Belfair Golf Club: East Course

Belfair's East Course is a Tom Fazio design that opened in 1999 as a links-style counterpoint to the club's wooded West Course. Naturalized sand areas, native grasses and an open Lowcountry landscape give the East a distinctly different feel; a 2018 Troon-led renovation restored green complexes to Fazio's original GPS-mapped sizes and regrassed the course with TifEagle and Latitude 36.

Belfair Golf Club, located in Bluffton, South Carolina, was planned as a 36-hole private club whose two courses would both be designed by Tom Fazio. The first course, the West, opened in 1995 and won Golf Digest's Best New Private Course in America award in 1996. On the strength of that debut, Fazio was retained to design the club's second 18, the East Course, which opened in 1999. Where the West Course plays through a wooded, tree-lined corridor landscape, Fazio built the East as a links-style counterpoint. The site's open terrain is used as a design element rather than a limitation, with naturalized sand areas, native grasses and broad horizons taking the place of tree framing. The East plays to a par of 71 at 6,936 yards, and the open character gives the course a different feel not only visually but in the way wind affects play from day to day. In 2018 the East Course underwent a four-month renovation as part of a broader $20 million long-range investment plan by the club. The project, overseen by director of agronomy Keith Einwag and Troon's senior vice president of golf course development Ron Despain, restored every green complex to its original size using GPS coordinates from Fazio's initial design drawings. Greens were resurfaced with TifEagle bermudagrass, and fairways, tees and collars were regrassed with Latitude 36 bermudagrass. All greenside and fairway bunkers were updated with new drainage and filled with G-Angle sand. Construction was carried out by McDonald and Sons, and the course reopened in October 2018. Belfair today sits on roughly 1,100 acres of riverfront property and continues to operate as a private, two-course club. The pairing of Fazio's wooded West and links-style East remains the club's defining golf identity.