Tag Archive for: bunkers

ZLine bunkers at The Rose

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ZLine bunkers at The Rose: The Rose is a new golf club, located close to the city of Athens in Georgia, due to open in 2026, and being developed by two-time All American and 2001 Walker Cupper Nick Cassini and his brother Dimitri, and designed by Oklahoma-based architect Tripp Davis. And The Rose’s bunkers are being lined using the ZLine system, which Davis has used on several of his recent projects.

“We are now grassing the course, and will be doing so until into the fall,” says Davis. “And the bunkers are being lined at the moment as well. Our team have been trained by ZLine in how to install the product, and they’re hard at work doing so.”

ZLine bunkers at The Rose

ZLine bunkers at The Rose

The Rose will be private, and a healthy number of members have already been enrolled. “It is a beautiful site, fairly open,” says Davis. “200 of the 300 acres we are using for the golf course were harvested for pine trees, so we have mostly cleared lesser quality hardwoods and volunteer underbrush. The land has a Shinnecock feel to it, with really nice rolling contours. It will have 105 acres of turf and 195 acres of thinner native grasses near play and what we are calling our ‘heathland’ areas of native grass and small indigenous shrubs more out of play. The developers want the course to be in the style of early American classics, so the sand lines on the bunkers are very high. When you have a high sand line, you need to be sure that the sand will hold on the bunker faces, and ZLine holds extremely well. Additionally, the bunker sands used in Georgia need to drain quickly to perform well, and ZLine drains better than any other bunker liner product I have come across.”

“The course has turned out really well, and I can’t wait to see it finished – I think members and their guests will love it,” he says. “And the ZLine bunkers will play a significant role in that.”

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ZLine bunkers at The Rose

/in , /by

ZLine bunkers at The Rose: The Rose is a new golf club, located close to the city of Athens in Georgia, due to open in 2026, and being developed by two-time All American and 2001 Walker Cupper Nick Cassini and his brother Dimitri, and designed by Oklahoma-based architect Tripp Davis. And The Rose’s bunkers are being lined using the ZLine system, which Davis has used on several of his recent projects.

“We are now grassing the course, and will be doing so until into the fall,” says Davis. “And the bunkers are being lined at the moment as well. Our team have been trained by ZLine in how to install the product, and they’re hard at work doing so.”

ZLine bunkers at The Rose

ZLine bunkers at The Rose

The Rose will be private, and a healthy number of members have already been enrolled. “It is a beautiful site, fairly open,” says Davis. “200 of the 300 acres we are using for the golf course were harvested for pine trees, so we have mostly cleared lesser quality hardwoods and volunteer underbrush. The land has a Shinnecock feel to it, with really nice rolling contours. It will have 105 acres of turf and 195 acres of thinner native grasses near play and what we are calling our ‘heathland’ areas of native grass and small indigenous shrubs more out of play. The developers want the course to be in the style of early American classics, so the sand lines on the bunkers are very high. When you have a high sand line, you need to be sure that the sand will hold on the bunker faces, and ZLine holds extremely well. Additionally, the bunker sands used in Georgia need to drain quickly to perform well, and ZLine drains better than any other bunker liner product I have come across.”

“The course has turned out really well, and I can’t wait to see it finished – I think members and their guests will love it,” he says. “And the ZLine bunkers will play a significant role in that.”

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ZLine bunkers ‘great’ during Chevron tournament

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ZLine bunkers ‘great’ during Chevron tournament: Nelly Korda’s victory in the recent Chevron Championship at Carlton Woods outside Houston was her fifth straight tournament win (and her second Major title), equalling the LPGA record previously held by Nancy Lopez and Annika Sorenstam.

Between the 2023 and 2024 iterations of the tournament, the bunkers on the Nicklaus Signature course at Carlton Woods were reconstructed using the ZLine bunker liner system.

ZLine bunkers ‘great’ during Chevron tournament

ZLine bunkers ‘great’ during Chevron tournament

“We have known for some time that we needed to redo the bunkers on the Nicklaus course because of their age, the effects of storm damage, edging, and contamination,” says club director of agronomy Tim Huber. “We took the decision to renovate as far back as 2021, but with the Chevron tournament coming here in 2023, we obviously had to plan the project carefully, so we scheduled it for after the 2023 championship. The 2023 Chevron ended on April 23, and we started the rebuild on May 1. Chris Cochran of the Nicklaus company oversaw the work, which was carried out by contractor Sanders Golf. The build wrapped on November 1 last year, and the course was perfect for the championship last week.”

The Nicklaus course opened in 2001, the first of Carlton Woods’s two eighteens, and the bunkers were initially lined with a textile liner, but Huber says that two decades in the ground had left this practically non-existent. “There were traces of the liner left under the bunkers, but it was in no sense a barrier, and there was no way it could be patched, so it had to be replaced,” he says. “I chose the ZLine system because it has a long lifespan and is extremely resilient – it carries a fifteen-year warranty and even if you use a mechanical rake in the bunkers you’d have a hard time tearing it – because it is very competitively priced, and because it is low visibility. We chose ProAngle sand from Ohio, which is a very high-performance sand, and is very white. ZLine customized the liner to match the sand color, so if by chance a small amount of liner gets exposed on the face of a bunker, there’s no way the golfer would notice, and there’s no UV degradation.”

“I think ZLine is flat out the best bunker liner on the market,” he adds. “High performance sands are great, but they are extremely expensive – especially when they have to be transported a long way, which is the case for us as we simply don’t have good sands available locally – and if you are going to install them, you need to be very confident that your bunkers won’t contaminate and will keep the sand in place – you need to trust your liner. The bunkers were great during the tournament, and I’m confident they will continue to be great for our members.”

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Ryder Cup on course with Capillary Bunkers

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Ryder Cup on course with Capillary Bunkers: Next week’s Ryder Cup at the Marco Simone Golf & Country Club outside the Italian capital, Rome, will again be played on a course whose bunkers have been lined with the Capillary Bunkers system.

Marco Simone, originally designed by American architect Jim Fazio, was completely rebuilt by Dave Sampson of European Golf Design during 2019 and 2020. The course’s back nine was entirely grassed by the end of the summer of 2019, but the Covid-19 pandemic made phase two, the front nine, a little trickier.

Ryder Cup on course with Capillary Bunkers

Ryder Cup on course with Capillary Bunkers

“I was on site in March 2020, the day Italy shut its borders, so I had to get out of the country very, very quickly,” says CapillaryFlow EMEA sales manager Kneale Diamond. “But SOL Golf, the contractor who built the course are very experienced and extremely good at what they do, so all was well.”

Around 8,000 square metres (86,000 square feet) of bunkers were built and lined. “Obviously, the bunker drainage is vital for the Ryder Cup – given the time of year when it is played, there isn’t a lot of spare time if it rains heavily,” says Diamond. “But even more important than that is the quality of surface in the bunkers. This level of competition demands a perfect sand surface, and only Capillary Bunkers can combine outstanding drainage performance with world-class, consistent surfaces.”

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Bunkers still drain six years on

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Bunkers still drain six years on: Opened in 1924, Dubsdread in Orlando is the oldest public course in Central Florida. Formerly the site of the Orlando Golf Open, it played host to great names such as Hogan and Snead.

The course was rebuilt by architect Mike Dasher in 2007/8, and its bunkers were reconstructed at the same time, with new sub-surface drainage lines, but no liners.

Bunkers still drain six years on

Bunkers still drain six years on

Superintendent Alan Lichter says it became clear to him fairly quickly that those bunkers would not stand up to the amount of play the busy course receives, especially in Florida summers, where signficant rains are an everyday occurrence.

“The bunkers just kept washing out all the time,” he says. “So we started talking about bunker liners in about 2012, and did a demonstration project on our chipping green bunker using a liner from a company that later went bust. So we started looking at the alternatives, and that’s when I came across Capillary.”

Installing liners across the golf course was a significant investment for a municipal course, so Lichter began tracking the amount of time it took to fix the bunkers after rain events. “It wasn’t pretty, and that convinced the powers that be at the city that it was a good investment,” he explains. “The payback to the city was pretty obvious, and the improvements in playability that would follow were also a big issue. So we started the project in 2017, working with Benson Construction, a Georgia-based contractor. It took three months to install the liner in all the bunkers.

Six years on from the installation and Lichter is still extremely happy with the performance of his bunkers. “I love them,” he says. “They are still draining as they were the first day. We had seven tenths of an inch of rain last night, there’s no water in the bunkers.”

Given the extremes of the Florida climate, Lichter’s bunkers have had to face up to some pretty severe weather – and he says they have come through with colours still flying. Even after Hurricane Ian dumped eleven inches of rain on Dubsdread last year, the Capillary Bunkers still performed. “It took one person – me! – about twelve houtrs to fix the bunkers after Ian,” he says. “Before we installed the Capillary liner, it would have needed three guys working solidly for a week.”

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