Coore & Crenshaw break ground on Pinehurst No. 11
By Lee Pace
Film at Eleven: No. 11 Carves a Quirky New Path at Pinehurst
Bill Coore was tromping through the woods three miles south of the Village of Pinehurst one morning in November 2011. The 900-acre site around him carried a colorful résumé:
- Mined for sand in the early 1900s, its soil was blended into concrete and construction materials
- Later overrun by hunters and dirt bikers
- Then transformed in the mid-1980s into The Pit, a bold, do-or-die course by Dan Maples
- And at one point, wandered by Rees Jones and Jack Nicklaus as they explored course concepts during the post-1990s golf boom — before the dot-com bust cooled the market
He pointed to a pine shooting up through a hillside dune.
“A dune like that with a tree growing through it? That just doesn’t happen. If you can figure out a way to utilize that, you’ve got a fascinating feature. This is an interesting piece of ground. Overall, it’s a spectacular place.”
That course was never built. Dedman opted instead to purchase the layout formerly known as Pinehurst National in 2014 and rebrand it as Pinehurst No. 9. But the sandmines site never stopped calling.
“Some have said it’s better we didn’t build that original course,” Coore said. “I would agree. What we’re going to build now will be better — and a great companion to what Tom did with No. 10.”
What’s striking is how different the two sites are — despite touching at several points.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen two more physically different sites that are contiguous,” Coore said. “They’re massively different in terms of character and landforms.”
Doak’s No. 10 is open and expansive, with broad sightlines and graceful elevation changes. Only the eighth hole embraces the property’s sandmines past, with its dramatic mounds and blind tee shot.
“We’re not in a hurry,” Coore said. “We have a routing, but the concept of the holes will evolve. We’ll go little by little — figure out what to knock down, what to keep. There are decades-old ridges and piles we’ll look at one by one. Some of them we’ll say, ‘Oh my God, let’s play over that.’
“I’m pretty darn excited about this one.”
Lee Pace is a freelance golf writer who has written about Sandhills area golf for four decades and is the author of club histories about Pinehurst Resort & Country Club, Mid Pines, Pine Needles and Forest Creek.