Before and after, 30 years apart

It’s easier to show than to tell. Among the many things I have learned during my decades as a golf writer, architecture enthusiast and design consultant is that you can explain things all you want to folks, but nothing comes close to visual examples as evidence that progress is possible.

Case in point, and it is a personal one, concerns my involvement since the early 1990s with the Donald Ross-designed Wampanoag Country Club in West Hartford, Connecticut. It’s in the next town over from where I live, eight miles away. I joined it back in 1993 as a full dues-paying member because I had always wanted to be part of a home course. Also, entirely by coincidence, Wampanoag has been home since 1988 to the Donald Ross Society, a group that had formed there in response to some ill-planned renovations to the layout.

It’s a lovely setting for golf, with the course unfolding in butterfly fashion so that the two returning nines fan out elegantly in a kind of circular layout from the lookout that forms the clubhouse and patio. There’s a mountain in the distant background — or at least what passes for a mountain in woodland Connecticut. But the place was hopelessly over-treed, and I lost little time in making my concerns known about the need to manage the overgrowth and restore the lost character of the layout. I even wrote about it in a chapter of my 2001 design biography, “Discovering Donald Ross.”

There were a few sympathizers. But most dismissed me as fanciful and thought a restoration would ruin the place and make play too easy. This latter objection, often from mid-handicappers who struggled to break 90, struck me as particularly laughable. By the time I left the club in 2002, I was more convinced than ever that a restoration was needed. But it would take a massive shift in the membership, management and culture to get to that point.

Fast forward 30 years. New management. New vision. Some money to invest. And by then everyone was ready to talk about restoration, whether of Ross (Pinehurst No. 2, Inverness, Scioto) or other dead architects. The club had the wisdom to hire two dedicated up-and-coming designers, Tyler Rae and Kyle Frantz, and they were kind enough to ask me to help them develop a restoration plan. Construction started in August 2022, with the course shut down for nine months to endure extensive drainage work, a complete overhaul of bunkers, green expansion, tree work, altered fairway lines and three completely rebuilt putting surfaces to replace the ones that had been clumsily installed in the late 1980s.

Construction work was undertaken by Matt Staffieri’s MAS Golf, an experienced New England contractor. Wampanoag superintendent John Ruzsbazsky and crew were deployed to help absorb some of the labor tasks. I helped along the way by observing, mediating and suggesting. Most of the fine shaping was left to Rae after Frantz found himself entirely occupied with other design commitments.

The work came in on budget at $3.7 million. We ended cutting out 17 bunkers from the plan to save money and future maintenance costs.

Greens surfaces expanded by about 15 percent to 20 percent. The area of bunkering nearly doubled from 70,000 square feet to 135,000. Fairways became wider. Forward tees were moved forward by 400 yards and the back tees were pushed back an equal amount. The course plays just over 7,000 yards. Enough tree work was undertaken to allow a return to original lines of play.

The course did not get easier. It’s more diverse, more interesting, more fun, more strategic. It can now play vastly differently from day to day because of enhanced hole locations and a slight variance in teeing ground positions. And if the course is too much at one set of markers, there’s always room to move up to the next set. Or back, if you dare.

The membership is now booming. There’s a waiting list to get in, something the club had not seen in decades. The club was also wise enough to expand Ruzsbatzky’s maintenance budget to accommodate the larger playing field — though the course would benefit from additional spending in that department.

And the members? They are thrilled. The course is more complex, more intriguing, more scenic, more beautiful and more worth spending their dues to play.

Before and after. The evidence is overwhelming.