Here’s what will happen to the golf course:
• All 18 greens and tees will be rebuilt, and all fairways will be slit-seeded with bentgrass after the present grasses have been killed.
• All of the bunkers will be rebuilt in the flat-bottom sand style consistent with the original design. They are easier to maintain, especially after heavy rains. New drains will be installed.
• Using space presently occupied by the tennis courts and the platform tennis facility, the driving range will be expanded and a short-game practice area will be added.
“We think we’ll have the best practice facility this side of Columbus,” Haley said
In order to carry out the renovation, the golf course will be under construction from approximately July 5, 2015, until late in the spring of 2016.
“We’re not shutting down the Moraine Country Club,” said Ray Lane, chairman of the restoration committee. “The staff is working on events that will keep the members engaged.”
Lane said there will be no assessment of the Moraine members.
As for making golf available to the members during the construction period, Moraine golf professional Brent Sipe said he will be exploring options for them to play other courses in the Dayton area.
Moraine’s driving range will undergo renovation beginning Aug. 1 of this year so the new practice facility can be available to members next year when the course is closed.
The Moraine golf course, designed by Alex “Nipper” Campbell in 1930, has undergone many changes since then. Some of them have not been consistent with Campbell’s style.
In 2007, on the advice of the late green committee chairman Hugh Wall III, Moraine hired Keith Foster, a 54-year-old architect whom Moraine green superintendent Jason Mahl had worked with on a project at Louisville Country Club. Foster, who specializes in renovation of classic courses, was asked to prepare a master plan for Moraine.
“He has a very good reputation for restoring classic courses,” Lane said.
Foster, who is currently working with Baltimore Country Club and The Quarry in San Antonio, said the first time he walked the Moraine course, he was thinking: ‘Wow this really feels Scottish.’ “I was entranced by that,” he said. “Moraine is a really special golf course. It has incredible terrain and wonderful green sites.”
In designing the Moraine course, Campbell had modeled some of the holes after those on famous links courses in his native Scotland. Over the years, however, Moraine had become a heavily-wooded Parkland course.
Foster’s plan included the removal of a considerable portion of the trees, which occurred in the two years prior to 2009, when Moraine hosted the Ohio Amateur championship.
Last year Foster was asked to prepare a more extensive master plan for the renovation of the course, and five months ago, Moraine’s 12-person board of directors voted unanimously to proceed.
In studying the course’s history and examining Campbell’s architectural plans, Foster learned that the original hole No. 12 was changed prior to the 1945 PGA Championship and the greens at Nos. 3 and 15 were changed by architect Dick Wilson in 1954 when he designed nearby NCR Country Club.
Foster decided to raise the green and lower the bunkers at the par 3 12th hole and to re-design the hourglass green at the par 3 15th, making it much larger.
Over the years, Moraine has had difficulty maintaining consistent speeds on the greens because of poor drainage and the invasion of rapidly growing Poa annua (a flowering lawn weed) among the surface grass.
The bases of Moraine’s greens, built 84 years ago with horses and scoop shovels, were of clay, which prevented them from draining well after heavy rain.
The new greens will be built to United States Golf Association specifications, meaning that drains will be installed 16 inches below the surface and covered with four inches of gravel and 12 inches of a sand/peat mix.
“We are rebuilding the greens with the same contours except where the slopes are too severe for bentgrass,” Lane said. The green contours at holes 1 and 2, notorious for their difficulty, will be moderated.
To assure that the contours will be duplicated, Foster has lasered them and obtained a three-dimensional printout.
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