ABERDEEN, N.C. - America's most extensive golf resort is about to get even bigger and better.
On Wednesday, Pinehurst Resort, the historic haven of golfers in the North Carolina Sandhills, announced that it will be building a brand-new 18-hole golf course, Pinehurst No. 10, set to open in 2024. It will be designed by acclaimed golf course architect Tom Doak.
On Monday, the resort dropped a big hint previewing the announcement: a video of photos from the resort's golf courses with voiceover from Doak.
"The number-one thing is, you're working on beautiful sand," says Doak in the video. "The sand and the wiregrass and the bluestem and the little native grasses that grow around here are fabulous texture for golf."
Doak will evoke that texture at Pinehurst No. 10 on a tract of land Doak describes as "distinct and dramatically different from anywhere in Pinehurst." Whereas Pinehurst's most famous course, No. 2, has modest terrain movement, No. 10 will rise and fall as much as 75 feet, with vistas from the middle of the property overlooking much of the rest of the layout.
Located about five miles south of Pinehurst's main resort and the Village of Pinehurst, the 900-acre property has housed golf before: The Pit Golf Links, a Dan Maples design that opened in 1985 and closed in 2010. So called because of the presence of an old sand quarry on the site, the Pit polarized golfers from the start with some dramatic features and unusual holes that did not fit everyone's tastes. And when Mike Strantz's Tobacco Road Golf Club opened in nearby Sanford 1998, it served up a more coherent and enjoyable version of what The Pit had provided. Pinehurst CEO Robert Dedman, Jr. purchased The Pit in the wake of the Recession, and with golf surging in popularity, the timing is right to add to the resort's impressive portfolio under the aegis of Doak, who is as busy as he has ever been in his 30-plus year career.
Future plans for the Aberdeen site include lodging and additional golf, establishing it as a future-focused hub for the 127-year-old resort.
Assisting Doak, as usual, will be a small army of talented shapers and associates. Chief among them: Angela Moser. Moser grew up in Germany and became a landscape architect via an Erasmus Scholarship at the University of Sheffield in England. Since 2011, she has been a key part of Doak's Renaissance Golf team, assisting him with new-build projects such as St. Patrick's Links in Ireland, The Loop in Michigan and the restoration of Woodhall Spa's famed Hotchkin Course in England. She has contributed to several Gil Hanse projects as well, including Ohoopee Match Club, Streamsong Black and the renovation of the Vineyard Golf Club in Martha's Vineyard, Mass., as well as the restoration of 2023 U.S. Open Host Los Angeles Country Club. Women are underrepresented among golf course architects; Moser's rise has been exciting to witness.
Pinehurst No. 10's opening will make 2024 arguably the biggest year in the resort's history. Within months of the course's debut, Pinehurst will host the 2024 U.S. Open at Donald Ross' masterpiece No. 2 course. The United States Golf Association's brand-new Golf House Pinehurst will open around the same time, including that year's World Golf Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. This latest announcement adds another celebration to an already busy year.
Even though Pinehurst No. 10 is technically the first new 18-hole course to be built by the resort since Tom Fazio's Pinehurst No. 8 opened in 1996, it has been plenty busy in the interim. In 2010, Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw's restoration of Pinehurst No. 2 helped usher in a resort-wide change in philosophy as it pertained to the presentation of its older golf courses, back toward a sandier, scrubbier overall look. Kyle Franz's 2017 renovation of Pinehurst No. 3 brought a similar look to a course that is regarded as similar to No. 2, but in miniature. Later that year, the resort opened The Cradle, a brand-new, fun-oriented 9-hole par-3 course by Gil Hanse that helped spur similar projects at clubs and resorts across the world. A year later, Hanse's team unveiled a full-scale "retrovation" of the No. 4 course, again with an eye toward harmonizing with the natural sandy scrub of the area.
Numerous other improvements to Pinehurst's lodging, dining and other spaces has the resort looking its best and more popular than ever. The development of Pinehurst No. 10 suggests it has no intentions of slowing down anytime soon, and that's great news for golfers.
