photo by: Rochelle Valverde

A portion of the Jayhawk Club golf course is pictured Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2018.

Those waiting for the Jayhawk Club golf course to fully reopen will need to wait a little longer but should expect to see major changes once the greens are ready for play.

The Journal-World reported in February 2017 that the whole course would reopen by summer 2017 after re-sodding and reseeding. Significant portions of the course still remain closed, but those involved with the project say the delay is due mainly to a decision to expand the project’s scope.

Mike Gogel, of Mike Gogel Golf Design, told the Journal-World Wednesday that the club’s owners decided to redesign and update the golf course as much as possible. He said the 2017 completion date was for a more limited project and that the expanded project is now estimated to be complete by spring 2019.

Under the project’s new scope, Gogel said all the routes the golf course takes have changed, as have the features of the course, such as the tees, bunkers and greens.

“Those have all been redesigned and rebuilt,” Gogel said.

Gogel said that the redesign also included “extensive” clearing of trees, which he said tend to compete with the turf grass for sun and water and had become overgrown over the last 50 years.

The Jayhawk Club, formerly known as Alvamar Country Club, is the home course of the University of Kansas men’s and women’s golf programs and has a licensing agreement with the university. The club previously had an 18-hole public course and an 18-hole private course, but it became completely private following an ownership change in 2014.

The Jayhawk Club maintained nine holes of the original 36-hole Alvamar course, and Gogel said the club has opened nine new holes in addition to those. He said the Jayhawk Club’s clubhouse, wellness center and swimming pool are all complete and that completed portions of the course were generally open to club members on weekends.

Gogel said that once the entire golf course is reopened in spring 2019 it will include 27 holes total. As far as the grass itself, Gogel said that has also been a factor in the delay. Gogel said that the new turf grass hasn’t gotten the rain it needed, slowing the process of reopening the course.

“In drought conditions, turf grasses struggle, especially young turf grasses,” Gogel said. “We are very protective of our investment, and so we’ve elected to baby that along and really give them the nourishment they need to succeed rather than forcing the golf course open sooner.”

The Journal-World reported over the summer that the Jayhawk Club had gotten permission from the City of Lawrence to use metered city water to recharge its irrigation systems.

The Jayhawk Club is owned by a group headed by Lawrence businessman Thomas Fritzel. Fritzel is charged in federal court, along with his son Tucker Fritzel and business associates Casey Stewart and Wesley Lynch, with violating the federal Clean Air Act by improperly removing and disposing of asbestos during the remodeling of the Alvamar Country Club. The trial in that case has tentatively been set for July 2019.