The Golf Course Down the Road Still Answers to Windermere

In a 2019 report, ColaDaily quoted Fred Layman: "We want to make sure people understand there's new ownership, new management, and a great new future here."

He said that in the fall of 2019, while standing in a half-renovated clubhouse and explaining why the golf course at the center of the neighborhood was about to have a new name. His company, L&J Acquisitions, had just taken over the club on Longtown Road East, and the plan included a rebuilt clubhouse, Friday sunset socials, themed Saturday dinners, a new junior program for golfers, tennis players, and swimmers, and a 3,000-square-foot fitness center with a view of the lake. The new name on the new sign was going to be The Blythewood Country Club.

Type that name into a map today and you'll get directed somewhere else entirely, if you get directed anywhere at all. The club's current name is The Windermere Club, the name still used by the course, clubhouse, scorecards, and current listings. Most of the rest of that 2019 plan—the clinics, the socials, and the fitness center—did take shape.

The Club's Name After 2019

Layman told the local paper at the time that guests should keep typing "The Windermere Club" into their GPS even after the new signage went up, because the physical location wasn't changing, just the name on the building. That turned out to be more accurate than he probably intended. The building got its renovation. The name reverted, or maybe it never fully left in the first place. Residents kept calling it Windermere. Directories kept listing it as Windermere. The club's own current website, years later, still operates under windermereclubsc.com.

The course sits inside a gated neighborhood named Windermere. The neighborhood sign and the club's current website both use the Windermere name, even though the 2019 rebrand proposed The Blythewood Country Club.

The Same Stretch of Years It Went Public

The 2019 ownership change wasn't just about a name. It landed in the same general window as a bigger shift: the course opening its tee sheet to golfers who aren't club members. Bill Chandler, Windermere's longtime director of golf, put it plainly in an interview with Discover South Carolina: the club had quietly allowed outside play for a while, but it was only in the last three or four years before that conversation that they made it publicly known. His reasoning wasn't sentimental. It was economic. Keeping a Pete Dye course fully private in a market this size stopped penciling out, so Windermere started selling tee times to anyone willing to book one.

That timing lines up with the ownership change. The same stretch of years that tried to rename the club also opened its fairways to the public, which means the two changes that actually mattered to how the course functions, who owns it and who can play it, both trace back to roughly the same moment. Only one of those two changes has stuck without dispute. The other keeps getting revisited.

Golf directories today don't fully agree on who's running the place. Some listings still credit Fred Layman as director of club operations. Others now list a different name, John Bakhaus, as owner. Whatever the exact sequence of ownership since 2019, the club has changed hands more than once, and the tee sheet is still open to the public either way. The name held. The management didn't, at least not permanently.

The Course's Condition and Design

A visitor who played the course in June 2025 and posted a review afterward noted improvement in the fairways and greens. That review is over a year old at this point, so it offers a dated snapshot rather than a current assessment.

Some of what makes the course distinctive hasn't changed since Pete Dye and his son P.B. Dye started shaping it in 1987. It opened for play in 1989, a par-72 layout running just under 7,000 yards, and it still carries the last set of bent-grass greens left in the Midlands, a detail Chandler has pointed to as worth the extra maintenance cost. Bent grass needs more water than Bermuda, which is part of why the course leans so heavily on the lake residents call Windermere and county records list as Lake Columbia. Chandler has also mentioned a pattern locals may have noticed without naming it: golfers visiting from Ohio, Pittsburgh, and Washington during Masters week specifically because bent-grass greens are what they're used to playing back home.

The Rhythm of a Season at the Club

None of that history changes what's actually bookable this fall. The club still runs on a seasonal calendar that starts, according to its own membership materials, with the Frostbite Tournament, followed through the year by the Member/Guest event, the Windermere Cup, and the Club Championships. Those are member events, but plenty of what surrounds them isn't:

• Weekly Ladies Clinics and a standing junior golf program, open to newcomers learning the game
• An indoor-outdoor tennis complex staffed by USPTA Elite professionals trained under the Nick Bollettieri Academy system, with clinics and lessons open to non-members
• A Junior-Olympic pool and aquatics center attached to the fitness facility overlooking the lake
• A clubhouse dining room looking out over the 18th fairway and the water, with a second-floor banquet room available for private events

The club has also hosted charity tournaments open to the public over the years, including fundraisers tied to Benedict College's LeRoy Walker Memorial and Clemson's Youth Learning Institute. Those are the kind of events that don't require a membership card at the gate, just a registration fee that goes to the cause.

Booking a Round Without a Membership

For anyone in Windermere who golfs but never joined the club, the practical version of this story is simple. Public tee times are bookable directly or through third-party platforms, with green fees for 18 holes running roughly in the $45 to $58 range depending on the day and the booking source. Rates drop on weekday afternoons and during twilight hours, and climb on weekends when member play takes priority. None of that requires knowing who currently owns the place. It just requires picking a tee time.

The scorecard handed out at the pro shop this week still says The Windermere Club, same as it did before anyone tried changing it, same as it will likely say next season regardless of whose name is on the ownership filing.

If you're weighing what it actually means to live a few streets from that clubhouse, or you're trying to figure out where Windermere ends and the rest of Longcreek begins, Kay Muri knows this stretch of Blythewood well enough to walk you through it in person. Let's Connect.