Architect: Brian Schneider and Blake Conant
From its inception, Old Barnwell was meant to be different. Owner Nick Schreiber wanted to create a private club that was truly accessible, affordable, and put an overall family experience first. The course embraces this idea as well. The playing corridors are wide and receptive, but Blake and Brian created an incredible set of greens that demand your attention from the tee shot (and maybe even more attention when you miss them). However, the greens are such that varying pin positions and winds mean that the ideal target in the fairway could change on any given day. Add to that a great variety of fairway contour and slope with bunkers never far from where you want to be, and you have a course that members will never tire of. Many will take notice of the bold shaping and above ground features scattered throughout the course, and rightly so. These features and the overall aesthetic are so seldom seen in golf (especially in America) and help to create a unique sense of place for the club. But I hope that Blake and Brian will get the deserved credit for the strategies of these holes and their brilliant use of a site that you wouldn't necessarily expect to yield such a brilliant course. For my part, this was my first experience as what you might call a "shaper", though I feel far from deserving of such a title. Blake and Brian allowed me the opportunity to take a crack at shaping many different parts of the course including several fairways and even more bunkers, many of which are gratefully still there. I was allowed to fail and change and tweak and learn the finer details to look for. There's not a bunker on the golf course that neither I or my coworker was in with both a machine and a shovel at some point. This level of care and detail maximized every feature on the golf course, and I hope nothing more than for members and their families to go to Old Barnwell and have a blast playing such a unique course.
#51 Golf Magazine Top 100 Courses in the U.S.