The Nest Invitational Tournament (NIT) is No Laying Up’s year-end championship and the culmination of our 2024 event series presented by YETI. This year, 96 participants spanning 4 countries traveled to Dobson Ranch Golf Course in Mesa, Arizona in hopes of becoming the 5th NIT champion. For more information on how to qualify for the 2025 NIT and No Laying Up’s upcoming 2025 events schedule, check our events website and sign up for the No Laying Up email newsletter.
MESA, AZ — For 54 holes, Ben Reinhart (@reinben) was struggling to hit a draw.
It hadn’t truly mattered. At least not yet. He’d been playing great golf through the first three rounds of the No Laying Up Nest Invitational Tournament at Dobson Ranch, and now he was in the thick of the finals, in contention.
He wasn’t leading, but anything and everything felt possible.
Still, it was a bit like showing up at a party without your most reliable friend.
A draw, in recent months, had become one of his best weapons — a big, booming, beautiful, right-to-left ball that seemed to scoff at the wind and dance on jetstream before it tumbled back to earth. That draw had helped him earn a berth into this tournament, his first appearance in the NIT, when he rode it to victory at The Olympic Prolific at Gearhart Golf Course. But ever since he showed up in Arizona, it had deserted him. Maybe it was a blessing, he decided. After all, you could miss right everywhere at Dobson. He was going to lean into it.
But when Reinhart stood on the 13th tee at Dobson Ranch, a Par 5 with a sharp dogleg to the left, he decided he would try — one last time — to turn a ball over. He picked out a line with his caddie, Calvin Cotton, and set up over the ball. He pulled the club back, coiling his body like a predator ready to strike, and fired his left hip. He hammered his drive with a vicious lash, then watched as it rocketed toward the dogleg.
If it went straight or drifted right, it might end up in the trees.
But gently, for the first time all weekend, his ball began peeling to the left. It cut the corner and came to rest more than 300 yards from the tee.
“My best drive of the week,” Reinhart said.
He had just under 200 yards, roughly a good 6-iron, left into the green.
An inflection point had emerged. This was his chance.
“That pin was kind of tucked behind that front bunker,” Reinhart said. “So I just aimed at the right part of that green thinking, ‘If it doesn’t draw, I'll be pin high, and I'll have a putt at it. But if it draws, it’s a great shot.’
Cotton, who has been Reinhart’s best friend since they were in college together at the University of Washington, knew the shot was something special seconds after it left the clubface. He told Reinhart as much as they watched the ball reach its apex.
“Every time you hit a good one, I let you know when it’s in the air,” Cotton said. “But I didn’t know how close it really was until I heard the people around the green were like ‘Woah!’”
The ball finished inside 10 feet, and when Reinhart trickled in the eagle putt, he soared up the leaderboard and grabbed control of the tournament.
There would be a few nervous moments down the stretch, including a clutch par on 18 when he hit a flop shot over a row of carts to make a par that secured the win by a single point, but once it was over, it was the approach for eagle that stood out as the shot of the NIT.
“Just hit one of the best shots I've ever hit,” Reinhart said.
In the five years of its existence, the NIT has produced a wide array of winners. We’ve had mid-handicaps and high-handicaps grab the title, and even an emerging LPGA star put on the plaid coat after a 2-day torrential rainstorm. But the connective tissue is ultimately how badly each of them wanted to win this meaningful-but-ultimately-meaningless golf tournament. Reinhart is no different.
“It’s just fun to have that exhilarating feeling,” Reinhart said. “And that's what I love about playing in the Roost events is that you get a little bit of that, but it doesn't actually matter. You're there with your friends playing golf and that's what it's all about. And so it was definitely a similar vibe here.”
Reinhart, 31, lives in Seattle and works for AWS in their billings operation team, but he grew up in Port Townsend, Washington, a small waterfront community on the Olympic Peninsula with around 10,000 residents that sounds like something you’d read about in a literary novel.
“It is a Victorian seaport, so there's a lot of old Victorian houses,” Reinhart said. “There's a wooden boat building school, so there's a little harbor and stuff. It's kind of a seaport.”
He learned the game around the age of six from his father, Steven, and they did countless loops around the one golf course in town, the 9-hole Port Townsend Golf Course that has a rating of 32.9 and a slope of 114 and tips out at a menacing 2,700 yards. He played for his high school team, but more for fun than fanfare.
“I wasn't very good, but it was fun, at least where I was for high school sports, it was the most laidback,” Reinhart said. “Everybody was out there just to have a good time.”
After graduation, he went to the University of Washington and didn’t have a lot of time for golf. The game slipped away from him a bit, as it does for many young people. But when Reinhart was living in the dorms, Cotton (who lived on a different floor of Haggett Hall) walked into the common living area one day, sat down, and they started watching a Seahawks game together.
They didn’t realize it right away, but a friendship (and eventual golf partnership) was born.
“I was never into golf,” Cotton said. “My grandpa was a big golfer and I have a distinct memory of when I was 10, my grandfather took all his grandsons out to play golf and I hit the ball into a tree and just burst into tears. It wasn’t for me. But when COVID rolled around, Ben messaged me and was like ‘We can’t do anything. All we can do is go outside and play golf. If you’re ever going to learn, now is the time.’ The rest is history. The bug hit me pretty hard.”
They started playing together every weekend, and Cotton gradually got better and better. When Reinhart and Cotton both qualified for the NIT, they made each other a promise they’d caddie for the other person if either made the finals. When Reinhart finished +7 over his quota in Round 2, it became clear he was likely going to be in the mix.
“I didn't want to embarrass myself,” Reinhart said. “It was kind of the bare minimum expectation. I knew if I just kind of kept my head down and played my game, I'd be in it.”
Cotton and Reinhart talked their way through some tense situations in the final, including a wild sequence of events on the Par 3 12th when Reinhart chunked his tee shot woefully short of the green. It landed in one of the cement canals that winds through Dobson Ranch, then ricocheted backward. It left him with a 55-yard pitch over the bunker to a tucked pin.
“I was like ‘Well, I’ve got to hit with it in order to get it close at all,” Reinhart said. “And when I hit it, I thought ‘Boy that is going to be really close to not clearing that bunker.’ It just barely did and rolled out to like six or seven feet.”
He made the putt for par, securing a crucial two points. Then on the 16th hole, Reinhart cold topped his driver off the tee, leaving him in no man’s land and still nearly 250 yards from the hole. He thought about laying up to the corner of the dogleg, but knew he was almost certainly going to make bogey, and possibly worse. He and Cotton talked it over and he decided to hit a high draw with a hybrid, and Reinhart hit possibly his second-best shot of the day, drawing it around a tree and leaving it in front of the green. He didn’t get up and down for par, but the easy bogey secured yet another crucial point.
Reinhart didn’t want to know where he stood in the tournament when he got to the 18th tee. He was too nervous to think about it and tried to block out a dozen spectators repeatedly asking him if he wanted to know his position. As it turned out, he needed a bogey to tie Dustin Ball of the High Cotton Club and a par to win outright.
His drive found the massive bunker in the middle of the fairway.
Reinhart decided his best bet was to advance the ball as far as he could, and he nuked an approach with a hybrid that went way right of the green, nearly the 10th hole. A massive train of golf carts was now blocking his path to the green, and with the sun sinking low in the sky, confusion briefly reigned. Did Reinhart want the carts moved? Was there going to be enough light left to finish if he did? Did he realize he was chipping toward the water off a questionable lie?
Reinhart and Cotton talked it over. They decided the carts could stay. He was always going to hit a flop shot, so why complicate things? He nipped his pitch with perfect tempo and watched it climb into the sky, arching over the row of carts. It landed softly on the green and rolled out to 20 feet. A burst of applause filled the dry Arizona air.
He lagged his birdie putt to 18 inches, then marked as the rest of the group finished. He still wasn’t sure where he stood.
“That’s about when I heard Cody and Neil saying on the live stream that I had a one-and-a-half footer to win the NIT,” Reinhart said. “I was like ‘Oh shit.’ It puts a little more pressure on you. I felt pretty confident about it, but still, there are 96 of your friends watching. I know I rushed it a bit.”
It didn’t matter. Reinhart’s par putt tumbled into the hole, and a big grin slowly spread across his face. He was officially No Laying Up’s Champion Golfer Of The Year.
“I don’t think I’d ever won a tournament before this, certainly not in high school,” Reinhart said. “This is definitely the biggest thing I’ve ever won. I was telling LC [Lauren Coughlin] after it was over, that it’s just fun to feel a little nervous and then step up and hit a shot. It’s super low stakes, obviously.
“But that doesn’t make it any less fun.”
Kevin Van Valkenburg is the Editorial Director at No Laying Up
Email him at kvv@nolayingup.com
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