Scioto engaged Donald Ross to lay out a full 18 in 1915; the course opened in 1916 and quickly entered national circulation, culminating in the 1926 U.S. Open. The club’s present-day hole-by-hole material attributes the routing and the strategy of specific holes to Ross’s original work, including his candid acknowledgment that the green at the “Ocean Waves” hole pushed severity beyond his own usual caution. While many Ross venues hold plan sets or extensive correspondence, Scioto’s archival situation is more complicated: mid-century work dramatically altered the green pads and bunker scheme, and subsequent scholarship has frequently noted that, by the 2000s, Ross’s tangible features had been largely overwritten even if his routing survived.
The most consequential non-Ross intervention occurred in the early 1960s, when architect Dick Wilson reconstructed every green and bunker. So much fill was imported—from the excavation of the Ohio Statehouse parking garage—that every putting surface was elevated, softening Ross’s original contour-to-grade relationships and reducing the effectiveness of the ground game. This Wilson phase defined Scioto’s look and play for decades.
Ahead of the 2016 U.S. Senior Open, the club undertook a significant update led by Jack Nicklaus and Michael Hurdzan (2008), a project noted by the USGA as part of modern preparations for elite events. Although helpful for staging competition, those works did not aim to reinstate Ross’s precise green-to-surround ties.
A comprehensive restoration directed by Andrew Green was completed in 2021–22, explicitly focused on recovering Ross’s intent where documentation and surviving evidence allowed. Green’s work lowered raised green pads, expanded fairways and short-grass runoffs, rebuilt bunkers in historic positions (including distinctive hummocky features), and re-centered strategy around angles and contours that make use of Scioto’s ground movement.
Unique Design Characteristics
Even after a century of interventions, several holes now read unmistakably as Ross through the lens of the 2021–22 restoration. The fifth—“Ocean Waves”—descends into a valley where placement is paramount; a cross-bunker governs indecisive lay-ups, and the approach rises to a green with multiple levels, protected by hummocks at the right. The club explicitly connects this green’s severity to Ross’s own confession, and Green’s restoration retained the chipping opportunities that reward precise distance control rather than aerial bail-outs.
At the second, the club notes that Bobby Jones used a 4-wood in all four rounds of the 1926 U.S. Open to manage a turtleback fairway and sloping approach. The present setup again emphasizes a fading tee ball into a crowned landing, feeding the sort of uphill, long-iron approach that Ross’s original corridor intended; importantly, restored short-grass on the green’s flanks brings back recovery options that depend on reading tilt rather than simply blasting from rough.
The par-3 fourteenth—today stretching to roughly 255 yards from the back markers—leans sharply left-to-right toward Riverside Drive, and the club advises the conservative play to the front edge. While the hole’s exact length has varied with championship setups, its defining characteristic is the canted target and fierce right-front hazards; short grass restored around the green accentuates how a miss on the wrong quadrant repels recovery.
On the thirteenth, the fairway drops nearly sixty feet toward a green that is “canted against the fairway slope,” creating an optical riddle where putts seem to move against gravity. This is prototypical Ross at Scioto: not an abstract design dogma, but a specific marriage of landform, angle, and green pitch that punishes an approach from the wrong side of the fairway. With the Wilson-era elevation now reduced, those illusions once again dominate approach and putting choices.
Collectively, the clearest surviving (and now revived) Ross expressions are holes 2, 5, 13, and 14, where the corridor geometry, diagonal hazards, and green tilts make angle and trajectory selection as important as raw length—an effect the club’s own tour prose documents in detail.
Historical Significance
Scioto occupies a rare position within Ross’s corpus as an early Midwest commission that immediately proved championship-ready. It hosted the 1926 U.S. Open, won by Bobby Jones, establishing its profile in the interwar decade. It then staged the 1931 Ryder Cup, the 1950 PGA Championship, the 1968 U.S. Amateur, the 1986 U.S. Senior Open, and the 2016 U.S. Senior Open—one of a small group of American clubs to have hosted that breadth of men’s majors and USGA team/championship events. These tournaments did more than launder prestige; they drove successive waves of alteration and, more recently, restoration choices.
Its cultural resonance is likewise specific: Jack Nicklaus learned the game here under Jack Grout, and has said the club’s out-of-bounds and fairway shapes nudged him toward his characteristic left-to-right ball flight—a local design quirk with global consequences for golf history.
Current Condition / Integrity
By the late 20th century, credible observers agreed that Ross’s tangible features at Scioto had been extensively overwritten by Wilson’s 1960s reconstruction; what truly remained was the routing. The 2021–22 project aimed to restore the Ross character without pretending to recreate undocumented green contours wholesale. Andrew Green’s public description is forthright: the early-1960s works elevated greens using imported fill, which diminished contours that tie into natural grade and thus muted Ross’s running game; Green’s team correspondingly lowered pads, rebuilt bunkers in historically appropriate locations and forms, and expanded fairway and short-grass areas to re-activate angles. The club’s course tour now emphasizes cross-bunkers (e.g., the fifth), hummocks, and short-grass fall-offs that directly influence day-to-day play.
Large elements of the 1916 routing and corridor scale endure; several green sites once “perched” in the Wilson era have been reset nearer to natural grade. Nevertheless, a full Ross restoration in the documentary sense remains impossible: Scioto does not trumpet a surviving, comprehensive Ross plan set, and the mid-century rebuild severed much physical continuity. The club’s current presentation is best understood as a Ross routing with Ross-like strategies revived to the degree modern evidence permits.
Tree management has clarified interior vistas and restored wind exposure, and mowing lines have been pushed outward to bring fairway bunkers and green-front hazards back into play for more tee sets. Championship setups (e.g., the 2016 Senior Open) still stretch the course beyond 7,100 yards at par 70, but the everyday identity is less about raw yardage than about using contours—particularly at 2, 5, 13 and the muscular par-3 14th—to test decisions on line and trajectory.
Sources & Notes
“Course Tour,” Scioto Country Club (hole-by-hole descriptions and championship yardages; accessed 2025).
Golf Course Architecture (GCA), “Ground game comes to the fore at Scioto Country Club,” Jan. 25, 2022 (Andrew Green on scope and intent of the 2021–22 restoration).
Golf Course Architecture Magazine, Issue 67, Jan. 2022 (duplicate/expanded reporting on Green’s restoration comments and the 1960s Wilson rebuild elevating greens with imported fill).
USGA Championship pages and reporting: 1926 U.S. Open at Scioto; 1931 Ryder Cup; 1950 PGA Championship; 1968 U.S. Amateur; 1986 U.S. Senior Open; 2016 U.S. Senior Open (course setup lengths, event contexts).
The Fried Egg, “Scioto Country Club” Course Profile (succinct architect timeline: Ross [1915/16], Wilson [1963], Nicklaus & Hurdzan [2008], Green [2021]).
PGA.com, “The country club that shaped Jack Nicklaus’ game” (Nicklaus on how Scioto’s playing corridors influenced his shot shape).
