Finley Golf Club, Re-Imagined – University of North Carolina Athletics

A year-long renovation and overhaul of UNC’s Finley Golf Club ends this month with the dedication ceremony on Thursday and the course and practice facility opening to members and the public on a limited basis starting next Wednesday, October 18. 
 
The design changes were engineered by Love Golf Design and its founder, former Tar Heel Davis Love III (1982-86), company president Mark Love, also a Carolina graduate (1988) and former Tar Heel golfer, and lead architect Scot Sherman. 
 
“I honestly don’t remember a lot about the original Finley we played in the ’80s,” Davis says. “I remember it was wet a lot. And I remember several par 4s were routinely drivable. What we have now is a completely new golf course, reimagined. It’s a lot more interesting, more classic and timeless. I think it looks like some ‘Golden Age Era’ designs. It’s good for the university community and good for the expert players to give them the training they need.”
 
“When Davis and I were in school, we played Finley out of convenience,” adds Mark.  “But if we wanted a more stern test of golf, we drove to Pinehurst. Now the team has it right here. It will be a great benefit to the men’s and women’s golf teams.”
 
And so begins era No. 3 of a facility that has been rebranded as Finley Golf Club. 
 
The first chapter began in the summer of 1950 when Carolina Athletic Director Chuck Erickson, golf architect George Cobb and Raleigh construction magnate A.E. Finley pooled their vision and resources to build a course on land donated to the university by professor and noted botanist William Coker. Cobb returned in 1982 when three holes were remade into intramural and athletic fields and three new ones built in the woods around the Highland Woods Road neighborhood. That was the course Davis played while earning All-America honors three times from 1983-85. 
 
The second iteration came in 1999 when architect Tom Fazio was retained to re-design the entire course and build a new one on the same site. He used some of the original corridors but not much else, and Finley was added to the portfolio of arguably the nation’s most prolific architect of the 1980s through the global financial collapse of 2008. One of the highlights of the project was a modern drainage system that helped solve the age-old problem of the course sitting in a low-lying area and being…