A is midway through a renovation of John
GOLF COURSES
Davis and ZLine collaborate to deliver best solution for San Angelo
rchitect Tripp Davis
A is midway through a renovation of John
Bredemus’ s San Angelo CC in west Texas. And he says the ZLine bunker liner he is installing is making the job significantly easier.
SAN ANGELO, TEXAS, APRIL 9, 2025 – Golf course architect Tripp Davis is currently renovating the course at San Angelo Country Club in west Texas. And, he says, he has been pleasantly surprised by what he has found there.
San Angelo CC was founded in 1920, and extended from its original nine to eighteen holes in 1928- 29 by John Bredemus, the first resident golf architect in the state of Texas.“ Bredemus is an interesting character,” says Davis.“ He was a Princeton graduate and an excellent athlete – he was declared the Amateur Athletic Union all-around champion in 1912, after the Olympic star Jim Thorpe was ruled ineligible because he had played semi-pro baseball. After school, he apprenticed for a short time with CB Macdonald and Seth Raynor, before moving to Texas, where he founded the state PGA. He was the first architect for Colonial in Fort Worth before Perry Maxwell came in and tweaked it for the 1940 US Open, and he designed Memorial Park in Houston, which Tom Doak rebuilt a few years and which hosts the Houston Open.”
When the club decided it needed to renovate its course, it called Davis.“ Fourteen of the greens are original, though they have shrunk quite a bit, and they are very severe by modern standards,” he says.“ Sand is hard to find in west Texas, so
Bredemus built grass bunkers rather than normal ones, and we debated whether to go back to that, but sand bunkers are now an expected part of the course design landscape. But we have minimised them! We are restoring the design intent on the fourteen old greens, and on the four that have been rebuilt, we are using a lot of the same, Macdonaldinfluenced, design concepts.”
This does not mean that San Angelo will now feature Macdonald / Raynor template holes.“ There is no evidence that Bredemus built template holes here, and I think it is a bit of cliché sometimes,” the architect says.“ But we will have the greens up on pads, very similar to Raynor’ s style, quite rectangular, with the edges falling away rather steeply. They had never converted any of Bredemus’ s grass faces along the fairways into
30 GroundskeepingJournal. co. uk | May / June 2025