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Trinity Forest: New AT&T Byron Nelson host will force pros to think
DALLAS — The latest addition to the PGA Tour circuit is unlike your standard tournament golf course.
Trinity Forest Golf Club, the new home to the AT&T Byron Nelson, is a 7,370-yard, par-71 layout designed by the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. Forget about a well-coifed, lush look with bunkers lining the fairways and everything right in front of you. This one looks more like a holdover from an aerial bomb-drop exercise. Tour players will have to look long and hard to find what they need to maneuver around.
The 18-hole golf course is part of a new private club that occupies an abandoned landfill nine miles south of downtown Dallas. All told, it comprises 400 acres of floodplain, forest and capped construction debris, now built out to include a massive practice range that’s home to the Cameron McCormick Altus Performance Institute and a nine-hole par-3 course that serves the First Tee of Greater Dallas. The facility sits at the center of the 6,000-acre (9.4 square mile) Trinity Forest, the largest urban woodland in the country.
The course has the scruffy, links-inspired look that Coore & Crenshaw have honed at leading resort courses like Streamsong Red in Florida, Bandon Trails in Oregon and Sand Valley in Wisconsin. Except that they all occupy compelling terrain. Trinity Forest occupies relatively flat ground, with no more than 20 feet of elevation change across the site.
When Coore & Crenshaw first assessed the land, it did not show much promise. But club co-founder and president Jonas Woods, a real estate investor and commercial investment manager with experience in buying and developing golf properties in the area, proved persuasive, not least because he was closely allied with movers and shakers in town, including city officials interested in converting the abandoned landfill for community recreation.