Design Notebook: Mid Pines or Southern Pines?

Hey there! Welcome back to Design Notebook, where we’re starting to wear the epithet “course architecture snob” as a badge of honor. It’s possible that we have no choice in the matter. Either way: guilty as charged!

For this week’s exercise in rank snobbery, Garrett Morrison compares and contrasts Mid Pines with Southern Pines. Which of these Pinehurst-adjacent Donald Ross gems, both recently polished by Kyle Franz, is best? We also touch on news of (yet another) upcoming Dream Golf resort, this one featuring courses by Tom Doak and Coore & Crenshaw in the wilds of East Texas.

Showdown: Mid Pines vs. Southern Pines

By Garrett Morrison

In our May 6th Design Notebook, I mentioned that my Fried Egg Golf colleague Matt Rouches and I were headed to the Pinehurst area. Club TFE members Ben Denison and Brad Weatherspoon both requested our takes on Mid Pines and Southern Pines, a pair of Donald Ross courses about 15 minutes from the first tee at Pinehurst No. 2. Well, Ben and Brad, ask and you shall receive.

Along with Pine Needles, Mid Pines and Southern Pines form a cluster of well-preserved Ross designs in the town of Southern Pines, North Carolina. They have significant similarities: all are open to the public, all are owned by the same family (the Bells, once led by the legendary Peggy Kirk Bell and now by her son-in-law Kelly Miller), and all have been renovated in Golden Age style by Kyle Franz within the past 11 years—Mid Pines in 2013, Pine Needles in 2018, and Southern Pines in 2021.

Someday, perhaps, I’ll write a longer essay about all three courses, but for now a head-to-head between Mid Pines and Southern Pines seems sufficient. Pine Needles has always struck me as the outlier of the trio. The four-time U.S. Women’s Open host is brawny and impressive but lacks the intimacy, charm, and fun factor of its sister courses.

So here’s a comparison of Mid Pines and Southern Pines across five categories—land, routing, strategy, greens, and presentation:

Land

Mid Pines and Southern Pines both sit in rolling, sandy, pine-studded valleys, and both have significantly more undulation than either Pine Needles or the Ross courses at Pinehurst. The difference is one of scale: Southern Pines’ property is larger and more spread out than Mid Pines’, and has grander topographical movements.

Routing

This difference in scale prompted Ross to take different routing approaches at the two courses. Mid Pines has a tight, contained, and interlocking layout that crisscrosses the property, pleasantly disorienting golfers as it weaves and wheels before finding its way—seemingly by accident—back to the clubhouse. In contrast, Southern Pines’ routing has a clear out-and-back structure, journeying to a large, amphitheater-like valley, lingering there for several holes, and then reutrning to its starting point. Throughout the round, players have a sense of where they are.

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It’s notable that neither Southern Pines nor Pine Needles (nor Pinehurst No. 2, for that matter) has returning nines, and while Mid Pines’ ninth green sits near the clubhouse and hotel facilities, the connection is loose. All of these routings prioritize finding the best land for each hole, rather than adhering strictly to convention.

Strategy

Ross often used sideslopes to create strategic challenges. He liked to reward players who could hold tilted fairways and hit approaches from sidehill lies. This preference is evident at both Mid Pines and Southern Pines, but it’s a more defining theme at Mid Pines, where holes like 4, 7, 13, 14, and 15 run boldly and memorably across sharp slopes. At Southern Pines, the primary elevation changes are uphill, downhill, or up-and-over. As a result, Southern Pines relies more on bunkers than topography to guard advantageous angles.

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Greens

Here we have a study in opposites. The greens at Mid Pines are smallish and subtly contoured, enhancing each hole’s strategic design mainly through tilt and orientation. From good angles, these greens usually provide backboarding slopes and room for long and short misses; from poor angles, they play shallower and less forgiving. Southern Pines, on the other hand, boasts large greens characterized more by internal humps and hollows than general tilt. These surfaces offer a wide range of pin positions, so favored angles from the fairway may change from day to day. They also create an immense variety of short-game scenarios.

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Presentation

Both Mid Pines and Southern Pines overseed their Bermudagrass tees, fairways, and greens with perennial ryegrass in the cold months. While I’m on the record as a fan of dormant Bermudagrass, I understand why a resort operation that caters to snowbirds would opt for year-round green.

The main difference in the presentation of Mid Pines and Southern Pines lies in the style and maintenance of the bunkers and native areas. While Mid Pines certainly adopting a rustic aesthetic, Southern Pines turns that dial up to 11, going for larger, messier expanses of sand and scrub.

Bunkers, waste, and native on the 12th hole at Southern Pines

Verdict

First, a slight cop-out: I’m glad that Mid Pines and Southern Pines are distinct from each other. Both are excellent, and the question of which is better largely comes down to personal taste.

Now, a non-cop-out (or cop-in?): I prefer Mid Pines to Southern Pines. The understated elegance of Mid Pines appeals to me far more than the baroque intricacy of Southern Pines. Mid Pines’ simple appearance belies a complex test of golfing ability, while Southern Pines’ aesthetic fireworks sometimes oversell what turn out to be fairly straightforward golf holes. Mid Pines possesses a quiet self-confidence: it boasts one of the finest routings in American golf, but the player must pay attention in order to discover that fact. Southern Pines seems more eager to impress—and, consequently, impresses me less.

My opinion may change as Kyle Franz’s work at Southern Pines settles in. The chaotic mélange of bunkers and waste areas may eventually blend into a coherent sandscape, and I may grow accustomed to some of the zanier green contours, which currently feel more Franz-ian than Ross-ian to me.

For now, though, I find that Mid Pines outpaces Southern Pines while running half as hard.

Chocolate Drops

By Garrett Morrison

The Keisers’ East Texas project: The long-rumored Dream Golf resort near Nacogdoches, Texas, made its first public pronouncements last week, publishing a website and a set of mouth-watering maps and renderings. Headed up by Sand Valley and Rodeo Dunes developers Michael and Chris Keiser, Wild Spring Dunes is located two hours from both Dallas and Houston and will initially feature two 18-hole courses designed by Tom Doak and Coore & Crenshaw, respectively. The property, according to the website copy, contains “four distinct and diverse ecosystems: towering pines and hardwood forest, open, grass meadows, rolling hills, and steep ravens carved by spring-fed creeks.” Two substantial real estate zones, located at a polite distance from the golf, also appear on the released map.

Courtesy of Wild Spring Dunes

Like Rodeo Dunes, Wild Spring Dunes is offering a “foundership,” which provides club-like benefits for those who pay a deposit of $75,000. Founders will receive exclusive access to construction-site tours, preview play, real-estate offerings, early bookings for tee times and lodging, and discounted green fees for guests. The blending of this kind of membership experience, real estate, and Dream Golf’s established model of public destination golf has become a hallmark of Michael and Chris Keiser’s approach.

The resort has not yet released a timeline for opening, but Tom Doak has finished the routing for his course and is getting ready to start construction, while Coore & Crenshaw have produced an initial routing for the second course.

A new Badger State short course: The rise of the shorty continues. The Club at Lac La Belle, a public 18-hole facility outside of Milwaukee formerly known as Oconomowoc Golf Club, announced that it had broken ground on a nine-hole par-3 course called Uncle Henry’s Backyard. The new course will be designed by Craig Haltom, a Wisconsin-based architect who revamped Lac La Bell’s regulation layout in 2018, has served as construction contractor on all of Sand Valley’s courses, and oversaw the restoration of Lawsonia Links.

A Course We Photographed Recently

Short Course at Circle T Ranch (Westlake, TX)—designed by Gil Hanse in 2021

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Quotable

“There is no such thing as a misplaced bunker. Regardless of where a bunker may be, it is the business of the player to avoid it.” -Donald Ross