Oakland Hills makes jump in Golf Magazine Top 100 course rankings following restoration

Oakland Hills Country Club’s South Course recently celebrated the completion of a restoration project to improve the course’s conditioning, in part, through the support of Bernhard and Co.

The renovation project allowed the course to make a huge jump in Golf Magazine’s World Top 100 Golf Courses rankings list rising 41 places in the new rankings list, moving into the No. 31 position.

The renovation work was carried out by course architects, Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. The club’s director of agronomy, Phil Cuffare, and his team of turf professionals were tasked with elevating the conditioning on the South Course to its highest ever level. The restoration project has allowed the course to offer its originally intended playing style, with larger fairway landing areas and greens.

“We are very excited about the recognition that our famed South Course is receiving after the completion of its extensive restoration,” Cuffare said. “To bring back to life something that had been lost for so long is a great feeling and we are continuing to express that through our conditioning efforts.”

The project involved the course being largely stripped back to the bare soil, to make way for a total revamp. Each hole was covered with sand in traditional USGA specification, meaning that mower blades were constantly subjected to sand damage. The renovation team operated with Bernhard and Co.’s Express Dual 4250 Reel Grinder and Anglemaster 4500 Bedknife Grinder machines in the workshop.

“The ultimate compliment to great golf course architecture is great conditioning,” Cuffare added. “The most important aspect of our agronomic programs is turf health, and the cornerstone of achieving that is using our reel and bedknife grinding machinery to sharpen mowing equipment used to maintain our fine turf areas.”

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