Traces Golf Club & Shankers Grille

The Woodlands course at Traces Golf Club & Shankers Grille in Florence, South Carolina, is a Ron Garl design that reflects the architect's approach to working with the natural terrain of the Carolina Sandhills region. Garl, a Florida-based designer who has worked extensively throughout the Southeast since the 1970s, typically emphasizes strategic variety and playability across different skill levels. The course occupies land characteristic of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, where rolling topography and stands of native pine and hardwood create natural corridors and elevation changes uncommon in the flatter Lowcountry areas closer to the coast. The routing takes advantage of the wooded setting that gives the course its name, with tree-lined fairways that reward accuracy and course management. Water features and bunker complexes provide definition and strategic interest throughout the layout. The design incorporates multiple tee boxes to accommodate a range of playing abilities, a hallmark of Garl's work during the era when daily-fee and public-access facilities expanded across the region. Traces Golf Club operates as a semi-private facility serving both members and daily-fee players in the Florence area, which sits along the I-95 corridor in northeastern South Carolina. The club's Shankers Grille provides on-site dining in a casual atmosphere typical of modern Carolina golf venues. The Woodlands course represents the kind of accessible, regionally-rooted golf that has become a staple of the Carolinas golf market, offering a tree-lined test shaped by one of the Southeast's experienced course architects.