‘Members are as happy as they can be with bunkers’ at Invited Clubs-owned Texas hill country venue.
FAIR OAKS RANCH, Texas – No one likes bunkers. That’s the conclusion of Jay Abbott, senior vice-president for golf course management at Invited Clubs, the owner of the Fair Oaks Ranch Golf Club in the Texas Hill Country north of San Antonio.
But, says Abbott, the new bunkers on Fair Oaks’s Live Oak course – which have been redesigned by World Golf Hall of Famer Lanny Wadkins, alongside architect Kurt Bowman and design association Marcus Reams, and which make use of the ZLine lining system — are as popular among the club’s members as it is possible for bunkers to be.
Fair Oaks opened in 1978, and the courses were designed by Gary Player’s firm.
“It is a very beautiful spot,” says Abbott. “The combination of the wonderful hilly terrain, the maintained turf and the desertscape is extremely aesthetically pleasing. But it is more than 35 years old, and the bunkers didn’t match today’s golfers’ expectations – they had become very rounded and the sand was a mess.
“So we brought in Kurt and Lanny to add a little spice to them – and also to build a new lake so we can hold extra water for when we need it in the summer.”
Abbott, along with his architects, and contractor ForeFront Golf, chose the ZLine system to line the new bunkers.
“I really like ZLine because it does a better job than any other product I’ve found of holding the sand on the bunker faces when we get rain,” he says. “It’s not a hard surface, so if the sand does get thin, it allows clubs to bounce off it and doesn’t scratch them. A lot of the time, because it’s the same colour as the sand, the members don’t even know they’ve made contact with the liner, which dramatically reduces member complaints.
“Because the product rolls over the edge, a lot of the contamination is prevented. Now, we don’t lose the edge of the bunker because it has the fabric rolling over. All we need to use to edge bunkers is a weedeater – the guys know where the edge is and it reduces the time taken to edge bunkers.”
The bunkers were renovated in a project lasting just over three months, and are now back in play, and Abbott says the reaction from his members has been ecstatic.
“Our members are as happy as they can be with bunkers,” he explains. “No one likes bunkers, but these ones are as popular as they can be