Seminole: Keeping pace with change
Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Florida, home to Donald Ross’s legendary design from 1929, is halfway through a massive reconstruction intended to bring back its original architectural character. When the dust settles and the turfgrass knits completely, the golf course will be sustainable for decades to come.
Given the scale of the project – work includes a complete overhaul of greens, bunkers, fairways, tees and drainage – and the need to not unduly disturb play during the main golf season, Seminole opted for an intensive assault on nine holes at a time, with the bulk of the work done during the summer – the front nine in 2025 and the back in 2026. This gives consulting architects Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, their Caveman Construction shaping team, and construction contractor LaBar Golf Renovations, maximum daylight to mobilise their efforts.
It is unlikely they could have finished all 18 holes in one stretch. That drove the decision to break up the work into two separate phases and gave the in-house maintenance crew, led by director of golf course operations Nelson Caron, time to grow in the new turfgrass for the 2025-26 golf season.
Three converging factors contributed to what has amounted to the largest renovation project in the club’s 96-year history.
One was the rapid deterioration of the bunkers that had been rebuilt only six years ago. They all needed reconstruction. The physical environment of the Seminole site makes it difficult to stabilise the kind of open landscape structure of a golf bunker. By nature, the edges are exposed and open to wind, erosion, desiccation, foot traffic and mechanical abrasion from regular maintenance. With the expansion of play during the Covid era and the increasing stress from marginally higher average temperatures and the occasional more intense rainstorms, the bunkers started unravelling sooner than anticipated. Something had to be done.
The second factor was the accumulating impact of coastal vulnerability on the Seminole property has been undeniable. The water table, from the outset an issue for the club given its proximity to the surface, has been confirmed by consulting engineers as measurably rising – a function of rising ocean levels and the impact of ever-expanding hard surface construction in areas outlying club property. The rising water table, even if only a few inches in some areas, complicates everyday drainage because surface water has nowhere to go. This forces storm water runoff onto golf grounds and has required the club to handle more water volume than ever.
Club officials worried that if the problem was not addressed, the golf course would slowly, inevitably, decline into a kind of swampy miasma: at best, without the lively ground-game attributes that had always been prized at Seminole; at worst, a shadow of its former self, akin more to a poorly managed municipal layout only intermittently playable at all.
Thirdly, as soon as the design team ‘opened up’ the golf course, so to speak, for a serious look at infrastructure, it became apparent that the architecture had changed dramatically since Ross’s design work of 1929. In some way, that’s not unusual. Greens often get rounded off and shrunk. Bunkers get a more formal look. Trees grow in. Fairways get narrower. The club obviously knew about the third green having been moved back 100 yards or so; and the eighteenth green having been swung back and left. What surprised them, however, as they took the original Ross drawings out in the field and compared them to what they had, was the degree to which putting surfaces had not just shrunk but had also completely changed in size, contour and boldness.
Hanse and Wagner are recapturing the green designs as detailed in Donald Ross’s 1929 plan for Seminole (Image: Tufts Archive)
The same was evident in the bunkering and in fairway contours. Seminole had migrated sufficiently away from its original Ross design to raise serious questions as to its design heritage. It also made it imperative that the club address this migration from the original character.
Addressing these issues has involved detailed study by outside professionals working in conjunction with Seminole staff. The club has been undertaking hydrological studies for several years now, measuring and monitoring everything from sea level rise to water table variance, storm water management capacity and on-site absorption load. Obviously, these issues are not new to the club. Donald Ross himself was attuned to them back in 1929 when he devised a plan, based upon a pumping system he read about in Popular Mechanics magazine, of diverting on-site water to ponds adjoining the golf course to the south. What has changed is the pace of environmental change and the increased stress it places on the golf course.
Seminole leadership decided that it needed, simultaneously, to raise its lower-lying areas, enhance pond capacity, and accelerate the rate of subsurface drainage through an aggressive system of sump pumps and 12-inch drainage pipes throughout the golf course. Additional work to stabilise pond edgings through a secure, protective fabric layer has also enhanced long-term sustainability.
The club has acquired further flexibility of more assured water supply by purifying its own accumulated water through a reverse osmosis system designed by irrigation expert Paul Granger. They are also in the process of sand-capping 20 acres of the lowest-lying fairways. The first half of that, planned for the front nine, involved distributing 15,000 tons of sand, which had been stockpiled on the seventh fairway, to a depth of 8 to 12 inches on the lowest lying stretches of fairway.
A solution for the bunker reconstruction has been to innovate a stabilised edge as well as a protected bunker floor that would adequately drain without suffering washouts. To that end, the design/construction team worked with Better Billy Bunker and Capillary Flow to devise a multi-pronged approach that combined semi-permeable polymer spray-on bunker floors with a reinforced slope and an exterior perimeter edge further locked in place with an artificial matting that is covered by conventional bermudagrass. That is the only way to prevent washouts and erosion and to keep bunkers whole and the sand from running out. The rigorous method also enables the club more clearly to create the contrasting, non-bunker sandy dunes areas that serve as transitional ground.
Over 15,000 tons of sand was stockpiled on the seventh fairway for distribution on the front nine to a depth of 8 to 12 inches on the lowest lying stretches of fairway (Photo: Seminole GC)
As for the greens, research into the design history revealed a fundamental shift that took place in the late 1950s. That’s when Dick Wilson, the esteemed Florida-based golf architect, shrank the greens during a complete reconstruction process that also saw him soften (a euphemism for ‘compromise’) the surface contours. The originally designed Ross putting surfaces averaged 8,438 square feet. Whether those greens were built to that full extent is anyone’s guess. The club’s evolution shows that design liberties were taken with the ninth green, though the other greens all looked at least close to the original Ross plan when the course opened.
Before the club undertook its last restorative work, Seminole’s greens had been reduced by an average of 2,045 square feet (24 per cent) each. Most of that, as the club found out through coring of the old greens base, had been achieved during the Wilson era of work.
Wilson did not just shrink from the perimeters while retaining the same relative shapes. In most cases, the perimeters were altered to reorient the axis or centre of the greens. Perimeter hole locations were lost, and the intensity of the surface slopes in terms of both fall and transition were reduced.
This is evident in the archaeology-like work that Caron and his staff undertook to unearth the various layers of greens mix over the years. Restoration design was unknown to the golf world in the 1950s. If Ross’s original plans or designs were ever researched, Wilson left no record anywhere of such an effort. Most likely he worked on his own, with his own modern intent to accommodate the originally stern slopes to a more playable character, one more suited for the kind of aerial power game that he and his chief rival at the time, Robert Trent Jones Sr, were championing across the country.
When architect Brian Silva was brought on board in the late 1980s, he took a close look at the original Ross design plans and realised they bore little relation to what existed on the golf course. Because he was hired to oversee construction of the existing structures with upgraded mix and growing medium, no restoration effort was made. Contractor Ed Connor of Golforms simply cored out the existing top layer and built his new greens mix on top of the existing subgrade – the Wilson version, not the Ross plan.
In an effort to reproduce the scruffy bunker banks evident in this 1930s photo of Seminole’s ninth green, Hanse and Wagner have deployed bahia grass on many high faces of their reconstructed bunkers (Image: Tufts Archive)
A similar approach guided Silva’s approach to the rebuild of fairway and greenside bunkers in the late 1990s. Reconstruction was the guiding principle, and it was authorised by club leadership. The work was largely undertaken in-house, with a local shaper used to reconstruct the existing Wilson shapes and positioning.
Industry standards for such work have since evolved. Budget parsimony that the club exercised in an earlier day has given way to a more willing approach to invest ambitiously. The whole point of hiring Hanse and Wagner and the rest of the construction team has been to recapture the subtlety and brilliance of Ross’s original design. In that original Ross plan, it made a difference where you hit the drive to get the optimal angle into the green. The closer to a fairway bunker the better your angle in.
There is now, on the completed front nine, ground-game access for the higher handicapper or for someone seeking the option of recovery from a wayward drive. There is also greater variety in any given hole given the wide range of hole locations now available. Pins can be tucked behind or adjacent to fall-offs and bunkers to maximise the risk of playing boldly.
The greens restoration has added an average of 1,525 square feet per green, to an average of 7,918 square feet each – much closer to Ross’s original design. There is also far more fairway contour and rollout than had become the case by the 2000s, to add more elements of uncertainty and risk to everyday play.
For example, Ross’s 1929 plan for the fourth green includes a four-corner structure to the putting surface and a central hollow traversing the surface. This had been lost following Wilson’s work, which has now been in play for decades, but is clearly identifiable in subgrade excavation and recaptured by Hanse’s plan.
The scale of work undertaken has seen a virtual complete resurfacing of the golf course as well essentially new infrastructure below, including a new irrigation system. The scope of work needed in the name of sustainability might surprise those who are already impressed with Seminole’s lofty status in the golf world – close to the top of every golf course ratings list. The ultimate test will come this fall, when members get to play a reopened course. They just might find the front nine a lot more interesting, and the to-be-completed back nine comparatively tame, by contrast. They might just want to play the front nine twice – until summer of 2026 has passed and the entire course meets the new standard of restoration design for Seminole.
This article first appeared in the October 2025 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.
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