Tavistock Members win Philly Team Title after Course Restoration

Tavistock Country Club in Haddonfield, N.J., is one year removed from an historic restoration of its Alex Findlay-designed course. Its members recently captured the Golf Association of Philadelphia (GAP) Team Matches title. "It was good to have our home course again," said team member Tom Gramigna, citing the renovation work of course builder Frontier Golf and the architects at Forse Design.

Tavistock was closed on July 31, 2006, and reopened a year later. Using knowledge gained from Forse designer Jim Nagle's extensive research, Frontier's team set about returning the layout to its Golden Era glory. Nagle provided each crew member a notebook replete with photographs detailing how the various course features - bunker lips, green contours, tee shapes - should look.

Bill McGuinness, Tavistock CC greens committee chairman during the restoration, said the new layout is better on every level. "The goal of the project was to bring out the best in the course," he said. "The amount of play is up since the restoration and that is the ultimate compliment. The comments from members have been very positive."

Head superintendent Tom Grimac's crew contributed greatly to the effort, according to Frontier project manager Chris Brennan, particularly with the fairway restoration. Grimac also worked closely with Frontier and Nagle in helping return the layout to the way it played when it first opened in 1921. "All I hear are superlatives about the quality of the work and how much the members enjoy playing the course," Grimac reported.

In the end, that's all a course restoration specialist like Jones Mill, Pa.-based Frontier needed to hear. "The best indication of how everything worked out was hearing from members that the outcome exceeded their expectations," said Frontier's Brennan. "We can't ask for more than that."

"Having Chris Brennan and his shapers on site was key," Nagle said, particularly around greens and bunkers. Added Grimac: "They did a masterful job on those ground features. They rebuilt all the bunkers, mounds and many of the tees with just the right classic feel."

Findlay (1865-1942) was a pioneer of the game, having played a series of exhibitions against the great Englishman Harry Vardon and designing more than 100 layouts, including such classics as The Breakers Golf Club (Ocean Course) in Palm Beach, Fla., and Aronimink Golf Club in Philadelphia.

A couple of old black-and-white photos of Tavistock's early design hanging on the men's locker room wall gave Nagle the basic idea of how the features, particularly the bunkers, were shaped and dug - usually to depths considerably greater than the shallow features they had become over 80-plus years. A bunker on the 10th hole was the only one that even closely resembled Findlay's earlier hazards.

The photos also revealed how Findlay had preferred lofty mounds to the shaved-down versions that, prior to the restoration, had lined Tavistock's fairways and surrounded putting surfaces. Those observations were reinforced when Nagle visited several nearby Findlay designs, such as Pennsylvania's Lebanon Golf Club and Reading Country Club, where bunkers dove to depths of 15 feet and tall mounds ran right up to the edge of putting surfaces.

Fortunately, 14 of the original Findlay greens at Tavistock were still in existence, even though a handful of architects had lent their touch to Tavistock's other features over the years. Among those were A.W. Tillinghast, Robert Trent Jones Sr., William and Dave Gordon, and Brian Ault.

Tavistock had recently invested $2 million in a new irrigation system with pumps, filtration and fertigation. With Frontier's help, the club had also added a significant amount of drainage work. In addition, Grimac's crew had previously removed 3,000 trees as part of a planned tree-management program. The irrigation and tree work set the stage for the restoration.

While reinventing the past, the team also kept an eye on the present. For instance, while many of the fairway bunkers were similar in design to Findlay originals, they were placed in different locations than they would have been in the 1920s to accommodate the longer distances today's golfer hits the ball.

Nagle believes the major challenge he and Frontier faced was rebuilding the 16th green. The putting surface on this 185-yard, par-3 is carved out of a hillside, about 18 feet above the tee. In the green's middle lurked a buried elephant that members wanted to retain as part of any redesign. Because of the green's severe back-to-front slope, that huge central hump created interesting pin placements across the middle.

Working with Nagle, Frontier took 3,200 Global Positioning System (GPS) readings around the 16th green. Then workers set about lowering and expanding the back of the green while elevating the front to provide additional cup placements. Finally, they recreated the buried elephant.

"We created a green that yielded more cupping space yet kept an internal feature exactly the same," Nagle said. "The members were very happy. Frontier can take a lot of the credit for that."

Frontier Golf is one of golf's busiest, must trusted contractors. Examples of its new-build capabilities include the Jack Nicklaus-designed Las Iguanas course at Cap Cana, nearing completion in the Dominican Republic, and the new course at Edgewater, which will debut this winter just south of Charlotte, N.C. Frontier is equally sought-after in the renovation realm. In addition to Bedford Springs and Tavistock, Frontier is fresh off a redesign of The River Course at Kiawah Island Club, with Tom Fazio. The River Course will host the 2009 Mid-Amateur Championship, the first USGA championship ever to be held on Kiawah Island.

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