The Restoration of Donald Ross’ Design at Florida’s Oldest Club

Below are excerpts from an article that originally appeared in aegolfnews.com.

Founded in 1897, Belleair Country Club is the oldest club in Florida. Originally a six-hole course, the West Golf Course expanded to eighteen holes in 1909. In 1915, Donald Ross redesigned the West Golf Course, while adding the East Golf Course. Less than a decade later, in 1924, Ross returned and revised both courses based on another decade of experience designing courses across the U.S.

In 2020, Belleair Country Club hired Fry/Straka Global Golf Course Design to oversee the restoration of the West Golf Course. To restore the course to Ross’ 1924 design, Jason Straka turned to historical records stored at the Tufts Archives at Pinehurst Resort (Pinehurst, North Carolina) and The Bellview Inn (Belleair, Florida).

"The vast bulk of the work we did at Belleair was to undo what had been done over the past sixty years," said Straka. "Through previous rebuilds, where the greens had been built on top of the previous greens, rather than having been removed and rebuilt at the same grade, and decades of top-dressing, the greens had been raised significantly – five, six, seven feet in the air, even more in some cases. As a result, there was a big misconception that Ross' greens were inverted saucers, but that couldn’t be anything further from the truth."

Click here to read the full article on aegolfnews.com.