Starmount Forest's Golf Course Went Back to 1930. The Gym Down West Market Didn't.

"It's a new day at Starmount, for sure," golf course architect Kris Spence said after wrapping up a renovation he'd spent most of a year on. It's a strange thing to say about a course he'd just finished making look older. Spence wasn't chasing a modern redesign. He was chasing 1931, the year after the club's original layout by Wayne Stiles and John Van Kleek opened, and by most accounts of the members who've played it since, he got there.

Meanwhile, a few minutes up West Market Street, a completely different kind of newness landed in January. Not a restoration. Not a return to anything. Just a 45,000-square-foot gym that opened its doors for the first time, full stop, no history to honor. If you live in Starmount Forest, both of these things are now part of your neighborhood's daily geography, and they didn't plan to open in the same twelve months. They just did.

A Golf Course Rebuilt to Feel Older, Not Newer

Starmount Forest Country Club has been the anchor of this neighborhood since 1930, when it opened as one of the original co-hosts of the PGA Tour's Greater Greensboro Open, now the Wyndham Championship. Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer all played the course in its early decades. In 1947 it hosted the first stroke-play event of the U.S. Women's Open, won by LPGA founding member Betty Jameson. The course got a modernizing pass from architect George Cobb in 1970 and another overhaul from Lester George in 1999, each one nudging it further from its original character.

The project that closed the course starting in December 2024 was trying to undo that drift. Spence's mandate wasn't to make Starmount Forest better by 2026 standards. It was to make it feel closer to 1931, tightening fairway bunkering, reshaping green complexes, and clearing some trees near the par-3 eighth to open sightlines that had grown in over decades. Underneath the visual restoration, the club also replaced a 25 to 30-year-old irrigation system with roughly 1,000 new sprinkler heads and converted the greens to Ultradwarf TifEagle bermudagrass. The course was closed through most of 2025, with a grand reopening targeted for that September or October.

Club president John Barbee has said the changes have been an overwhelming success with the membership, and general manager and COO Ray Armini framed the goal plainly when the project was announced:

"The improvements will position Starmount Forest Country Club as a top-tier private club."

What's easy to miss is that the club wasn't purely turning back the clock. While Spence was aging the course, the club was also adding two golf simulators and four new outdoor pickleball courts, neither of which existed on a course built in 1930. Nearly 700 member families now have access to a layout designed to feel nine decades old, sitting inside a club that also just added one of the newest sports in the country. It's not a simple case of the club choosing nostalgia. It's choosing which parts of itself get to look old and which parts get to catch up.

Three Minutes Up the Road, West Market Went the Other Direction

While the country club was closed for renovation, a different kind of construction was happening a short drive away. Crunch West Market opened on January 5, 2026, in the former Food World building at 3950 West Market Street. At 45,000 square feet, it's the debut of Crunch's newest "3.0" format in North Carolina, run locally by franchisee JF Fitness. Founder John Freeland called it the first of several Greensboro and Triad area locations the company plans to open, and it's the fifth JF Fitness location in the state overall. Before this, the closest Crunch Fitness to the Triad was in Raleigh, which makes this the chain's first real foothold in the region.

The gym isn't opening into a vacuum. It sits in a small retail center that's also home to Triad Yoga, and it's less than half a mile from Planet Fitness and several other boutique fitness studios already clustered along the West Market and Pomona corridor. Crunch's general manager, Steve Greene, has talked about the space as built for every level, from someone's first day in a gym to someone who's trained for thirty years. Members get access to hydromassage beds, tanning, red light therapy and full locker rooms with saunas, all with plans starting well under what most private clubs charge for a single month.

Same Twelve Months, Opposite Direction

Laid out side by side, the timing is almost comic. One institution spent a year and a new irrigation system trying to look the way it did before most of its current members were born. The other spent roughly the same stretch of calendar building something that had never existed in this corridor before.

What Two New Definitions of "New" Actually Change for Residents

Neither project was aimed at the other. The club's renovation was about golf architecture and drainage. The gym's opening was about a franchise filling a gap in an underserved regional market. But the effect on daily life in Starmount Forest is the same either way: within about a mile of each other, residents now have two genuinely different versions of a fresh start to choose from, and they arrived at almost the same moment without anyone coordinating it.

If you're a member at Starmount Forest, you're playing a course this year that's closer to what your grandparents might have played than what you played two years ago, with a couple of pickleball courts and simulator bays that definitely weren't part of the original 1930 layout. If you're not a member, or you just want a serious workout without committing to a club, West Market now has an option that didn't exist twelve months ago, sitting alongside Triad Yoga and Planet Fitness in a stretch of road that's quietly become the neighborhood's fitness cluster.

Neither change tells you much about the other on its own. Together, they say something about how this particular pocket of Greensboro absorbs change: not through one big shift, but through two unrelated ones landing close enough in time and distance that residents end up living with both.

If you want the fuller picture of what makes this neighborhood run, from its housing stock to its walk to Friendly Center, our Starmount Forest neighborhood guide goes deeper into the streets around both of these spots.

Whether you're already playing the new-old course at Starmount Forest or you're just discovering the gym cluster on West Market, Emma Skelton keeps a close eye on what's actually changing in this neighborhood, not just what shows up in a listing description. If you ever want a conversation about the local market grounded in that kind of detail, reach out any time.