Barefoot Resort - Love Course

The Love Course at Barefoot Resort is a Davis Love III design from 2000 that is widely considered the most balanced and accessible of Barefoot's four championship layouts, featuring generous fairways, strategic bunkering, and an emphasis on smart course management over pure power. The par-72, 7,047-yard course carries a rating of 72.1 and slope of 139, rewarding golfers who execute well-placed approach shots rather than simply bombing the driver. Love's design incorporates natural wetlands, coastal pines, and the rolling Lowcountry terrain that characterizes the Grand Strand's best golf courses.

The Love Course at Barefoot Resort in North Myrtle Beach has held the position of the resort's most popular layout since the four-course complex opened in 2000, a sustained popularity that speaks to Davis Love III's success in creating a design that bridges the gap between genuine championship challenge and the kind of pleasurable round that golfers want to repeat. Golf Magazine's inclusion of the Love Course among its "Top 100 You Can Play" confirmed within years of opening what players were already discovering: this is Myrtle Beach's most balanced public championship test. Davis Love III brought to Barefoot the perspective of a PGA Tour winner who had spent thousands of rounds studying what makes a hole great from the player's side. He had watched the best golfers in the world navigate course designs for his entire career, and his design philosophy reflected that: he wanted a course that rewarded skillful play without abandoning the recreational golfer, that provided genuine risk-reward decisions without resorting to penal hazard placement, and that used the natural character of the South Carolina lowcountry as its primary design language.

The Love Course opened in 2000 as part of the most ambitious multi-course development in American golf history, the only project ever to debut four championship layouts simultaneously. Love was working alongside Pete Dye, Tom Fazio, and Greg Norman — a remarkable peer group — and his course distinguished itself through a combination of accessibility and strategic richness that neither the confrontational Dye Course nor the naturalistic Norman Course quite achieved. The course plays to just over 7,000 yards at par 72, with five sets of tees spanning roughly 2,000 yards of range. Love's routing takes players through the Barefoot property's most varied terrain, with holes three through seven incorporating the remains of an old plantation home — the crumbling walls and overgrown foundations integrated into the design as historical markers within the playing corridors.

The connection to the site's antebellum history gives the Love Course a sense of place that purely manufactured resort courses rarely achieve. Love drew inspiration from Pinehurst No. 2 in designing the green complexes — firm, closely mowed surrounds that feed the ball away from the putting surface when approach shots miss the target. The philosophy encourages creativity and varied short-game options rather than the binary outcome of greens fronted by water or bunkers. Champion UltraDwarf greens and 419 Bermuda rough provide playing surfaces calibrated to firm, fast conditions.

The generous fairways invite confident driving while demanding proper positioning for approaches played to Love's complexly sloped putting surfaces. The Love Course has sustained its Golf Magazine ranking across multiple editions, a longevity that reflects consistent conditioning and the fundamental soundness of a design built to deliver an excellent round to a wide range of players. For many visiting golfers, it represents the ideal entry point into the Barefoot portfolio — accessible enough to enjoy, demanding enough to respect, and beautiful enough to remember.