GOLFTOWN JOURNAL

Bill Coore was tromping through the woods about 3 miles south of the village of Pinehurst one morning in November 2011. The 900-odd acre site around him had quite the varied dossier:

It was mined for sand to blend into construction materials dating back to the early 1900s.

It later became a haven for hunters and dirt-bikers.

It was the canvas in the mid-1980s for golf architect Dan Maples to design a dramatic, do-or-die, high-testosterone course called The Pit.

One corner of the land now owned by Pinehurst Resort had been walked by Rees Jones and later Jack Nicklaus for ideas on golf courses they would build in the afterglow of the 1990s golf boom but before the 2001-03 “dotcom” bust and 9-11 aftershocks shuttered golf course activity for several years.

And it was where Coore and design partner Ben Crenshaw had been invited by Pinehurst owner Bob Dedman Jr. to chisel out a new course that would, at the time, be known as Pinehurst No. 9.

In 2011 Coore looked around at trees growing through moguls and mounds of sand left half a century before, at the various hues of sand, at the stark rolls of the land left not by Mother Nature but by heavy machinery, then nodded at his preliminary golf course routing sketched on a topo map.

“It gets me excited when I come out and look at this stuff,” he said then. “I’m not particularly thrilled with what we have on the plan, but I think it’s here. It makes you want to go stumbling through the woods.”

He nodded toward a mature pine popping through a hillside. “A dune like that with a tree growing through it? That just doesn’t happen. If you can figure out a way to utilize that, you’ve got a fascinating feature for a golf course. This is an interesting piece of ground. Overall, it’s a spectacular place.”

That golf course was never built, Dedman opting instead to buy the course originally known as Pinehurst National in 2014 and making it No. 9. Then, in the post-COVID golf boom in 2022, Dedman and resort President Tom Pashley began exploring options to add to their golf inventory and simultaneously put these 925 acres to work. Coore & Crenshaw were booked at the time, so Pinehurst retained Tom Doak to design No. 10 and told Coore & Crenshaw to reserve a spot on their schedule for a second course a couple of years down the road.

That time has come.

The Doak course occupies the western expanse of the site, with holes eight, 13 and 14 bordering N.C. 5 as it runs from the west side of Pinehurst Resort, south toward Aberdeen and an intersection with U.S. 1 and U.S. 15-501. The Coore & Crenshaw course will sit adjacent to No. 10 and extend eastward. The courses will share a common golf shop and restaurant, and the facility as an entity will be known as Pinehurst Sandmines.

“Some have suggested it was better we never built that first course. I would agree with that. I think the course we’re going to build now will be better than what we had before and will be a great companion course to what Tom did with No. 10,” Coore says. “This site is so interesting. I don’t think I have ever seen two more physically different sites that are contiguous, that touch each other, than the site for No. 10 and No. 11. They are massively different in terms of characteristics and landforms.”

The Doak course features wide, sweeping vistas and long, gradual slopes. Only the eighth hole embraces the ancient sandmines heritage with dramatic hillocks, mounds and a blind shot off the tee. The Coore & Crenshaw course will be more compact and have more of the flavor of the old Pit golf course, which was closed in 2010.

“This is choppy, ridgy ground,” Coore says. “It’s not as much elevation change, but it’s so quirky with the ridges and the piles and the trees and the angles. This is going to be so intimate in scale. You’re winding your way through trees and over old piles and across ridges. We’re far, far from the sea, but we have these contours and features and landforms that remind you of spots in Ireland or Scotland. And yet here it is, in Pinehurst.” 

Pinehurst staff and subcontractors are working to clear centerlines for the fairways, and are using mini excavators because standard logging trucks would have trouble negotiating the terrain and would destroy some trees that Coore wants to save. Coore & Crenshaw’s lead shaper, Ryan Farrow, will move to Pinehurst in early fall to begin construction work.

“We do not want to be in a hurry,” Coore says. “We have a routing, but the concept of the holes will evolve. We’ll go little by little and study where to knock down the ridges, where to keep them as is. There are ridges and giant piles dating back many decades we’ll look at individually. There are some you’ll say, ‘Oh my God, let’s play over that.’ I’m pretty darn excited about this one.”

Given that Coore grew up about an hour from Pinehurst near the town of Denton and has fond memories of playing summertime golf marathons on the No. 2 course, the Sandhills have always held a special place in his golf-design heart. He was stoked to come to Pinehurst and design Dormie Club, a course that opened in 2006 on a piece of rugged ground just northwest of town. He was excited to return in 2010-11 and direct a major restoration of No. 2 predicated on ripping out much of the grass and smooth edges that had encroached over the decades and returning the layout to the ragged, linksy feel that architect Donald Ross left upon his death in 1948.

Now this project at No. 11 is an entirely different kettle of fish — a made-from-scratch course that combined with the Doak layout will give Pinehurst a satellite operation featuring courses from two of the game’s most noted architectural firms of the 2020s.

“I’m prejudiced because we’re doing one of them, but this will be a really big plus for Pinehurst. So many amazing resort courses are being built on properties ideal for golf. They are photogenic and dramatic and are the proverbial you-build-it-and-they-will-come scenario happening all over in America and other parts of the world. People go to Bandon, sit around the firepit at night, and a conversation might find advocates for any one of the five being the best golf course,” says Coore.

“At Pinehurst, it’s always been about No. 2, and rightly so,” he adds. “The addition of No. 10 and 11 will really be positive for Pinehurst. No homes, pure golf, interesting landforms, dramatically different from everything else.”