Frontier Golf Honored

Golf Course Industry magazine has awarded course builder Frontier Golf its annual Affinity Award for Best Environmental Project. Frontier earned this honor, course construction's highest, for its performance during a complicated, comprehensive "retro rebuild" of the Bedford Springs Old Course in Bedford Township, Pa.

Frontier Golf President & CEO Nick Scigliano accepted Golf Course Industry's Builder Excellence Affinity Award during the annual Golf Course Builders Association of America banquet. The event was held February 1, as part of the 2008 Golf Industry Show in Orlando. "We are extremely honored to receive the Affinity Award," Scigliano said. "It's a reflection of the dedication, hard work and concern for the environment shared by everyone here at Frontier."

[Another industry publication, GolfInc., also announced in February that Bedford Springs Old Course had earned top prize in its fifth annual Renovation of the Year competition. Frontier's renovation work at Bedford Springs, authored by architect Ron Forse, took top prize in the Daily Fee/Resort division. Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio earned top honors in the Private Club division, where Tavistock Country Club in Haddonfield, N.J., another Frontier-led renovation project, was a finalist.]

According to Golf Course Industry Editor John Walsh, Frontier Golf claimed GCI's Affinity Award on the strength of its creek restoration at Bedford Springs. "Frontier originally entered the project in another category," Walsh explained. "But the creek restoration was so total, it really impressed our judging panel, which included superintendents, course owners and architects from throughout the country."

The criteria used in judging for the Affinity Award, Walsh said, includes a project's scope and objectives; its challenges and solutions; its construction detail and its blending of new construction with existing features.

Frontier's work at Bedford included rebuilding every green, tee and fairway, whilst under-girding it all with state-of-the-art drainage, irrigation and soil-profiles. However, panel members voiced particularly admiration for Frontier's efforts on the re-channeling of Shober's Run, where a stream bed (5,000 feet of it, affecting 12 separate holes) was carefully restored to its original depth to guard against erosion and provide flood-retention capability. This huge undertaking was originally engineered by Lititz, Pa.-based LandStudies, Inc.

"This project," said one longtime superintendent on the GCI panel, "was successful primarily because of the creek restoration, which allowed them to recapture a capacity for storage during storms and to eliminate floods. It also gave them a place to drain the golf course features they were working on."

A second superintendent/panelist credited Jones Mills, Pa.-based Frontier with not flinching at the extent of the work. He cited the firm's ability to recycle materials and keep them on site, a major cost and environmental savings: "They used all of the excavated material that deposited over those years of flooding as topsoil throughout the facility and didn't haul anything away."

Frontier's ability to undertake the creek restoration project while addressing of the attendant regulatory concerns particularly impressed one course architect on the judging panel. Another architect/panelist applauded Frontier's ability to solve an unforeseen challenge that cropped up after the project had already begun: "They had to deal with storm water on site and the creek that ran through the site ... This was an add-on to the project and something they weren't necessarily expecting, but because of the dedication and hard work, and their ability to work efficiently at a rapid pace, the owner recognized them as the one to do that work. Frontier was able to handle some unforeseens on the project and was able to offer solutions, value-engineer the situation and come up with positive solutions to get around the problem."

A course owner/panelist also noted Frontier's ability to adapt to a changing work landscape and take on added responsibility on the fly. "It looks like they learned on the job. The original subcontractor that was brought in [supervised] the first 100 feet, and Frontier did the rest of the 4,900 feet. It was an extensive piece of work, and they did a great job."

In addition to the environmental complications caused by the creek restoration, the club assigned Frontier and Forse the tasks of preserving and integrating the disparate aspects of the three vintage design styles: those of Spencer Oldham, A.W. Tillinghast and Donald Ross. Frontier President Scigliano pointed to the unique proposition of restoring Oldham's antique Serpentine and Donut bunkers (complete with chocolate-drop mounding) at the third hole, while using period photography gathered from the National Archive to painstakingly restore Tillinghast's "Tiny Tim" green at No.14. There was also the not-insignificant matter of restoring more than 80 Ross bunkers.

"We've worked several times before with Forse Design, but never in the service of so many different classic design styles, on such tight schedule, with so many significant side projects, like the stream restoration," Scigliano said. "Still, we broke ground at Bedford in early June [2006] and essentially built an entirely new golf course, and seeded it, by the middle of October."

Frontier Golf employed more than 110 workers on its Bedford Springs crew during the summer of 2006 while simultaneously managing a massive Tom Fazio-led redesign of The River Course on Kiawah Island, S.C. This required another 80 crew members. "We have the resources to handle concurrent jobs of that magnitude and our client supported us in every way possible," said Doug Show, general superintendent for Frontier Golf and project super on the Bedford project.

For more information on Frontier Golf, call 724/593-7491 or visit www.frontiergolf.com.