Pine Needles Golf Trip — Part I: The Courses
Wanting to escape the northeast to play some golf in the winter and see some courses in a different area of the country, my friend and I booked a package trip for the last week in January through Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club. On the trip, we’ll be staying at Pine Needles Lodge Saturday through Tuesday, and we have rounds booked for Pine Needles, Mid Pines, and Southern Pines. We plan to play each course twice, starting with one round at Pine Needles on Saturday, two rounds at Southern Pines on Sunday, two rounds at Mid Pines on Monday, then another round at Pine Needles on Tuesday before we depart.
The three courses are located in the North Carolina Sandhills in Southern Pines, NC, and are only about 5 miles away from the famed Pinehurst Resort. The Mid Pines and Pine Needles courses are on the same property just across the street from one another, with the Southern Pines course only about 3 miles away. All three courses are Donald Ross original designs and are highly rated courses that have received critical acclaim for recent restoration work that they’ve had done and have hosted various top-level tournaments over the years.
Pine Needles
Pine Needles (ranked as the 11th best course in North Carolina on top100golfcourses.com) was originally designed by Donald Ross in 1927 and was then restored by Kyle Franz in 2017. Donald Ross is credited with designs and restorations for more than 400 courses around the world. Famously, he designed Seminole Golf Club, Pinehurst No. 2, and Aronimink Golf Club. Kyle Franz began his career working under Tom Doak at Bandon Dunes and then he joined Coore & Crenshaw to work on the restoration of Pinehurst No. 2 in 2010. Then with his own firm, Kyle Franz Golf Course Design, he has completed successful restoration projects at Country Club of Charleston and The Minikahda Club.
In 1954, LPGA player and World Golf Hall of Famer Peggy Kirk Bell and her husband purchased the Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club and restored it. In 1949, Bell won the Titleholders Championship. The Titleholders Championship was played from 1937 to 1966, and then once again in 1972. Originally, the Titleholders Championship was played at Augusta Country Club (not to be confused with the home of the Masters, Augusta National Golf Club), but in 1972 when the event was revived it was staged at Pine Needles. The 1972 playing of the event at Pine Needles was won by LPGA great Sandra Palmer, with legends Judy Rankin and Mickey Wright finishing just behind her. The Titleholders Championship was later designated as a major championship by the LPGA Tour. Today, ownership of the Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club still remains in the Bell family.
Three U.S. Women’s Open Championships have been played at Pine Needles, in 1996, 2001, and 2007. The 1996 Open was won by Annika Sorenstam and the Pine Needles course played as a 6,207 yard par 70 layout. Sorenstam finished the tournament at 8 under par and won by 6 strokes. It was her second of her ten major titles, with her first being the prior year’s U.S. Open. The 2001 Open was won by Karrie Webb with a score of 7 under. The course played to a similar length as it did in the 1996 Open. Webb finished 8 shots ahead of the second-place finisher Se Ri Pak, which was the largest winning margin in the event in the last 21 years. Similar to Sorenstam in 1997, Webb also won the prior year’s U.S. Open. Webb would eventually win 7 LPGA majors and enter the World Golf Hall of Fame. Completing the list of prestigious winners of Women’s U.S. Opens at Pine Needles, Cristie Kerr won the 2007 edition with a score of 5 under. Kerr won by 2 shots, ending the trend of blowout victories that occurred in the prior Opens at Pine Needles. For the 2007 playing, the course was lengthened to 6,664 yards and played as a par 71. Kerr went on to win 20 times on the LPGA tour, including 2 majors. Additionally, Pine Needles hosted the 2nd U.S. Senior Women’s Open Championship in 2019 (won by Helen Alfredsson), and they will be hosting the U.S. Women’s Open for a record fourth time in June of 2022.
Kyle Franz’s restoration work on the course in 2017 was completed with the intent to “reflect the challenges that Donald Ross envisioned nearly a century ago.” According to the Pine Needles website, Franz focused his restoration work on “making Pine Needles feel as wide, clean, and manicured Ross originally intended. To achieve this, Franz removed and renaturalzed 11 acres of rough, expanded greens, added new tees, and revamped overgrown areas with Pine Valley-style hazards.”
Today, Pine Needles plays as a par 71 at 7,062 yards from the back tees and 6,436 yards from the set of tees one in front of the tips. Additionally, Pine Needles has The Loop, which is a four-hole short course that has 3 par 3s and a short par 4. The Loop’s greens were also restored in 2017.
Mid Pines
Mid Pines (ranked as the 9th best course in North Carolina on top100golfcourses.com) was originally designed by Donald Ross in 1921 and then restored by Kyle Franz in 2013. Franz’s restoration work was intended to be minimalistic, and Mid Pines is praised today retaining its key Ross features from when it was originally built. Franz focused his restoration work on removing all rough, expanding greens, expanding waste areas, and removing about 400 trees. Today, Mid Pines plays as a par 72 at 6,732 yards from the back tees and 6,166 yards from the set of tees one in front of the tips.
Julius Boros served as the Head Golf Professional at Mid Pines in 1950. Boros won 18 times on the PGA Tour, including two U.S. Opens and a PGA Championship. He was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1982. In 1953, Boros and his father-in-law pooled their money with Peggy Bell and her husband to purchase the Pine Needles Golf Course, but two years later Boros and his father-in-law sold their shares in Pine Needles to the Bells.
Mid Pines hosted the 2002 U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur Championship, which was won by legendary amateur golfer Carol Semple for the fourth year in a row. Semple was a career amateur who won the U.S. Women’s Amateur, the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur twice, and the U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur four times. Semple is one of only five people to have won three different USGA individual championship events, with JoAnne Carner, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Tiger Woods being the others. Semple’s father once served as the president of the USGA, and she was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2008.
Southern Pines
Southern Pines (ranked as the 39th best course in North Carolina on top100golfcourses.com) was originally designed by Donald Ross and opened for play in 1906. According to the Southern Pines website, Southern Pines is the third original course that Donald Ross designed, after the front nine of Pinehurst No. 2 and Winchester Country Club in 1901 (Ross completed the back nine of Pinehurst No. 2 in 1907).
In 2020, Southern Pines was purchased by the same management company that owns and operates Pine Needles and Mid Pines. Then, Southern Pines was restored by Kyle Franz starting in the second half 2020, with the newly restored course having opened for play in the fall of 2021. Franz’s restoration work on Southern Pines focused on tree removal, expanding fairway widths, and removing maintained rough around greens and replacing the rough with fairway height grass green surrounds. Today, Southern Pines plays as a par 71 at 6,633 yards from the back tees and 6,137 yards from the set of tees one in front of the tips.
Southern Pines is also home to what they call “The Lost Hole”. According to the Southern Pines website, during his restoration, Franz had access to old aerial photos of the Southern Pines course from the early 1950s, where he noticed a par-three hole that was to the left of the 4th green and connected with the 15th tee. This “Lost Hole” would have allowed golfers to play holes 1 through 4, then the “Lost Hole” par three, and then finish a nine-hole round with holes 15 through 18. The original “Lost Hole” par three was abandoned at some point in the mid-1900s, but during Franz’s restoration, he built a new par three hole to replace the “Lost Hole” from Ross’ original design. The new par three hole is now the 193-yard 9th hole, and it is unique in that it is one of the rare 9th holes that doesn’t return to the clubhouse. To build this new par three hole, Franz found an area that he thought would make an ideal green site, and then had to clear the area of dozens of trees. The new hole resembles a redan with its elevated right side of the green which can feed balls towards the left side of the green, which is protected by a deep bunker. Additionally, Franz built a sand green next to the regular green, with the sand green having been made out of a clay base mixed with sand and dusted with sand on top. According to the Southern Pines website, the sand green mimics the style of green that Ross built on all of his Sandhills area courses before Bermuda grass greens became popular in the mid-1930s.
This is my first post in my series for this trip. In future posts, I’ll look to cover the travel, the stay at the Pine Needles Lodge, food, practice areas at the three courses, and of course, my experiences after playing each of the three golf courses.
Photos and some information courtesy of the Pine Needles, Mid Pines, and Southern Pines websites.
