Renovations at Cantigny Golf in Wheaton aim to make courses ‘pop’ and play better

The iconic Dick Tracy sand trap — and almost every trap and bunker at Cantigny Golf in Wheaton — will soon be getting a makeover.

A major renovation scheduled through June 2027 will address each of the three distinct 9-hole courses at Cantigny — Hillside, Lakeside and Woodside. Two of the courses will remain playable at any one time during the construction.

Cantigny Golf was designed by Roger Packard and named by Golf Digest as “the best public golf course in America” when it opened in 1989. Aside from minor cosmetic touches, the 27-hole layout has not been updated since a Jacobson Golf Course Design treatment in 2003.

“It’s a renovation,” said Terry Hanley, KemperSports’ general manager of Cantigny. “We’re not going to do dramatic changes to the tracks themselves.”

That will soothe the roughly 50,000 people who annually play Cantigny, managed since 2014 by KemperSports and overseen by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, which will fund the renovation through a grant.

Todd Quitno of Quitno Golf Designs is the course architect leading the renovation.

A Park Ridge resident, Quitno’s 150-plus course renovations include local layouts such as Schaumburg Golf Club, Canal Shores Golf Course in Evanston, and, just north of the Illinois border, Abbey Springs in Fontana, Wisconsin.

“We want to keep it very playable for the recreational golfer,” Quitno said. “I think it’s trying to enhance what’s already there. It’s an excellent golf course. It’s got an excellent reputation. We just want to basically sustain that.”

The work will include rebuilding and re-grassing all greens complexes and tee boxes and redesigning and renovating bunkers and specific fairways to improve play. The existing irrigation systems also will be replaced with sustainability in mind.

The idea, said head golf professional Matt Tullar of Winfield, is to “make it fun” for every golfer who plays Cantigny.

“A lot of golfers think the course is already too tough,” he said. “We’re not trying to make it harder. We’re just trying to make it for everybody.”

An update that promises to be a particular crowd favorite is the expansion of the 12,000-square-foot putting green to a 30,000-square-foot “putting lawn,” and moving the halfway house and outdoor patio from the bottom floor of the clubhouse nearer to the putting green.

Matching the bentgrass and some of the contours of greens on the courses, the putting lawn also will have “a lot of humps and bumps,” Quitno said, to make it compelling.

The Hillside course and the putting lawn will be the first addressed, planned to start this June. In June 2025, Hillside will reopen, and work will begin at the Lakeside course.

That pattern continues with the completion of Lakeside and construction starting on Woodside in June 2026.

Woodside renovations are scheduled to finish by June 2027 — in time for the Illinois State Amateur Championship, coming to Cantigny Golf July 17-20, 2028.

And yes, “We’re preserving the Dick Tracy bunker” on the Lakeside course, Quitno said.

Included in the update are walk-in bunkers, sand traps that drain better, new undulations and some false fronts on greens to foster creative pin placements, less mounding around the greens, and a “family” tee box on every hole to help satisfy the 2,300 children in Cantigny’s summer golf program.

Some hazards will be removed and others shifted to address today’s longer-hitting golfers.

The renovation promises to make Cantigny Golf pop aesthetically while offering golfers a course that’s challenging but not overbearing.

“I just think our guests are going to really see a different look and feel without having a dramatic change,” Hanley said.