Among Sea Pines trio of golf courses, time is finally right for Ocean Course transformation

The Ocean Course is the firstborn among Sea Pines Resort's threesome of golf destinations, but it has had to wait its turn as the resort's renovation addressed every other part of its golf portfolio over the past nine years.

Now with some $52 million already invested on the resort's other courses and two new clubhouses, there's just one piece left to complete Sea Pines' ambitious renewal - the piece that started it all.

"They've put so much into the new clubhouses, really all the amenities there," said Mark Love, president of Love Golf Design.

"(The Ocean Course) was a nice product when it was originally done, then it was renovated in the 1990s. Now to keep up with the quality of everything that's been done over there, it just has to be remade."

The golf landscape has changed significantly since the Ocean Course went through Mark McCumber's 1995 upgrade. The titanium driver was in its infancy, though Callaway's Big Bertha was catching on fast. The Pro V1 ball was still five years away.

Though high-level players drew the greatest benefit from such advances, many recreational players found something to help them hit the ball farther and (mostly) straighter.

Needs also were becoming evident underneath golfers' feet. Greens typically have a life span of a little beyond 12 years, and the irrigation process has transformed via computer analysis.

The grasses have a life cycle, and the infrastructure has a life cycle," said Cary Corbitt, Sea Pines' vice president of sports and operations. "You have to address it at some point in time and if you don't, it will start showing you. Conditioning will suffer. So now we're fortunate to be aggressive to deal with it."

Before the Ocean Course, though, the Sea Marsh layout had greater needs. And not all of them had to do with drainage or irrigation or grasses.

Sometime between its 1964 debut and contemporary times, "Sea Marsh" went from sounding exotic to, well, a bug haven.

"Sea Marsh at the time was the least-played of the golf courses, had the least demand of the golf courses and so we needed to address that," Corbitt said.

"It just really needed a facelift and a new identity. Sea Marsh - a lot of people thought that name was buggy. You don't want to go out and play a golf course that's got a lot of bugs. It wasn't, but perception sometimes becomes reality."

And so Sea Marsh moved to the top of the renovation list, with Pete Dye brought in to create a whole new test over the old routing.

Thus the Sea Marsh became Heron Point.

Though Dye's greens initially were criticized as too severe for the resort player, recent tweaks led to Heron Point being named South Carolina's 2015 "Course of the Year."

Next came clubhouse renovations - first a new Plantation Club facility that serves both the Ocean Course and Heron Point, then the elegant $23 million structure overlooking Harbour Town that opened prior to this year's RBC Heritage.

Harbour Town itself got attention over the summer - every blade of grass was replaced and its irrigation system upgraded.

Less than a month after Harbour Town reopened, the Ocean Course finally moved to the renovation forefront.

"It now fits into the time schedule of when we could do it," Corbitt said. "And it certainly is the time."

This story was originally published December 17, 2015 at 2:33 PM with the headline "Among Sea Pines trio of golf courses, time is finally right for Ocean Course transformation."