Coore & Crenshaw break ground on Pinehurst No. 11

By Lee Pace

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

Now, Coore and longtime design partner Ben Crenshaw had been invited by Pinehurst owner Bob Dedman Jr. to chisel out a course that might become Pinehurst No. 9.

Coore surveyed the scene — trees sprouting from sand moguls, varying shades of soil, earth rolls created not by nature but by machines — and nodded at his preliminary routing, sketched on a topo map.

“It gets me excited when I come out and look at this stuff,” he said. “I’m not particularly thrilled with what we have on the plan, but I think it’s here. It makes you want to go stumbling through the woods.”

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.

Fast-forward to the post-COVID golf boom of 2022: Dedman and Pinehurst CEO Tom Pashley began scouting options to expand the resort’s portfolio. Coore & Crenshaw were booked, so Pinehurst tapped Tom Doak to build No. 10 — and secured a future slot for Coore & Crenshaw to return for what would become No. 11.

Now, that time has come.

The Doak course sprawls across the western side of the property. Holes eight, 13, and 14 trace Highway 5 as it dips south from the main resort toward Aberdeen. The new Coore & Crenshaw course will sit just east of it, the two designs eventually sharing a common golf shop and restaurant. The entire complex will be known as Pinehurst Sandmines.

“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.

The new course, by contrast, will lean into the texture of the land’s forgotten corners — evoking the flavor of The Pit, which closed in 2010.

“This is choppy, ridge-y ground,” Coore said. “Not big elevation changes, but quirky. There are piles and ridges and trees and funky angles. It’s intimate. You wind through the woods and over the old contours. We’re nowhere near the sea, but the features remind me of places in Ireland or Scotland. And here it is — in Pinehurst.”

Construction is underway. Pinehurst crews are clearing centerlines using mini-excavators — traditional logging trucks would struggle with the terrain and risk damaging trees Coore hopes to preserve. Ryan Farrow, Coore & Crenshaw’s lead shaper, will relocate to Pinehurst this fall to begin shaping work.

“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.