Southern Pines Golf Club

One would like to believe that if pioneer golf course architect Donald Ross was around today, Southern Pines Golf Club is where he would be playing most of his golf. Yes, Pinehurst #2, Mid Pines and Pine Needles are his masterpieces but they are centerpieces of fancy resorts. Ross, the son of a stonemason, hailed from Dornoch, Scotland where the daily fee golfer is greeted by an unpretentious clubhouse just steps away from a world class golf experience with unrivaled routing and challenges for every club in the bag.

Southern Pines is very much cut from that that mold. Ross laid out the first nine holes in 1906 with a commission from the town, his third design project in what would become a legacy of some 400 golf courses during a 48-year stay in Pinehurst. In an age when many courses were created by the local pro walking back and forth driving stakes in the turf, Ross took one of the choicest plots of golfing ground in the Sandhills and fashioned a course that flows so naturally up and down the contours that it feels as if the man uncovered a course rather than designed one.