards. There’s some fairway bunkers, but if you avoid those, the rough’s not that long, so it’s not a huge penalty.

“I’ve heard a lot about this golf course, and to play it over the last couple days has been cool. I’m trying to learn a little bit about it and trying to come up with a strategy to play it.”

McIlroy, one of the longest hitters on tour, has one strategy in play this week.

“You can send it,” he said, indicating he’ll be hitting plenty of driver. “It’s basically open season. … These new renovated old-school courses, the strategy is just hit driver everywhere, and then figure it out from there.”

The weather might make the figuring out from there a little easier.

» READ MORE: The Truist Championship has no Philly locals. But two golfers wear a Cricket member’s name on their sleeve.

Cricket will play under 7,200 yards this week, and there will be a lot of driver-wedge into the par 4s. But when the course is firm and fast, it becomes its most difficult, and the quirks of its greens make birdie a difficult score. There is rain in the forecast, however, Thursday later in the day and much of the day Friday. Beyond the impact to tee times and the schedule — the PGA Tour has already moved tee times on Thursday and Friday to threesomes beginning off the first and 10th tees at 11:09 a.m. — the inclement weather will drastically impact the scoring.

“In a perfect world, we probably wouldn’t have the forecast that we’ve had coming and what we’ve had early this week because it is meant to play firm and fast, especially the greens,” Thomas said. “It’s a shame in that aspect, but obviously there’s nothing that we can do about it or that anybody can do about it.

“I think because of that, it will show a fair amount of birdie opportunities, but it’s still very much position golf, and you need to be able to hit it in the right spots on the greens and kind of take advantage when you can.”

Friday and Saturday, at least, could feature increased wind speeds. Once the rain softens the course, the breeze may be the only barrier to birdies.