Rogers to Restore Classic Courses by Willie Park & Donald Ross

Sylvania Country Club in Ohio, home to an original Willie Park Jr. design, has retained architect Drew Rogers to oversee a comprehensive design-reinstatement that will begin in 2015. Rogers' work at Sylvania will run concurrently with his firm's planning efforts at Kenosha Country Club, one of only two Donald Ross designs in the golf-rich state of Wisconsin and in similar need of a restoration.

"We're nearly 100 years into the evolution of each of these golf courses, and any such layout will undergo marked change over such a long period of play," said Rogers, principal of Toledo-based JDR Design Group. "But there's a spectrum of change that can take place on courses like these, from the 'Golden Age.' At one end, there are courses where the greens, tees and bunkering have been actively modified, moved or replaced with ever more modern feature components. At the other end, you have clubs like Kenosha and Sylvania, where nearly all the original features are essentially intact, still recognizable, but have fallen into some level of disuse.

"The goals for projects such as these are straightforward but highly nuanced. We intend to recover these original features and bring them back into play in a way that best suits today's game and its diverse range of players."

Rogers' work at both courses will use original planning documents drawn up by Ross and Park, nearly 100 years ago, along with aerial photography, correspondence and notes archived at both clubs. "The aerials in particular will greatly aid the pending recovery of original design elements as this vintage imagery will more clearly delineate how rampant tree growth has warped the architects' intended strategies," Rogers said.

Those strategies, as devised by Willie Park Jr., are perhaps not so well known today. He was a contemporary of fellow Scot, Donald Ross, and nearly as prolific - on both sides of the Atlantic. Park is responsible for the original course at Olympia Fields in Chicago, the famed No. 2 course at Gullane in Scotland's East Lothian region, the Old Course at Sunningdale near London, Maidstone GC on Long Island, and Pine Lake CC outside Detroit, where Rogers is planning another historic renovation.

"Park doesn't get the attention of Ross, but his work was brilliant," said Rogers, who will work beside Sylvania superintendent Steve Brown on the project. "Park's routing and use of the terrain at Sylvania was amazingly playful. But his design is just part of what makes Sylvania Country Club such a unique place. This was the birthplace of the GCSAA [Golf Course Superintendents Association of America], the place Arnold Palmer won the Ohio Amateur, in 1954. That tournament, at Sylvania, was where he first met a young Jack Nicklaus.

"I think it's important for older clubs to understand that heritage sells. I mean, Byron Nelson won the 1940 Ohio State Open at Sylvania. Ross was at the height of his powers when he laid out Kenosha, in 1920. If your course is so demonstrably classic, that fact can and should be enhanced through some level of beneficial recovery and leveraged to better attract a certain type of member. Reviving these grand designs can and should add value, if done properly."

Proper restoration of courses built prior to World War II invariably centers on the putting surfaces, many of which grew smaller during those years as limitations in labor, equipment and fuel led to mowing reconfigurations. The advent of modern irrigation systems in the 1950s essentially locked those smaller, rounder green shapes into place.

Rogers envisions that nearly every green at Sylvania will be restored to its original perimeters, which will add new cupping areas while providing larger, more interesting, better integrated targets.

"Today, we see edges that extend well outside the maintained green and collar designations - and also outside of where irrigation heads are currently placed," Rogers said. "That's an easy, logical fix, and it dovetails with our goal to establish and further develop greater identity and consistency among all of the holes at Sylvania, to institute greater thematic cohesiveness and design clarity to the overall golf experience."

Many courses from this era have, over the decades, also seen bunkers completely removed from play. This was not the case at Sylvania, where the course suffered instead from a series of inelegant bunker modifications. Rogers' plans actually call for a modest bunker reduction at Sylvania CC, while providing all remaining bunkers a uniform, rolled-grass-face, flattish-bottomed look more in keeping with a typical, manageable Park style.

"I'm all for replacing dull, shallow saucers with more dynamic bunkering that is fitted into the landforms, and there are many examples at Sylvania where bunkers have become detached from greens and fairways. We'll restore and reattach those bunkers and refine their purposeful positions," Rogers said.

"However, sometimes modern architects need to recognize the purity and simplicity of what the original architect had clearly intended, and simply get out of the way. The 12th green at Sylvania sits atop a wonderful landform that was identified and partly built up by Willie Park. Two greenside bunkers were added later, right and left. We plan to remove them both. The ravine and mounding at left are too special to be cluttered by a detached, flat, featureless bunker - by any bunker!

"Hole 12 is actually a good representative example of our mission at Sylvania. It's a tremendous dogleg par-4 that plays over a striking landform where the fairway turns. By selectively removing a few trees in the right rough, we're opening up a fairway corridor that, when we're done, will drape itself over the full breadth of this hillock. By establishing some new forward teeing grounds, negotiating this hole will be easier and more enjoyable for shorter hitters. By removing bunkers and a few more trees at greenside, we'll further peel back the layers - revealing the details of an exquisitely natural hole that's been there all along."

For more information about JDR Design Group, visit http://www.jdrewrogers.com.

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