Bent Creek Country Club gets makeover by lauded golf course architect

Golfers at Bent Creek Country Club begin their rounds with a mildly scary sight.

Looking down the par-4 first hole from the tee, it's hard to miss the out-of-bounds stakes, menacingly close, all along the left side, with a fairway tilting slightly that way.

A bail-out drive to the right is no prize either; a bad miss that way is into trees, or even an access road to the many homes that line the course.

Except that, from now on, there will be a fairway bunker on the left side to grab tee shots, as part of a large maintenance and renovation project underway at the private club along Fruitville Pike.

The bunker doesn't necessarily make No. 1 more difficult— a miss to the right off the tee is probably better off in a bunker than under a tree or bouncing away along a road.

It does frame the tee shot, likely help it "fit the eye'' of the golfer, and at the very least makes No. 1 more visually interesting.

"There's a corridor there, where we're trying to balance left and right,'' Andrew Green, the architect overseeing the project, said during a visit to the site Sept. 20. "That was a good spot, distance wise, (for a bunker) to make golfers think a little bit.''

Bent Creek's course opened for play in 1993 and hosted the Pennsylvania Open just a year later. It hosted the Pennsylvania Amateur in 1998 and the Golf Association of Philadelphia Open in 1997 and 2009.

Nothing like that lately, though.

That wasn't the reason for hiring Green. Golf course irrigation systems, which are massive and, of course, mostly underground, typically last about 30 years, and Bent Creek was still on the original. Bunkers ought to be redone roughly every 20 years, and Bent Creek's had been redone in 2005-06.

In 2018, Jim Haus, now the club's director of golf, and superintendent Steve Ehrhart began working with long-term planners on a major project encompassing the golf course, practice area, tennis center (which will be covered with a dome in the winter), pool and clubhouse.

Since everything would be all dug up anyway, why not tweak the golf course here and there?

"Steve and I — Steve gives his heart and soul to this place — realized what needed to be done, and that this was the right time to do it,'' Haus said.

The planning group interviewed five architects and, Haus said, "We were blown away by Andrew Green.''

Green has degrees in landscape architecture and turf grass management from Virginia Tech. After college he went to work for Mc-Donald and Sons, a Jessup, Maryland, golf construction firm that is now doing the work on Bent Creek that Green is overseeing.

There is a golf subculture in which architects are celebrities. Since they're not making any more land, increasingly, that renown has come from renovating existing courses more than designing new ones.

In that world, Green has become a star since 2018. His work at East Lake, in Atlanta, the now-annual site of the PGA Tour Champion-ship, led to a lengthy interview with Brandel Cham-blee on The Golf Channel last month that, Green admits, "probably got a little too granular.''

Other name-brand tracks on Green's resume: Inverness in Toledo, Ohio; Oak Hill in Rochester, New York; Shoal Creek in Alabama; Interlachen in Minneapolis; and Congressional near Washington, D.C.

"When I was a junior in high school, I knew this was what I wanted to do,'' Green said. "I'm finally there, I guess.''

He is based in Forest Hill, Maryland, only about 50 miles from Lancaster. He's been on the property roughly once a week for most of the summer.

'A lot of intention'

Green is making no changes to the routing or essential design of the course. The club's 82 bunkers, however, are getting more than just a rebuild.

"We draw with a lot of intention,'' Green said of his literal drawings that are the project's blueprint.

"We don't just look and say, hey, let's put a couple bunkers there. We draw it exactly the way it's supposed to look.''

Some of the bunkers are getting concrete liners. All of them are getting new sand with angular grains, better for golf balls to hit and bounce rather than bury.

Many large bunkers are being split into two or three smaller ones, and most are becoming shallower.

This isn't a redesign. Bent Creek will mostly be what it's been: Some of the best greens anywhere, and the constant challenge of keeping one's ball between the white stakes that surround the course. The difference will be slightly kinder, gentler but also more strategic bunkering.

"It doesn't matter your ability level, any time you have a bunker with a steep face in the fairway, that's almost like a full shot penalty,'' Haus said. "A major part of this is making the bunkers more playable.''

Members have been playing the course with temporary greens and tees at various spots. The golf portion of the project began in the spring and is expected to be complete in early spring of 2025.