A year-long restoration of the University of North Carolina's Finley Golf Club was finished this week, with the course opening for play on Wednesday.
The restoration was the handiwork of Love Golf Design and Davis Love III, who played for the Tar Heels from 1982 to 1986, company president Mark Love, also a Carolina graduate and former Tar Heel golfer, and lead architect Scot Sherman.
The $13.5 million restoration includes a wall-to-wall regrassiing with Bermudagrass, lengthening of some holes and expanding the practice area to better suit the needs of the university's golf teams.
The latest redesign effort is only the second makeover at UNC since the course was built in 1950, when Finley was built by architect George Cobb.
The course had not been touched since a Tom Fazio renovation in 1999. As other courses throughout North Carolina converted to one of many varieties of ultradwarf Bermudagrass, Finley's greens remained creeping bentgrass. The university's golf team also was in need of a more expansive practice facility.
Greens were recontoured and regrassed with Tif-Eagle and are surrounded by Tahoma 31 collars. Tees, fairways and rough were grown-in with 419.
About 16 acres from the 10th and 11th holes have been absorbed to expand the practice facility and provide the golf teams every lie, grass length, corridor and target imaginable. Consulting on the practice facility project was Darren May, desinger of the Michael Jordan-owned Grove 23 in Hobe Sound, Florida.
The Finley course was built in 1950 by Cobb on land donated to the university by William Coker, a UNC professor and botanist. In 1982, when three holes were remade into intramural and athletic fields and three new ones built in the woods on campus.
In 1999, Fazio was hired to re-design the course and build a new one. He used some of the original corridors and added drainage since the course was built in a low-lying area prone to flooding.
The project also included reversing the nines, with the old front nine now being the back, and vice-versa, because Love saw the par-4 ninth hole as an ideal finishing hole. And with the 10th and 11th holes being swallowed up by the practice facility, the par-3 12th hole is now hole No. 1.
Losing Nos. 10 and 11 meant finding room for two new holes on the new front nine. The new holes are the 320-yard uphill par 4, and No. 6, an uphill par 3.
The course held a grand opening on Oct. 18. Golf car traffic will be restrict to cart path only for eight months until the men's NCAA Regional Tournament in May.
