DUNEDIN, Fla. – I’m a sucker for a municipal course, but I rarely played Dunedin Golf Club when I lived just a few miles away in the early 2000s. The layout carried the name of famous architect Donald Ross as the original designer, but there just wasn’t much Ross left in the ground. Other than accessibility, there was little to draw fans of golf architecture to the course that sits less than half a mile from the Intracoastal Waterway north of St. Petersburg.
That has all changed. Architect Kris Spence led a sympathetic restoration that wrapped up in 2024, and Dunedin again is one of the finest municipal courses in Florida. Turns out, all the Ross features were still there, only buried under multiple renovations that altered Ross’s intent. Spence made it his mission to reclaim the Ross history on Dunedin’s behalf.
No. 18 of Dunedin Golf Club in Florida shines in the evening after a restoration by Kris Spence.
There’s plenty of history to offer. The course opened in 1927 as Dunedin Isles Golf Club, and it immediately began hosting PGA Tour players with the 1927 Florida Open. Plenty of top players – Gene Sarazen, Tommy Armour, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson as examples – played events and exhibitions at the club.
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The Great Depression slowed things down significantly, and in 1938, the City of Dunedin took over the property. In 1945, the PGA of America selected the club as its home base, leased the club and renamed it PGA National, then renovated the course. It was home to the first PGA School in 1947 and the first PGA Merchandise Show in 1957, during which equipment was sold from the trunks of cars in the parking lot. The PGA of America remained at Dunedin through 1962, when it moved across the state to Palm Beach Gardens. The golf club was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.
Plenty of change came to the course, as well, and the various renovations over the decades resulted in Ross’s work sliding into the turf. But when Spence peeled back all the layers, he found Ross’s original greens and bunkers in the layers of dirt.
“At Dunedin, the most pleasant surprise was that I could see the old greens extending out beneath those renovations,” Spence said after completing the restoration in 2024. “They had never been destroyed – just buried. We were able to excavate, expose and restore them exactly as Ross designed them. … It was almost an archaeological dig. Once we peeled away the newer material, we found the original greens that had been buried for 75 years.”
The greens of recent decades had shrunk and become flat, their contours muted. Spence erased them, restoring in their place the Ross designs that feature often bold contours mixed with plenty of subtleties. He also returned the bunkers to their original style with flattish bottoms and sometimes steep grass faces. Many fairway bunkers were moved to address the distance gains provided by modern equipment, but their style is pure Ross. The net result is a greater emphasis on strategy and precise shotmaking.
Before the restoration by Kris Spence, the 17th green at Dunedin Golf Club featured a single bunker guarding the left side of the green.
In the restoration, Kris Spence installed a cluster of four bunkers in the 17th fairway, added two more just short and left of the green, and also added one more bunker on the right side of the green. The hole still offers a chance to bounce a ball onto the green.
A great example of Spence’s restoration is available at the par-5 17th hole. The longest tee was relocated 25 yards back to accommodate modern distance gains, and a section of the fairway was raised slightly to improve drainage. The most striking element of the hole is now a cluster of four bunkers on the right side of the fairway, affecting the second shot for most players. Two more bunkers were restored on the left, short of the green. Another bunker was brought back on the right side of the green. In all, what had recently been a rather boring hole with just one sand trap to the left of the green now provides plenty of strategic interest from the tee to the restored Ross green, which still can be approached with a ground-game run-up shot. Such examples abound on other holes, too.
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“Players are going to experience the greens and bunkers as he envisioned them,” Spence said of Ross. “There are some difficulties and depth to it all, and the bunkers are very challenging. That’s what’s so unique about Ross — he brought the Scottish style of golf to America, with bump-and-runs and low approaches that you can now experience again at Dunedin.”
The restoration was completed for less than $6 million, including a new irrigation system and other infrastructure upgrades, said Blair Kline, Dunedin’s general manager of golf operations. “People are going out of their way to come here and play,” he said. “It’s helping put Dunedin in front of golfers who may not have been aware of this community.”
The green fees are in keeping with municipal golf, too, ranging from $85 to $140 depending on season, day of the week and time of day. Locals get a discount. It’s safe to say that if I still lived nearby, I would be there all the time.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Dunedin Golf Club returns to Donald Ross glory after restoration
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