Fall in the NC Sandhills: Where Golf Memories Last a Lifetime

By Lee Pace

In 2014, as his son prepared to graduate high school, Kevin Foster wanted to share some wisdom and perspective he’d gained over half a century. He based his message on an annual golf trip to Pinehurst that he and a group of lifelong friends — dating back to their own high school days in the late 1960s — had been taking for more than 20 years.

“What I wish for you is that you and your friends someday have what my high school friends and I have — Pinehurst,” Foster wrote. “Pinehurst, for us, is not just five days of golf. It is a state of mind.”

He went on to tell his son of the deep and abiding friendships among the group and, no matter what life might have dealt with them 51 other weeks a year, a bedrock of their existence was gathering amidst the fresh pine scent, sandy loam and the bountiful rota of golf courses in the Sandhills of North Carolina.

“We gather to reminisce about those great times we shared growing up,” Foster wrote. “There is no talk of how much money we may or may not have, how many cars we may or may not have, or how big a house we may or may not have. Nothing material comes up between us. You see, we were all equal in our own eyes. To be able to laugh and cry together, to share good times and the bad times together. True friendships are not measured by the material things. They are measured by love and fellowship. For the person who beholds such friendships, he truly beholds one of the great gifts of life.”

Hear, hear.

And the experience is all the richer by bunking down at the Pine Crest Inn in the heart of the Village of Pinehurst, playing golf, drinking cold beverages, settling bets and telling stories that grow in dimension with every passing year.

The Foster group started with eight golfers in 1989, all of them friends from the same private Catholic military high school in the late 1960s. It has grown to as many as 20 golfers but has settled in at 16 players traveling to Pinehurst in early August for a Wednesday-through-Saturday itinerary. The 2025 trip was their 36th, with Foster organizing the group from his home in Tampa and golfers coming from across the country, from places like Malibu, Denver and Cleveland.

“We don’t play quite as much golf as we used to,” Foster says. “We’ll drink a little more beer and watch the world go by. As I tried to explain to my son in that letter, time passes very fast. Pinehurst has been a very special place for us.”

You can multiply the Foster story numerous times throughout the coming fall golf season across the Sandhills — groups of four to 40 descending during the best time of the year. A nip in the air. Color framing the fairways. A fire pit with a cigar and tumbler of the good stuff after golf.

And a community that is a regular host of national championships and has an umbilical cord to the beginnings of golf in Scotland with the influence of the great architect, Donald Ross, who designed seven courses in Moore County and lived along the third hole of Pinehurst No. 2 until his death in 1948.

As former USGA Executive Director David Fay once said, “Pinehurst is the closest thing to St. Andrews we have in the United States in terms of that feel for the history of the game, the passion of the game. The whole place just exudes golf.”

The anchor of the Sandhills experience is Pinehurst Resort & Country Club, which dates to 1895 and where golf was first played in 1898. Today the resort has 10 golf courses with No. 11 on the way. The bell cow is the No. 2 course, which has been the venue for the PGA Championship (1936), the Ryder Cup (1951), four U.S. Opens (1999, 2005, 2014 and 2024) and the U.S. Women’s Open (2014).

Ross, Ellis Maples, Tom Fazio, Rees Jones, Jack Nicklaus, Gil Hanse and Tom Doak have worked their magic on the ground to create the 10 courses, and Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw are working on course No. 11 toward an opening in 2027. Five courses play out of the main resort clubhouse, and courses 6 through 10 are dotted around the landscape within two or three miles of the Village. A smashing success in the golf offerings at Pinehurst is The Cradle, a nine-hole course next to the clubhouse built in 2017 by Hanse and design partner Jim Wagner.

Ross had built four courses at the resort by 1919, and business was so good through the Roaring Twenties that the Sandhills needed more golf. Ross designed Mid Pines in 1921 and across the road Pine Needles in 1928, the latter settling in in recent years as a four-time venue for the U.S. Women’s Open. Those two courses and Southern Pines Golf Club (Ross, 1906) are under the same ownership umbrella linked to the family of LPGA founding member Peggy Kirk Bell.

Now the family has entered into a venture with Marine & Lawn Hotels & Resorts, a hotelier with extensive experience renovating and managing historic golf-centric hotels in the United Kingdom. Work has already begun at the historic inn at Mid Pines and will continue at Pine Needles in coming years. Soon the lodging at Mid Pines and Pine Needles will be on par with historic properties that Marine & Lawn Hotels & Resorts manages at elite U.K. destinations such as St. Andrews, Dornoch and Newcastle.

“This is an exciting initiative for our resorts,” says Kelly Miller, managing partner of the ownership group. “We’ve needed for some time to upgrade our lodging facilities, and Marine & Lawn Hotels & Resorts is the ideal partner for us.”

Miller and his ownership team have also recently purchased the golf operations at a pair of venerable Sandhills golf clubs — Whispering Pines Country Club and Foxfire Country Club. The former dates to 1959 and has two Ellis Maples courses and the latter to 1968 with a pair of Gene Hamm layouts.

“We see great opportunities in both properties,” Miller says. “Our goal is to make significant improvements on all four courses and get them on an upward trajectory.”

Over a century some three dozen courses have sprouted throughout Moore County to turn the Sandhills into such an alluring golf destination.

Mid South (Arnold Palmer and Ed Seay) and Talamore (Rees Jones) are sister resorts on opposite sides of Midland Road, halfway between Southern Pines and Pinehurst, with on-site lodging and dining facilities. The resort in 2024 added Legacy Golf Links to its offering by purchasing the Jack Nicklaus II-designed course south of Aberdeen.

Pinewild Country Club is a gated residential community with 45 holes open to visiting golfers. The Magnolia Course was designed by Gene Hamm and opened in 1989, and the Holly Course followed in 1996 with a contrasting look created by Gary Player. The Magnolia is a big-boned, championship style golf course where there’s a premium on length, while the Holly is more about precision as golfers hopscotch wetlands, ponds and streams on nearly half the holes. The nine-hole Azalea course is perfect for a twilight emergency round.

Longleaf Golf & Family Club features 18 holes designed by Dan Maples on the site of an abandoned equestrian facility. Longleaf is also the home of the U.S. Kids Golf Foundation, where kids and families are prioritized and thrive in an environment gearing toward learning the game of a lifetime.

Woodlake Golf Club opened in 1971 with an Ellis Maples course routed around a 13-acre lake. The course is under new ownership and in 2024 re-opened with Kris Spence having supervised the rebuilding of all the tees, bunkers and greens.

“The more I looked at the golf course, the more I realized this is some really good work by Ellis Maples,” Spence says. “We got the greens cleaned up, and I started to study them. I got excited. After a month, I went back to Cara and said, ‘I don’t think you know what you have here. You have one of the best golf courses in North Carolina.’ That’s saying a lot, especially for this region.”

Many golfers traveling from the north like to begin or end their sojourn to the Sandhills with a round of golf at Tobacco Road, located in Sanford half an hour away. The late Mike Strantz chiseled 18 memorable holes out of ground previously used as rock and sand quarries and tobacco and soybean farms. The result is visually stunning and fun to play.

No wonder golfers make a lifetime of memories visiting the Sandhills.

 

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.