Pine Lakes Prepares for July 13 Reopening

Jimmy Biggs, PGA, general manager of Pine Lakes Country Club, discusses the significant upgrades “The Granddaddy” has implemented in preparation of its July 13, 2021 reopening. New greens and dramatically reconfigured bunkers highlight the changes.

Interviewer:
Jimmy, exciting changes coming here at Pine Lakes. If you could just give us a quick overview on what visitors can expect when they come visit the new Pine Lakes.

Jimmy Biggs:
Well, they should expect, obviously the first thing they’re going to notice is the bunker work we’ve done out here. They mostly shrunk in size, but I feel like they’ve gotten a lot more animated. Before they used to be kind of big and cavernous with big, high flash faces, and the bunkers that we had would get a lot of plugged balls, which is unfortunate, but now we’ve got grass faces all the way down to kind of a more mellow shaping in the bunker. It’s new bunker sand, which is pretty and white. It’s kind of got that peach white color, which I think everyone’s really going to appreciate.

Jimmy Biggs:
And then, the greens themselves. They’re going to be able to get some faster greens speeds with this surface, the Sunday Ultra-Dwarf Bermuda, which I think is really what this place has always been lacking in terms of it’s always never had that “fire” that some of these other courses have gotten. You get greens like these that are so undulating and so much tiering, if you can get them up there in that 11, 11 and a half range, it’s a challenge for the best of the best, for sure.

Interviewer:
If you could name off the top of your head some holes in particular that really stand out to you in terms of the biggest difference in the bunker reconfigurations, which of those holes would they be?

Jimmy Biggs:
Well, the first one for me would be number five. Number five was always a very large bunker. It still is very large, but they put a nice little feature right towards the middle of it, kind of a hand, so to speak, a couple of little fingers, which is two things. It’s for that shot that does come up short, it’s no longer plugging into a lip and buried that you now have to walk 30 yards through a bunker. Now you can get into the bunker and exit from right there. You don’t have to go back and rake everything. So I think that’s a big plus.

Jimmy Biggs:
Another one would be number 14. We actually removed a bunker from the right side. The problem with that bunker is it always had a lot of material from a tree, overhanging tree, so it was always kind of full of stuff. So we got rid of that bunker, reshaped it and resodded it with the Zoysia grass. And I think that it’s definitely a catcher’s mitt because it’s on the right side of the hole. Nine out of 10 golfers miss everything to the right, so now it’s going to be a little bit easier up-and-down. And we did take a limb off that tree, so we’ll be able to get some sunlight in there and keep that grass growing. But that’s a big one. And we also put a little pot bunker there that wasn’t there before. And we still haven’t named that bunker yet, but it’s going to have a creative name, I’m sure, by opening day.

Interviewer:
If I’m a long-time visitor to Pine Lakes and I’m coming here for the first time since the renovation, the first words out of my mouth after I walk off 18 are, “Man, Pine Lakes is really…”

Jimmy Biggs:
Man, Pine Lakes has really got its groove back. It’s still got the plaid and the flair and the chowder and the mimosas that everyone remembers. But I feel like we’ve eliminated the two biggest knocks that we had on the course, and that was the greens and the bunkers. And now we’ve got them both. So there’s no more you can do out here to make this course any better. It’s perfect right now.