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 71 The newly restored green complex of the par-four twelfth hole at Seminole, with the thirteenth and sixteenth greens in the background Photo: courtesy of Autumn Hartshorne
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