Wampanoag Country Club

About the club

Wampanoag has always possessed a gracefully gliding property in the now wooded suburbs of West Hartford, but it had long ago lost the finer points of its 1926 Donald Ross design. Modifications through the decades, including a poorly-received renovation in the 1980s that added the era’s popular mounds and moguls, pushed the design increasingly out of time and place. In 2022, architects Tyler Rae and Kyle Franz, working with historian-consultant Brad Klein (a former Wampanoag member), commenced a comprehensive restoration of the course that included several new and newly enlarged greens and tees and significant tree removal. Back are Ross’s cops and chiseled bunkers rotated at angles into the avenues of play setting up set-piece strategies. Rae and Franz restored lost bunkers and doubled their overall square footage, twisting them suggestively across fairways as Ross had them, and also re-introduced short top-shot bunkers that rarely come into play but create depth and directional confusion. Wampanoag finished fourth in the 2023 Best Renovation awards (out of 30 courses), and after nearly 100 years feels once again like the golf course it was meant to be.