Seminole: Bearing fruit

When it reopens on 31 October after phase two of a transformative 18 months, the legendary Donald Ross design at Seminole Golf Club in Florida will have completed the single greatest sustained change in appearance since it opened in 1929. 

The scale of the work has been monumental. “Seminole deserves the very best and this membership was committed to providing all that was necessary to ensure its future,” says club president Jimmy Dunne III. Through the leadership of Dunne and Nelson Caron, Seminole’s director of golf course operations, the course has seen every green rebuilt and expanded, and every bunker refined – many of them pinched in closer to landing areas – and rebuilt to endure and remain playable for many years. The design team of Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner worked closely with construction firm LaBar Golf to make sure the work got done on schedule.

Rough areas have been rebuilt so that there is less formal turfgrass on the perimeter and far more expansive ground with native dune plants and scruffy land formations that form a semi-hazard open area. Irrigation has been upgraded with a new Rain Bird system installed by the Leibold Irrigation Company. Drainage work has been extended. The lower-lying parts of the golf course have been literally raised from the depths of a floodplain so that they are now perched safely above the water table. Along the way, many of the fairways were subtly reshaped to recapture the initial ground contour that had been slowly lost in the intervening years.

The work is not yet over, as there are plans for a third phase next summer which will involve some tweaks and refinements. But now that the major restoration effort has been completed, Seminole is closer to the historic vision of Ross’s original design than it has been in over half a century. It is also now structurally more sustainable.

Aerial imagery from the 1930s revealed differences between Ross’s plans and what was actually built (Image: Seminole GC)

Three factors drove the work. First was the rapid deterioration of the bunkers following initial work in 2018-19 that did not hold up. Second was the need to address the growing vulnerability of the golf course surface to water incursion, via a rising water table, coastal flooding and/or stormwater inflow from the surrounding community. In any case, the ground was too vulnerable and had to be addressed. That included upgraded drainage throughout plus stabilising the deteriorating pond edges that had to be reinforced. Finally, the realisation, once the course was ‘opened up’ to construction, that over the years there had been significant migration away from the original Ross greens in terms of size, slopes and integration with surrounding bunkers. The club, as it turned out, was playing on greens entirely rebuilt by Dick Wilson in 1957-58.

It wasn’t just that two greens – on the third and eighteenth – had been moved significantly downfield. That had been well known and documented. What concerned club officials far more was the altered shape, size and overall configuration of the putting surfaces and consequent loss of subtle – and not so subtle – swales, hollows, platforms and rolls. In fact, as the greens got cored out and cross-sections of the infrastructure were exposed, it was possible to see evidence of Ross-era slopes that had been flattened or altered by some (undeterminable) combination of redesign and the impact of erosion, top-dressing, mowing and perimeter retreat.

Seminole’s front nine went under the knife in the spring of 2025 and reopened in November of that year. The work was met overwhelmingly with praise from members as well as the community of informed golf course critics. The restored nine played firmer, faster and with more diverse shot-making and roll-out than ever before; more so, as well, than the back nine. The success of the work encouraged club officials to be at least as bold, if not bolder, as they approached the back nine in 2026. That work, which began on 20 April, saw the greens rebuilt and sprigged by 16 June, with bunkers following and the rest of the course sodded by late August. 

In some respects, the most recent work dwarfs that of the front nine. For example, sandcapping the front nine to raise the lower-lying areas by eight to twelve inches required 17,000 tons of sand. On the back nine, the same process required 50,000 tons to raise the affected areas by two to three feet. That work focused on 29 acres between the long dune on the west and the parallel dune along the east. The result in terms of firmness, conditioning and playability is palpable. The ball rolls farther. The ground game is back.

The greens also got their robust look back – by a factor of 15 per cent on the back nine, from an average of 6,261 square feet to 7,205 square feet. That’s slightly lower than the 24 per cent expansion of the front nine, simply because the greens on the front shrank more over the years and offered more ground to reclaim. What counts now is that in contouring, positioning and structure, the putting surfaces at Seminole conform to state-of-the-art, USGA-specified construction technique while embodying the complexity and subtlety of Ross’s original design.

A crucial aspect of the whole project was simply getting more drainage pipe – over 70 miles of it, varying in structure from seepage lines to 12-inch mains – into the ground so that more water could be moved off. Six drainage pumps and diversion vaults were added to the 19 already in service to handle the anticipated load of peak drainage needs.

Ponds were rebuilt, in some cases combined, and their banks reinforced with a combination of fabric, impermeable construction material and plantings designed to stabilise the edge. Bunker construction, combining technology from Better Billy Bunker and CapillaryFlow, was equally rigorous; the goal was to ensure long-term viability in an environment defined by heavy winds, corrosion from salt water and sea spray and the steady presence of stormwater and a high water table. To bind the sand in place, the crew relied upon a combination of a spray-on polymer liner and turf matting on the perimeter.

From a playing standpoint, Seminole is now bigger, more varied and more engaging of the ground game. Fairway expansion went hand in hand with an increase in irrigation coverage with the new watering system deploying 2,200 heads, compared to 900 previously. The club’s newly upgraded reverse osmosis water purifying system has also dramatically increased the supply of available irrigation water, thus providing Seminole with more water and with lower overall salt and mineral levels. The redesign of the ponds, fed by all of those drainage pipes, now ensures both faster clearance of stormwater and the ability to keep the water table at bay. All of which means better turf, a firmer surface, faster recovery from rains and enhanced reliance on a sustainable cycle of water management.

What does this mean for specific holes? Consider the 368-yard twelfth on the northern edge of the property, the shortest par four at Seminole. It plays 18 feet downhill from tee to green, but into the prevailing breeze off the ocean. A narrow ditch lining the entire left side of the fairway was introduced some time after World War Two – undoubtedly to aid drainage, but certainly not part of Ross’s plan and not evident in a 1930 aerial. Between that ditch and the out-of-bounds along the left side, golfers tended to favour the right side and even the adjoining fourteenth fairway that runs in the opposite direction. Not only was this area virtually free of obstructions or hazards, it actually opened up a better line of approach into the Wilson-redesigned green – which itself betrayed an alignment different from the original Ross green. A few paltry palm trees between this area and the putting surface hardly impeded good players, who had no problem lofting their approaches over them. The result was that, over the years, elite players came to play the hole way right to gain an easy line in.

The Hanse-Wagner restoration took care of this and brought back the original line of play options. That narrow lateral ditch was removed, allowing the fairway to expand left. Also removed was a Wilson-era fairway bunker deep on the left side that had only steered longer hitters away to the right. The previously unprotected area right, bordering the fourteenth, was restored to the wild-looking, broken-up, native dune-like area that Ross had originally built. The green was reconfigured, with 15 per cent expansion and a rotation of its axis of about 15 degrees to the right, by expanding the green front left and back right while closing off the front right entry with steep bunkering – as originally indicated in the Ross plan.

Meanwhile, back at the tee, coconut trees were added on the right to impede clear line of sight and flight to the area along the fourteenth. A cart path on the right was removed and the tee expanded to provide more optional angles on the drive. A veritable wall of bordering trees down the left side was also peeled back to make the opening chute to the fairway look more receptive. The result is that the ease of access down the far right has been undercut, the left side landing area more generous, and the path into the green more favourable to shots from the centre-left of the fairway than before. Mid-range golfers now have more room for their drives. Elite players now don’t have the casual bail-out right off the tee. As an added benefit, golfers coming up the fourteenth no longer fear for their safety to the extent they did before.

Equally transformative has been the work on the dogleg-right, par-five fifteenth. The hole is already unique in several regards, as it’s the second of consecutive par fives, something Ross rarely did. Moreover, it’s a split-fairway hole, with two distinct paths to the green, each about 35 yards wide: a safer if longer ‘low road’ to the left, and a riskier ‘high road’ to the right that is shorter. Interestingly, Ross’s original plan called for a long series of mid-fairway sandy mounds, between three-and-a-half and five feet in height, to divide the two paths. However, the aerial evidence from 1930 shows that a series of seven bunkers was actually built, backed by a line of palm trees. Over the years, those bunkers got reduced to four in number and were shallowed out; the mounding behind them also got reduced in height. Advances in equipment technology and swing training also had a dramatic effect in neutering the impact of that mid-fairway bunker complex because the last bunker could be cleared by a drive flying 290 yards – monumental in Ross’s day but pretty standard for elite players in recent years.

On the split-fairway par-five fifteenth, the drive is now more demanding and thought-provoking for elite players (Photo: Autumn Hartshorne)

Except for days when playing into a stiff wind, the hole had become very easy for elite players. Meanwhile, the alternative path for mid-handicappers had become less attractive an alternative as the trees grew up and the left fairway shrank.

The balance of optional routings has now been restored. The left fairway has been expanded, and with the ground firmer and more roll-out expected, the prospects of taking the safer ‘low road’ become more appealing. Meanwhile, the ferocity of the mid-fairway bunkers has been recaptured in the form of seven new hazards, with steep mounding, deeper floors and a subtle angling in of the complex so that the last bunker in line, now 335 yards from the (lengthened) back tee, is 10 yards closer to the pond on the right, making the opportunity zone for elite players more demanding and thought-provoking.

Throughout the course, fairway bunkers have been made more relevant by tighter mowing into them and by angling them a little closer to the line of play; where ground exists, they have been moved slightly downfield. With some lengthening of holes still possible, the result is that the strategic bunkering Ross intended is now more relevant to elite players while the landing zone for mid-range golfers is marginally wider.

Those who thought they knew Seminole will now experience a golf course that is more dynamic, more engaging and more demanding of those who seek a strategic advantage. It’s also simply a more beautiful landscape to survey visually. Over the years, a wall of sea grapes running the length of the east side between the golf course and the Atlantic Ocean has been cut, from as high as 15 feet down to four feet. The result is that the ocean is more dramatically in view, and from more holes than ever – even more so now with the sandcapping and elevation change.

Finally, the rough areas are now more varied, with extensive recultivation of native wild sandy dunes replacing areas that had simply been sprigged in bermudagrass.

During the research for the project, the design team and club officials uncovered a series of images illustrating the curious agricultural fate of the Seminole golf grounds during World War Two, when concerns about a potential invasion from the sea shut down almost all coastal activity, including golf. Locals utilised the cessation to turn part of the 140-acre site into agricultural land – in Seminole’s case a crop of watermelons. They were farmed on site, particularly along the northwest corner, where the fourth, eleventh and fourteenth greens converge.

As a nod towards Seminole’s agricultural role in World War Two, the project included a modest planting of watermelons (Photo: Autumn Hartshorne)

In a gesture of historical recognition, watermelons have again been planted – not in such arrays as to constitute farmland, but enough to provide an interesting alternative plant material and perhaps also to harvest for club consumption. The club, as yet, does not have a signature refreshment. But this restoration deserves to be honoured. Perhaps a mixologist could create an appropriate watermelon cocktail.

This article first appeared in the October 2026 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.