Barefoot Resort - Fazio Course

The Fazio Course at Barefoot Resort is a par-71 layout designed with a classic Lowcountry character, featuring live oaks draped in Spanish moss, native grasses, and natural wetland areas along the Intracoastal Waterway in North Myrtle Beach. The course stands out for its high slope of 152 from the Platinum tees, making it one of the more challenging resort layouts along the Grand Strand.

Barefoot Resort's Fazio Course in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, stands as Tom Fazio's contribution to one of American golf's most ambitious multi-course resort developments — a four-course complex designed simultaneously by four architects of exceptional standing. When Barefoot Resort opened in 2000 with courses by Fazio, Pete Dye, Greg Norman, and Davis Love III on a single property, it represented a concentration of design talent without parallel in South Carolina golf history. Tom Fazio brought to his Barefoot commission the same meticulous attention to site character and playing variety that had distinguished his private club work at Belfair, Kiawah Island, and Berkeley Hall. The par-71 layout of 6,834 yards was crafted with what Fazio described as Lowcountry charm — live oaks, loblolly pines, natural areas, and native grasses giving the course an organic character that the industrial-scale development context of the Grand Strand makes genuinely difficult to achieve. Where other Grand Strand courses accept the coastal plain's flatness as an immutable condition, Fazio used natural elevation changes and selective earthwork to create a course with genuine visual variety across the round.

One of the Fazio Course's most distinctive architectural features is its unusual run of three consecutive par-3 holes at numbers six, seven, and eight — a sequence that is a rarity in championship golf design and that creates a demanding mid-round stretch of short-game precision requirements. Three par-3s in succession require three successive approaches to defended greens under pressure, with no reset hole between them to allow a wandering focus to return. That sequence has become one of the course's signature characteristics and a test that golfers discuss long after completing the round. Unlike the resort's other courses, the Fazio Course does not return to the clubhouse after the ninth hole — a continental-style routing that adds to the European-inspired character Fazio pursued for the layout. This departure from the conventional American 9-and-9 format creates a different experiential rhythm for the round, giving the design a through-routing quality more common to older British courses than to American resort golf.

The absence of a midway clubhouse stop also creates a particular quality of immersion in the round that the out-and-back format provides. Water hazards appear on fifteen of the eighteen holes — a frequency that demands continuous awareness of approach angles and shot positioning throughout the round. The combination of the course's live oak corridors, native grass rough areas, and the consistent water presence creates a course that rewards strategic discipline over aggressive play, reflecting Fazio's consistent design philosophy of rewarding thoughtful golfers rather than simply penalizing reckless ones. GN-1 hybrid turf on tees and fairways, Tif-Sport Bermuda on approach areas, and Champion UltraDwarf grass on greens reflect the modern agronomic standards that Barefoot Resort has maintained to keep the Fazio Course competitive with the region's best-conditioned resort facilities. The Grand Strand's golf market is among the most competitive in the world, with hundreds of courses competing for visitor rounds, and the Fazio Course's conditioning and design quality have sustained it as one of the area's premier offerings more than two decades after its opening.

Barefoot Resort's full four-course complex — with the Fazio, Dye, Norman, and Love courses available to guests within a single resort stay — provides a breadth of architectural experience that positions the development as a genuine destination for golfers seeking variety and quality across multiple days of play. The Fazio Course serves as the complex's most thoughtfully crafted offering, the one where the design intelligence most consistently reveals itself to golfers who engage with it attentively.