From the shadow of the U.S. Open at Pinehurst, a game-changer emerges

In Pinehurst, N.C., a place that’s technically a village but fancies itself as a cradle, there’s long existed this deep desire to be the motherland of American golf. It’s why a town founded by a Boston soda magnate in 1895 was quickly outfitted with two nine-hole golf courses designed by Leroy Culver and John Dunn Tucker. In 1900, a Scotsman named Donald Ross arrived as golf pro and married the two nines into an 18-hole course. Then he set out in 1907 to build a second; a routing that would come to be known as Course No. 2. Then he built a third. And a fourth.

Ross left the property to build gems near and far, but Pinehurst was home. Early on, he built a cottage next to No. 2’s third green, where he lived until his death in 1948. From there, Ross saw firsthand the inception of what would become this country’s largest golf resort — a mosaic shaped by seminal golf architects. The property grew by five more courses between 1961 and 2014, sketched by Ellis Maples, George and Tom Fazio, Rees Jones and Jack Nicklaus. As a foray into the modern era, Pinehurst enlisted the biggest current names in course design to honor Ross’ original genius with artful renovations. Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw restored No. 2 in 2010, while Gil Hanse redesigned No. 4 in 2018. Hanse added a clever new nine-hole short course to the property for good measure.

In September 2020, the United States Golf Association named Pinehurst its first “anchor site.” Going all-in, the USGA constructed a seven-acre campus walking distance from the resort’s main clubhouse, essentially ratifying the area’s claim as “the cradle of American golf.” This week, for the fourth time since 1999, the U.S. Open will be played at No. 2, as it will again in 2029, 2035, 2041 and 2047.

So, yes, it’s a big deal to move dirt in Pinehurst.

This brings us to a 900-acre expanse of land about five miles south of Pinehurst’s clubhouse. An expanse of deep woods, dunes of bygone mining operations, the remnants of an old peach tree farm, and an overgrown golf course that shuttered after the 2008 recession. Pinehurst acquired the land over the years, eying future expansion.

This is where, from January 2023 to April 2024, the resort’s newest 18 holes were carved across 250 acres.

Pinehurst No. 10 is being billed as one of the best new courses in an explosive, competitive space of resort course construction. That’s what Tom Doak was paid to deliver. The virtuoso architect is among a finite group of active course designers whose brand recognition is as great as his talent. Doak, Hanse and the team of Coore & Crenshaw are the ultimate commodities in modern course design. In the ongoing arms race among deep-pocket destination resorts, their work is nearly as consequential for its instant status as it is their unquestionable quality.

It is no coincidence that, as the self-assigned bloodline of American golf, Pinehurst saw Doak as a necessary link in its lineage.

Nor is it a coincidence the resort hustled to open No. 10 two months before this year’s U.S. Open.

“We were very fortunate,” Pinehurst resort president Tom Pashley said, “with our timing to be able to get Tom Doak to design this golf course. It’s a marvel to see someone who can look at a piece of land and very quickly learn how to stitch it all together.”

Except, while No. 10 now has its rightful place on Doak’s mantle, there might be a legacy much larger in the production of that stitching. Something just as worthy of the attention.

Yes, Doak sketched the new course’s lines and angles, but it was 38-year-old German Angela Moser who oversaw the day-in, day-out construction. As is her style, the project’s lead design associate rather quietly delivered perhaps the most significant undertaking by a modern female architect in the exceedingly narrow world of golf course construction. After years spent working for Hanse and Doak on various high-profile builds, Moser was, as Doak puts it, “out in front” for the first time at Pinehurst No. 10.

“A big, big deal,” says fellow architect Christine Fraser. “I popped a bottle of champagne for Angela. It was so massive. You need that kind platform and that stage to really be able to show off, and she did it. She held up her end of the bargain.”

It’s enough to make you wonder: Who is the woman responsible for overseeing construction of the first new course built by Pinehurst in three decades? And if she’s good enough to shape the sands at the game’s preeminent U.S. resort, will she soon be tabbed to design a course herself?

And, if not, why?

An aerial view of the eighth hole at Pinehurst No. 10, the newest course at the storied North Carolina resort. (Courtesy Pinehurst Resort)

It was sometime around age 14. That’s the first time Angela Moser vividly remembers seeing a ball roll upon a green and feeling the doors of her mind swing open. Seeing it slow here, accelerate there. Frictional force dictated by ground, gravity and the gods’ whims. Moving. Reacting. Young Moser realized that someone, somewhere, intentionally designed that green to manipulate that ball. It became all she could see.

Moser was a promising junior golfer at the time. By 16, she was a single-handicap, regularly leaving home in Augsburg, Bavaria, to play in tournaments around Germany. Chasing college or professional golf was never an interest, though. Instead, she doodled golf holes and studied landscapes. When she was young, Moser had been fascinated by a great uncle who worked as an architect renovating historic German monasteries. Once she fell in love with golf and nature, those passions combined to chart one of the more unlikely career choices for a young girl in Germany. She entered college to study landscape architecture with an end goal of building golf courses around the world.

“It never crossed my mind that I was doing something especially different,” Moser says 20 some-odd years later.

Today’s golf architecture landscape counts at best a handful of women known to be working in the field. Following the deaths of trailblazers Victoria Martz in 2017 and Alice Dye (Pete’s wife) in 2019, the American Society of Golf Course Architects is now down to two active female members. Jan Bel Jan and Cynthia Dye McGarey are the lone current ASGCA members. Out of 180.

Around the world, Lyne Morrison (Australia) and Kristine Kerr (New Zealand) are credited with some international courses. Giulia Ferroni of Italy is currently working in the United Kingdom. Fraser, a Canadian, has worked throughout Europe, and recently became the first female architect to undertake a comprehensive master plan with her selection to redesign Toronto Hunt Club. Annika Sörenstam has a portfolio of courses around the world with her name attached. Fellow former LPGA star Amy Alcott co-designed the Olympic golf course in Brazil with Hanse.

There are others.

But there are not many others.

Moser entered this world with a blissful naïveté that comes with single-mindedness. In 2008, while in college in Germany, she landed a scholarship for half a year at the University of Sheffield in England. She jammed an entire week’s worth of classes into a day-and-a-half schedule, then spent the rest of her days driving a rental car through the UK, along the Scottish coasts, seeing the game’s birthplaces. Walking upon the greens at North Berwick, she says, amounted to a religious experience. She came to understand that while other sports are beholden to courts and fields, and confined by borders and measurements, a golf course is whatever the architect wants it to be in his — or her — mind’s eye.

Moser googled various lists of the best golf courses in the world, wanting to know who built these things. She saw a lot of Alister McKenzie and Donald Ross. Only issue: Both were dead. Then she saw Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw, and Gil Hanse, and Tom Doak. She emailed all of them and applied to Doak’s internship program. Doak replied that he was interested, but added, unfortunately, she needed a visa. Moser saw this as an invitation to obsessively email Doak for the next two years, trying to write in English as she learned it (the emails, she says, were awful, and refuses to share them all these years later). The hope was Doak might eventually break ground on a project in Europe and align the stars. Moser was, at the time, studying software design and learning course excavation and bunker management as part of a local golf construction internship. On the side, she worked as a greenskeeper in Munich.

In the summer of 2011, Doak contacted Moser with a possible gig. He met her in France for an interview. The next thing she knew, she was in Scotland assisting on new holes built along the cliffside of Renaissance Club. She climbed aboard a Sand Pro for the first time, steering around, shaping and raking and repairing bunkers. Then an excavator. Then a bulldozer. At 26, Moser’s world began moving fast. What began as an internship with Doak grew into more and more work. She created MoserGolf, her own firm as an independent contractor.

By 2014, Moser was shaping the earliest stages of St Patrick’s Links, Doak’s triumph along the Irish dunes. Then The Loop, the first reversible course in the world, an 18-hole Northern Michigan layout played both clockwise and counterclockwise. Then Moser joined Hanse and partner Jim Wagner on the renovation of Los Angeles Country Club. Then for Ohoopee Match Club in Georgia, what is now Hanse’s highest-ranked original design. The list goes on — Streamsong Black in Florida with Hanse, Te Arai Links in New Zealand with Doak.

This is an abbreviated list. One many designers would kill for.

“Each place has its own identity,” Moser says of her philosophy, “and you get to take a golfer by the hand and take him or her through it.”

Now it’s Pinehurst No. 10, where Moser is sitting in a makeshift trailer having a familiar conversation. There’s a twitch of exasperation. A squint. Every accomplishment seems to come with the constant expectation to once again explain herself as a female golf course architect. So she does.

“All I know is I love golf course architecture, and I’d be the saddest person in the world if I couldn’t do what I love,” she says. “Really, I don’t care if there are only five women in the world, and I don’t care if I’m the only one actually on a bulldozer and building stuff. I would love it if there were more women. It’d be great to not be the one who gets singled out, gets asked about it. But I accept it because building golf courses is the coolest thing in the world.

“That’s all I know.”

“All I know is I love golf course architecture,” says Angela Moser. (Courtesy Matt Gibson / Pinehurst Resort)

Moser’s default to explain — or even justify — her place as a woman in a male-dominated industry is understandable. It’s her story. It’s what she’s constantly asked. But that story misses out on so much.

Moser is a product of her imagination. Most golf architects — regardless of gender — have deep ties to the game, whether they were raised by designers or club pros or raised in places where the game thrives.

Moser? She was born in Germany in 1985, where the sport barely registered on the radar. It was the same year Bernhard Langer of Anhausen, West Germany, won his first Masters. Asked that April afternoon to name the second-best golfer in his country’s history, Langer replied, “I think Tony Kugelmüller? Good luck with the spelling.”

Moser’s father was a pilot for Air Berlin. Her mother was a homemaker. Neither played golf. She first swung a club in 1995 when she and her older brother were dropped at a summer camp. One of the offerings was golf, so a 10-year-old Angela gave it a try. A natural swing produced pure contact and a local pro noticed the unexpected talent. Soon, Moser’s parents joined a club so she could play regularly.

From that, to taking the lead on a construction project at the pinnacle property in U.S. golf.

“She is so fascinating,” says Fraser, whose grandparents built a public course in Ontario in the 1970s and couriered her into the business. “Because golf is such a different world, one that requires you to understand the language and the context. For Angela to be able to have stepped into that in such an elegant way, and been able to adapt and be agile enough to find a place in this space? One that’s very much not our space? It’s incredibly inspiring.”

Yet, the question remains.

In 1894, Morris County Golf Club in New Jersey was planned, organized, and operated by and for women. On the eve of the seven-hole course’s first competition, wire reports ran a headline, “FEMININE GOLFERS,” and declared the event “probably the first women’s golf tournament ever held in this country.”

One year later, the course expanded to 18 holes and became the first all-women’s golf club to become a USGA Associate Member Club. The U.S. Women’s Amateur was played at Morris County in 1896.

And then the men got involved. In a series of meetings, husbands of the women managing the course voted to install themselves as club officers and took over operations. The club’s first president, Nina Howland, rejected the men’s offer to serve as an honorary president and never played the course again.

Two years later, the men’s U.S. Amateur was played at Morris County. In 1916, the original course was renovated and expanded by Seth Raynor. By the 1990s, the club didn’t allow women to play morning tee times on the weekend.

Golf is a game that, while having evolved to welcome more people to play, remains long predicated by a history of those in power rarely relinquishing control. Course architecture is no different. If anything, the road is narrower. It’s a field shaped by supply and demand, economic flux and arbitrary rankings. Any chance taken has to be pretty compelling.

To work as a golf course architect is one thing. To be selected to design a routing upon a blank canvas? Or tabbed to direct a major renovation? Or handed the keys by one of the major resort developers? That’s another thing; another world.

Bel Jan first worked for Tom Fazio in the early ’90s, spending nearly 20 years as his senior construction and project manager, working on a deep portfolio of courses. She formed her own design firm in 2009 and was elected ASGCA president in 2019. Yet, while Jan has routed courses for others, work that’s beholden to non-disclosure agreements, she’s never been chosen as solo architect of record for a new 18-hole design.

Asked about that void, Jan says she has no regrets that there is no Jan Bel Jan original out there.

Yet, then says in the same breath, “But I do wonder, is there going to be a Moser?”

A game-changer, so to speak.

Thinking about all this, sitting on the floor of a new house she’s constructing in Ireland, Moser says if the opportunity comes, she’ll be ready. She has been approached recently about possibly designing a nine-hole short course in Europe, along with some other ideas, but the timing hasn’t aligned. She’s open to anything, though, she says. “Hell, I would do one of those big putting greens courses, as long as I think the land is interesting.”

That, ultimately, is what Moser cares most about. The dirt.

Angela Moser’s imprint is all over Pinehurst No. 10. (Courtesy Matt Gibson / Pinehurst Resort)

She says she played in it as a kid and never really grew up. It’s why she prefers a bulldozer to a drafting table. At Pinehurst No. 10, as lead design associate, Moser was forced to oversee construction, opposed to being out there each day, moving earth atop a dozer. It’s the price an architect has to pay when moving up the rungs. “A real learning experience,” as Doak puts it, “and it can drive you crazy, because you’d rather just be building all the greens. But at some point you’ve got to step back and accept help from other people.” It’s experience Moser has now.

She did still find a piece of Pinehurst for herself, though. The 17th green is all hers. Built, shaped, sculpted by her hands. It stages a shortish par-3, one with water to carry and two gnarly bunkers guarding the front. The green gives and takes. Tempting backstops offer wild possibilities. Wayward approaches into certain pin placements offer certain disaster. Playing No. 10 recently, Moser put her tee shot into the back-right of the green. Not too bad. Except the pin was in the front-right, and that right bunker carves into the green, making a straight putt impossible.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Except, she did.

At Pinehurst, Moser’s fingerprints are all over an entirely new experience. You just need to know to look for them.

(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic. Photos: Courtesy Pinehurst Resort. Matt Gibson / Pinehurst Resort.)