Montclair (First & Third)

Host venue for the 1973 US Women’s Amateur and the 1985 US Amateur, Montclair Golf Club boasts twenty-seven holes designed by Donald Ross, with a 4th nine from Charles Banks. Course revisions down the years have been made by Robert Trent Jones and by his son Rees.

Brian Schneider, senior design associate at Renaissance Design, renovated the Third nine in 2020 and built a new 5th hole. The renovation was reported as follows by Golf Course Industry in November 2020:

This multi-year project paired Montclair Golf Club director of golf course operations Michael Campbell with Brian Schneider, senior design associate at Renaissance Design. The team looked at historic aerial photographs, the oldest from 1930, to guide the project.

“We’re not going back exactly to 1930 but very, very close,” said Campbell, who noted that Bobby Jones once described Montclair as the “longest short course I ever played.” “We are redoing the bunkers and rebuilt four greens (3, 5, 6 and 9) on the Third Nine. Those greens that we’re not redoing are being re-contoured along the perimeters to regain lost pin positions. And we’re re-building tees. It’s all being done with a 1930’s flavor, but to modern specifications.”

Phase I was completed and in play this past golf season, with an entirely new fifth hole that improved overall design and allowed for construction of a new short game area. Phase III, which focuses on the Second Nine, is scheduled to begin in late July 2021. The final phase, to restore the Fourth Nine — Banks’s holes, which are dramatically different from the Ross 27, featuring huge elevated greens and big, flat-bottomed bunkers — is scheduled for 2022.