The Gauntlet at Pinehurst

By Lee Pace

The operation began in May 2024 with a golf shop in a trailer and a restaurant out of a food truck. They were humble beginnings for Pinehurst No. 10.

Now Pinehurst Resort’s newest course has some fancy ribbons to display (Golf Digest’s “Best New Public Course of 2024” designation) as well as a new clubhouse and dining facility.

“It’s easy to believe that, after 18 months of play, the reviews for this Tom Doak original design are unanimously outstanding,” says Jon Cavalier, a well-traveled golf photographer, noted in an Instagram post.

And the best is yet to come. Combining the Doak course with the Coore & Crenshaw designed No. 11 in two years will put the 36-hole facility in elite company. It was one thing to have Bill Coore and partner Ben Crenshaw supervise a major and well-received overhaul of Pinehurst No. 2 in 2010-11.

To have them carve an original course of their own from scratch is another story altogether.

Caption: Tom Doak

“We have the classic architects covered at Pinehurst with Donald Ross and Ellis Maples,” Director of Golf Matt Barksdale says. “We have the great ones of the late 1900s with Tom Fazio, Rees Jones and Jack Nicklaus.

“Now with Gil Hanse at No. 4, Tom Doak at No. 10 and Coore & Crenshaw with No. 11, you could throw darts on which is the best of the modern generation. Having Doak and Coore & Crenshaw at one facility truly makes it a ‘destination within a destination.’”

Coore has completed a final routing for No. 11 and has made several site visits. Some fairways have been cleared.

“It’s amazing to have two courses that are so close together be so different,” says Kevin Robinson, Pinehurst’s golf maintenance manager and a key conduit in the construction process of both courses. “The land has so many contrasts. You’ve got all the up and down on No. 10 and the wide, sweeping views. The land for No. 11 is where all the excavating happened and the mortar sand was mined. There are so many cool little features on that property.”

Meanwhile, the tee sheet at No. 10 has been consistently full as golfers come to check out the course that Doak built in lightspeed fashion beginning in late 2022.

Pinehurst management had originally wanted Coore & Crenshaw to design No. 10, but scheduling conflicts and Pinehurst’s timing conflicted with Coore & Crenshaw’s worldwide commitments, and Doak stepped in when an opening on his schedule popped up.

Consistent with the rest of the golf offering in Sandhills is, of course, sand—and lots of it. There are the pine trees and wire grass and volunteer vegetation of many varieties. On this site where Dan Maples’ Pit Golf Links once sat are dramatic and colorful land forms left from the old mining operation of the early 1900s.

Exhibit A is the eighth hole, a par-four that ventures into the heart of the old sand quarry and is marked by a giant mound dubbed the Matterhorn facing the golfer off the tee. Golfers then play a loop on holes nine through 14 that takes them up and down some steep topographical ebbs and flows. “Roller coaster” is a term the golf staff has pegged to capture the experience.

“The first six or seven holes, you’re going up the incline of the roller coaster, and the drama builds,” Barksdale says. “Then you get to eight and have that huge wow factor, it’s really unique, you’ve not seen anything like that hole anywhere. Then holes nine through 14 we call ‘the gauntlet.’ It really tests your skill and patience. Then the rest of the course is like a gentle handshake. You start off well, finish well and hang on in the middle.”

Tyler Yancey, the head pro at No. 10, loves walking off the eighth green and looking back toward the tee and seeing the dramatic mounds.

“You think, ‘What’s next?’” Yancey says. “Then you see nine and 15 and the massive width and breadth and then you go a roller-coasteresque six holes with backflips and corkscrews. Then you come back to 15 and catch your breath and kind of flatline into the finish. Course 10 pulls you in with some fun holes, then you hit the difficult part and it brings you back with a soft, warm welcome to the clubhouse.”

The golf course is a walking course, with exceptions made in the summer for safety reasons and golfers allowed to take carts (restricted to paths) when it gets hot. Roughly 70 percent take caddies, 20 percent use push-carts and a small number of the hardiest golfers walk and carry their bag. Tee times are set at 12-minute intervals.

The generous spacing of starting times and the lack of contrived machines on the property make for an old-school experience. Doak himself is a traditionalist, and without the need to space holes to accommodate marketable housing sites, the distances from greens to tees are relatively tame.

“It’s a nice pace,” Barksdale says. “By the time a group tees off on number one, the group ahead should be on the green. It’s a big golf course, a big piece of land. There are 275 acres out there. At times you can feel like your group is the only one out here.”

“It’s important to have that purist walking experience,” Yancey adds. “We have a lot of guys who walk their home course with their MacKenzie bag or Sunday bag and go for a walk here and love it. More guests than I would have expected have asked, ‘So when will you have carts out here?’ I say it’s a walking course, that will never happen.. They say, ‘Great, don’t change.’”

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.