Course Profiles / North Carolina

Anderson Creek Golf Club: A Course Profile

A player's first signature course is usually a vanity project. Anderson Creek, opened in 2001 in Spring Lake, was Davis Love III's first signature design in North Carolina, and it opened to a verdict players do not control: it was named Best New Golf Course in North Carolina. That award matters because new courses in this state open into a crowded field. The Sandhills are up the road. Mediocre does not win anything here.

Love built on the edge of the Sandhills, near Fort Liberty, and the land does a lot of the work. The facts in the record are spare but pointed: par 72, 7,240 yards from the back tees, public access. Seven thousand two hundred forty yards is a full examination, not a resort stroll, and building that examination for the public near a military town is a statement about who the course is for. Soldiers, locals and visiting golfers get the same tee sheet.

What a tour player's eye gives you

Love spent his career hitting the shots he now asks for, and first designs by tour players tend to share a virtue: they are honest about what a good shot looks like. The Sandhills edge setting means sandy soil and pines rather than the heavy parkland further east, and drainage and turf that reward the running shot when the ground is firm. We score the golf first, and the golf here is a long, straight examination with no gimmicks in the record to hide behind.

In the full North Carolina state ranking, Anderson Creek's argument is access as much as architecture. The state's famous golf concentrates in private clubs and one very famous resort zip code. A public course of this length and pedigree, priced for a military town, is a different kind of asset.

The concession: the record is thin on signature holes, and we will not invent one. A 2001 course also plays in the shadow of older, more celebrated designs nearby, and Best New awards fade. What does not fade is 7,240 yards of public golf by a designer who grew up in this state and chose it for his first signature course.

Anderson Creek will never be the first name out of a stranger's mouth when North Carolina golf comes up. It might be the most useful course in its county anyway: a tour player's first design, open to everybody, an hour from the famous names and free of their tee time lottery.

The Fort Liberty factor

Location is a fact, not a footnote. Spring Lake sits next to Fort Liberty, and a public course of this size in a military town gets a particular kind of use: young soldiers with afternoons off, retirees who settled nearby, families learning the game without a country club bill. A 7,240 yard Davis Love III course serving that population is a different social object from the same design dropped into a resort market. The tee sheet stays democratic because the town is.

That also explains the design brief Love was really working to. A first signature course is a résumé, and résumés get read by future clients. Naming it Best New Golf Course in North Carolina in 2001 meant the résumé worked. But the choice to build it here, on the Sandhills edge rather than in a gated development, meant the course had to function as everyday public golf from the day it opened. Length from the back tees for the strong player, public access for everybody else: that combination is rarer than it should be in a state that markets itself on golf.

Harnett County is not where the tour buses stop. Anderson Creek is the argument that it holds a course worth stopping for anyway, built by the most accomplished North Carolina golfer of his generation, in the place he chose to start.