When it comes to golf and public golf courses, Cape Cod residents and visitors are truly blessed. There have been great courses on the Cape for many years, but the 1980s were a boom for the creation of extremely high-quality municipal courses.
Prior to that era, Cape Cod had been mostly a summer retreat, but by the 1980s, there were more and more year-round residents. Managers of towns like Yarmouth, Brewster, Harwich and Dennis recognized a need to provide additional public golf courses for both year round and summer residents as well as for the summer season visitors to the Cape. The concept of expanding the Cape tourist season outside the traditional July/August summer months and into the “shoulder seasons of May/June and September/October also made golf an attractive option. Open space requirements as well as the need to provide recreation for these residents and visitors led the towns to begin building modern golf courses during the decade.
In the mid eighties, architect Brian Silva was hired to design a new course in Yarmouth. The Town of Yarmouth already had one municipal course in Bass River, but realized there was ample golfer interest to fill another quality course.
Town resident and golf committee member Tom Paquin came across a nice 200-acre swath of land off the end of Old Town House Road that had all the features for a golf course site and shepherded the project through the maze of town and state permitting and funding approvals. Silva liked the high point elevation for the clubhouse that allowed for downhill tee shots on the 1st and 10th holes, but also provided some great uphill green sites for the 10th and 18th holes.
There was some discussion of trying to build 27 holes, but that idea was ultimately abandoned and Silva was allowed to build, as he puts it, “A roomy 18” that would be known as Bayberry Hills Golf Course. Because of Cape Cod’s rolling glacial till topography, there wasn’t much need to push dirt around. Much of the land’s features were there and it was just a matter of determining routing and tee and green locations. The irrigation pond only required the enlargement of a glacial kettle pond to adequately water the bent-grass turf. Construction of the original 18 holes began in 1986 and was completed two years later. This Silva design is not your typical straight, flat, back-and-forth track. It has some serious challenge with a par of 72, playing more than 7,100 yards from the tips, a course rating of 75.3 and a slope of 132.
The Town of Yarmouth eventually opened a third nine, The Links, in 1999 when they transformed a former town landfill into a rolling, open, Par-36 layout. The nines were then renamed to Red, White and Links.
Director of Golf Operations Jim Armentrout came aboard nine years ago from his native Virginia and has doggedly worked to make improvements to Bayberry Hills and its sister course, Bass River, despite being occasionally challenged by Massachusetts town politics. He says his goal “is to constantly be improving facilities.” Jim totally gets the notion that it is conditions that attract golfers and keeps them coming back.
Recent improvements include a revamped irrigation system; tree pruning and removal to aid turf growth; removal of asphalt cart paths and replacing them with more environmentally friendly crushed seashells; and upgrading the driving range operation. Armentrout says “things have improved tremendously and all the projects, even the small ones, are having a positive snowball effect.”
Bayberry Hills is able to manage all this while keeping rates at a very reasonable price. Yarmouth residents pay only $750 in annual dues and the non-resident rate is a remarkable $1,050. The daily fee rates range from $40 in the winter to $66 from May through September. Walking is allowed at all times except during peak hours on weekends and in high season when carts are required until 2 p.m. A buggy will run you $19 per person for 18 holes.
For more information on Bayberry Hills Golf Course in Yarmouth, visit golfyarmouthcapecod.com or call 508-394-5597.