Article and photography By DAVID DROSCHAK
“I was trying to make Mid Pines look natural and feel natural, which a lot of times takes a lot of tinkering with bunkering to get them to look like they do out in the wild,” said architect Kyle Franz.
Mid Pines Resort is better known as the sister course of the more famous Pine Needles Resort just across the street, which has hosted three U.S. Women’s Opens and is the home of famed golf instructor Peggy Kirk Bell. Facing greens that were last redone in the 1960s, resort president Kelly Miller knew he had to pull the trigger sooner rather than later on his struggling putting surfaces at Mid Pines, a 1921 Donald Ross classic that was in need of some major grooming. The evidence was in the numbers. Play among members and resort guests had swung to about 70 percent in favor of Pine Needles over Mid Pines in recent years, mainly because of the suffering bent grass greens in the North Carolina summer heat. “I’ve been a big fan of Bermuda greens for a long time,” said Miller, an accomplished player himself. “Some of the best greens I play are at Seminole Golf Club in Florida; they are firm, they are fast and the grain is gone on all these new dwarf Bermuda strains of grass.” Miller placed Bermuda greens on the course’s practice areas for four years to see how the new putting surface would perform. A decision was made last year to move ahead with the greens project on the course itself, and Miller began looking for a window to begin construction. But who would execute the work? Miller remembered meeting Kyle Franz at a cocktail party a few years back while the young architect was working for Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw on the Pinehurst No. 2 restoration project. What Miller didn’t know was Franz had been sifting through files in the Tufts Archives in his spare time, waiting for the right moment to approach Miller about his plan – to not only work on the greens – but to restore Mid Pines to its original Ross ideals. The two connected and the wheels were set in motion in late 2012.
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