Golf Course Architecture - Issue 66, October 2021

33 bunkers in front of greens so you have shot options for the ground game or the aerial game, which is especially important when the wind is blowing on a coastal site.” The aesthetic of the bunkers was updated to give them a more windswept look, too. “Bunkers in the windswept areas of the world, especially in the British Isles, often have an irregular line, so this was appropriate for this coastal site,” said Jones. Green surfaces were renovated and the seventeenth and eighteenth greens were relocated. “On the eighteenth, we moved the green for better access and to make it fairer, and on the seventeenth it was relocated so you didn’t have a tree impeding your shot, and to bring it closer to the saltwater marsh,” said Jones. “The saltwater marsh is really dramatic on the back nine and I think that we brought that into play. It’s really a wonderful finish. Fifteen is a par three and we did a lot of changes on the tees there.” “We wanted to make the golf hole look like it was dropped in the middle of the marsh,” said Sean Hardwick, the club’s director of golf course maintenance, of the fifteenth. “We took a lot of the grasses that were already growing along the side of the marsh and ran them through the teeing surfaces and put the pods of the tees in the middle of them.” The course has six sets of tees, all named after birds, from the 4,674-yard Heron to the 6,802-yard Hawk tees. “Every tee box presents a different course,” said Chick Vladuchick, the chair of the club’s master plan committee. “So rather than having one Ocean Winds course, we have five or six or seven. “We talk about golf clubs being fitted to a player – well a golf course can be fitted to the capability of the player, and I think that’s really exciting.” “Seabrook Island Club is a community of very active golfers,” says Jones. “What we, as architects, have to do is to design for the clientele. We shouldn’t be building golf courses for the critics, we should be building them for the people that actually play them.” Following the success of the Ocean Winds renovation, the club is expected to turn attention to its Crooked Oaks course, originally laid out in the 1980s by Jones’s father Robert Trent Jones. The par-three fifteenth, 181 yards from the back Hawk tees, sits lightly on the saltwater marsh Photo: Seabrook Island Club