The historic Spring Lake Golf Club in New Jersey is in the middle of a five-year rebuild of its bunkers using the ZLine liner system
SPRING LAKE, New Jersey – When Spring Lake GC was founded in 1898, golf in America was only in its infancy. The USGA had been founded only four years before, the US Open was first played only three years earlier, and the Lawrenceville School course, the oldest in New Jersey, was but two years old.
Spring Lake has been the home of courses designed by two of America’s greatest architects for more than a century and a quarter. In 1911, in the infancy of his great career, George Thomas extended the original nine-hole course to eighteen, incorporating the monstrous fourth (now, shortened, the third), an uphill giant of 674 yards, surely the longest hole in the world at the time.
Spring Lake was the last course Thomas would design in the East before his move to California, which saw him create some of the greatest venues in the world.
And then, in 1918, A. W. Tillinghast came to Spring Lake to update the golf course, though Thomas’s routing is largely intact. Since Tillinghast’s work in 1918, the course has remained substantially the same.In 2010, the club engaged golf course architect Tripp Davis to undo some of the tinkering work done over the previous century.
“Over a two-year period, working with Tripp, we restored the bunkers to their original shapes, and installed a fabric liner,” says superintendent Tom Havelka, who has been with the club since 2011, and was promoted to his current role in 2019. “But that was 12 years ago, and the liner has essentially worn out. So, about three years ago, we started looking for a longer-term solution.”
The solution that Havelka and the club selected was the ZLine Bunker Systems liner. ZLine uses synthetic material to create a barrier between the sand and the underlying soil, to hold the sand in place, and to ensure good drainage. Since then, contractor Mottin Golf has installed the ZLine system on eight holes of the golf course, and the job will be completed, bit by bit, over the next few years.
“Our members are looking for playability and consistency from the bunkers, and I’m concerned about lifespan,” says Havelka. “ZLine offers a 15-20 year lifespan at a very competitive price, which is ideal for us. In recent years, the availability and price of bunker sand in the north-east has been problematic, and ZLine enables us to use two inches less sand in the bunkers, saving money and making them quicker to rebuild.”
“The consistency of the ZLine bunkers is incredible,” Havelka concludes. “The bunkers have been excellent – we have had far fewer washouts. The original bunkers were grass faced and in this iteration we have flashed the sand – which would have caused huge problems with our previous liner, but with ZLine is not an issue.
“We have a lot of animals on the property, such as deer and foxes. Foxes were burrowing in the bunkers and they were just ripping the fabric liner to shreds. I’ve seen foxes try to dig into bunkers that are lined with ZLine. They can’t get anywhere. My only concern is that they’ll abandon the bunkers and go dig up the greens.”
