Architect Davis is midway through a renovation of Bredemus’s San Angelo CC in west Texas. He says the ZLine bunker liner he is installing is making the job significantly easier
SAN ANGELO, Texas – Golf course architect Tripp Davis is currently renovating the course at San Angelo Country Club in west Texas. And, he says, he has been pleasantly surprised by what he has found there.
San Angelo CC was founded in 1920, and extended from its original nine to 18 holes in 1928-29 by John Bredemus, the first resident golf architect in the state of Texas.
“Bredemus is an interesting character,” says Davis. “He was a Princeton graduate and an excellent athlete – he was declared the Amateur Athletic Union all-around champion in 1912, after the Olympic star Jim Thorpe was ruled ineligible because he had played semi-pro baseball.
“After school, he apprenticed for a short time with CB Macdonald and Seth Raynor, before moving to Texas, where he founded the state PGA. He was the first architect for Colonial in Fort Worth before Perry Maxwell came in and tweaked it for the 1940 US Open, and he designed Memorial Park in Houston, which Tom Doak rebuilt a few years and which hosts the Houston Open.”
When the club decided it needed to renovate its course, it called Davis.
“Fourteen of the greens are original, though they have shrunk quite a bit, and they are very severe by modern standards,” he says. “Sand is hard to find in west Texas, so Bredemus built grass bunkers rather than normal ones, and we debated whether to go back to that, but sand bunkers are now an expected part of the course design landscape.
“But we have minimized them. We are restoring the design intent on the 14 old greens, and on the four that have been rebuilt, we are using a lot of the same, Macdonald-influenced, design concepts.”
This does not mean that San Angelo will now feature Macdonald/Raynor template holes.
“There is no evidence that Bredemus built template holes here, and I think it is a bit of cliché sometimes,” the architect says. “But we will have the greens up on pads, very similar to Raynor’s style, quite rectangular, with the edges falling away rather steeply. They had never converted any of Bredemus’s grass faces along the fairways into sand, so they’re all still there. The only thing is there are trees along them, so we’re taking them out.”
The project is proceeding apace.
“We have about three-quarters of the shaping done,” says Davis. “It’s still hard to find sands in west Texas, but we have found a supply for greens mix, so we’re going to start rebuilding greens shortly. We should be ready to grass greens in late April or early May, and we are sodding everything else, so we should be done by late June, and hopefully the weather cooperates so we can reopen in September/October.”
Although Davis is being parsimonious with sand bunkers, they will still be significant part of the course, and the architect has a very definite view of how he wants them to look.
“I like to roll the sod over the edge of the bunker,” he says. “In west Texas, for years they have mowed everything between bunker and green at collar height, similar to what they do in Australia. The toplines are pretty smooth so they can run a machine over the edge. It was really important to roll the sod over and staple it down.”
Texas-based contractor Greenscape Methods is handling the build.
Greenscape boss Don Mahaffey says: “Any time a club entrusts us to work on its golf course, we understand what that means as most full renovations are a once-in-a-generation type of project. The project at San Angelo even feels a little more than that as this is the first major renovation since the club was founded in 1927.
“We’ve been fortunate to work on John Bredemus designs at Memorial Park and Braeburn CC in Houston, but both of those courses have undergone significant renovations in the past. At San Angelo much of Bredemus’ work is still there, and Tripp has done a masterful job restoring that, especially the Bredemus grassy bunker type features, while also adding interest, especially on and around the greens.”
Davis is installing the ZLine liner system at San Angelo.
“I believe that ZLine is the most effective bunker liner system I have seen in my thirty years in the business,” he says. “Being able to have water move across the top of the liner and run down to our drainage system is key to managing moisture in the sand. With ZLine, the beauty of it is that you’re still putting in four inch perforated pipe in a trench filled with gravel, then we put the filter fabric above the trench, then put the liner on top and glue it, and it creates a very solid barrier.
“The liner has a grain in it, which helps to hold sand, which is important we’re at 55-60 per cent slope in our bunker faces. At that angle, the ball isn’t going to hold, so we only need an inch of sand up there.”
ZLine representative Casey Jones says that he has modified the system to suit Davis’s bunkers at San Angelo.
“Our normal system includes an edging solution, but because Tripp likes to have sod overlap the bunker edge, we took the edging system out of the package for San Angelo,” he explains. “He likes to flash the floor liner up the bunker face a few inches instead. We have been involved on numerous projects with Tripp and working with him is a joy – and we look forward to seeing the San Angelo work successfully concluded.”
