Belmont Redo Update: "Trying to offer a bit of something for everyone.”
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Josh Sens checks in with Belmont in near Richmond and the reimagination of the old Tillinghast course and home to the 1949 PGA Championship is almost complete, with a First Tee facility, 12 holes, a par-3 course and a bright future as a community centerpiece just three years after facing extinction.
Putting their heads together with Scot Sherman of Love Golf Design, Schneider and his First Tee colleagues pitched the county with this proposal: they would transform Belmont into a multi-faceted facility, turning the 18-hole course into a 12-hole routing while converting the remaining ground into a community-focused hybrid, composed of a driving range and short-game area, an 18-hole putting course and a six-hole par-3 course. Inspiration for this blueprint came, in part, from other unconventional success stories around the country, including Sweetens Cove, in Tennessee, a nine-hole underdog-cum-architectural darling; Goat Hill Park, a come-one, come-all muni in Southern California; and Bobby Jones Golf Course, in Atlanta, where an 18-hole layout had been modified into a wildly entertaining, reversible nine-hole track.
What those courses had in common was respect for golf tradition, married with a hearty sense of welcome and a keen attentiveness to the tenor of the times. They paid homage to the past even as they pointed toward where the game was headed.
The plan for Belmont sprang from those same ideas.
“If you look at our culture today and all the folks that golf is trying to reach, there are so many different interests,” Sherman says. “You’ve got the serious golfer, the golfer who’s just getting started, the golfer who maybe only has an hour-and-half after work to play—we were trying to offer a bit of something for everyone.”
As Sens and Sherman highlight, Belmont’s just the kind of project golf needs as a model with so many muni’s facing similar needs to be reinvented or face redevelopment.
One note not mentioned in the story: the fine work by Fried Egg’s Andy Johnson three years in highlighting the course and dreadful direction it was headed, including a less-than-subtle inside job by an architect to capitalize on bunker liner construction covered here as well.
