The day after Hurricane Helene, Paul Bonesteel walked down toward the waterline at Asheville Municipal Golf Course with a camera in his hand. He had flown a drone over the flooding the day before, but on foot the damage was harder to take in. Matt Dierdorf, the course superintendent, was walking down to the same spot, and for a while the two of them just stood there and looked.

On September 27, 2024, the Swannanoa River swallowed the Muni’s front nine, leaving downed trees and layers of mud and debris where fairways had been. The flood arrived just as a multimillion-dollar renovation was wrapping up. The back nine was spared the worst of it and reopened on October 28, 2024; the front nine has been closed to golf ever since.

Soon thereafter, Bonesteel recalls, Dierdorf was eyeing piles of topsoil and working out what he could do with them. That was the mood among the people who love the course, Bonesteel says: “This is horrendous, but we can make this right. We’re not going to let it defeat us.”

Two years later, the front nine is still moving through design review, and golfers go around the back nine twice for a full round. In a statement marking the anniversary, Bonesteel called the date “a reminder that recovery here on this historic course is not finished.”

The group Bonesteel now leads, Friends of Asheville Muni (FOAM), has spent those two years working with the ground it has. Many golfers are hearing its name for the first time.

Three distinct groups keep the Muni going:

FOAM doesn’t pay for the restoration, but it stays close to it: Board members have reviewed design plans and offered input, and they’ve met with city council members to explain why the course matters. Bonesteel calls the city for updates often enough that he describes FOAM’s role, in part, as being “that person on the phone that cares.”

Board vice president Luke Lingle says a frequent hurdle isn’t that people misunderstand FOAM; it’s that most have never heard of it. He was a Muni regular for years before he learned the group existed, and joining showed him what he’d been missing: “Now that I’m a part of it, I see all the great work it does behind the scenes.” Golfers enjoy a new bench or new tee-box stairs without realizing a community of volunteers made it happen, Lingle says, which is part of why FOAM recently rolled out a new logo and a rebuilt website.

Bonesteel, an Asheville filmmaker who first played the Muni in 1997, directed Muni, a 2020 documentary narrated by Darius Rucker. The film follows the Black caddies who became players at the Muni and built a thriving golf community, with a history that includes the Skyview Open (as we covered in our August 26 issue). The documentary aired on PBS and Golf Channel, and Bonesteel says the attention it brought helped the city recognize how much it had underinvested in its own golf course.

As the city began rethinking the Muni, a core group of golfers started meeting informally to make sure the people who play the course had a voice, and in 2022 they formally organized as a nonprofit. City staff pointed them to a model that was already working in Asheville: The city-owned WNC Nature Center, where the nonprofit Friends of the WNC Nature Center has supported the wildlife park for roughly half a century. Bonesteel also visited the support groups behind the municipal courses in Charleston and Wilmington to learn how they operate.

Today FOAM has nine board members, all volunteers, with no paid staff. The board is a mix of men and women from a range of economic backgrounds, from retirees who play three or four days a week to parents who are lucky to get out once a month. Representatives from the City of Asheville, the Asheville Buncombe Regional Sports Commission, and Commonwealth sit in as ex-officio members, an arrangement Bonesteel likens to a Rubik’s Cube, with a different side mattering most on any given day.

One recent board member didn’t play golf at all, Lingle notes: She joined because she saw what the course could mean for the neighborhood around it. “A municipal golf course is a huge ecological system right in the middle of the neighborhood,” he says.

Lingle himself joined after the storm. He grew up playing a Donald Ross municipal course in Asheboro, moved to Asheville about 16 years ago, and made the Muni his home course, where he could walk nine holes before work in about an hour and 20 minutes. After Helene, he drove over, sat on the hill above the course looking out at the ruined front nine, and called Pat Warren, the course’s general manager, to ask how he could help.

Warren introduced him to Bonesteel, and Lingle joined the board shortly after. “I just really believe in public golf,” he says.

With nobody on the payroll, most dues and gifts go straight into projects you can see from the course. FOAM has renovated the back-nine restrooms, built stairs at the tee boxes, and installed interpretive signs, including ones explaining what happened to the front nine. Its new benches on the back nine each carry a plaque honoring someone who has mattered to the course.

Last month, FOAM paid for cart-path patching and supplied volunteers to help do it, part of a shared effort with the city and Commonwealth to keep the course playable on nine holes.

FOAM has brought in outside money, too, with grants from the American Society of Golf Course Architects Foundation, the FairWays Foundation, the HV3 Foundation, and the City of Asheville. Working with the 2025 Wyndham Championship in Greensboro and the sports commission, it helped raise donations, including one from PGA Tour player Ben Griffin, for a fund to help keep the course open while it runs on nine holes.

On the youth side, FOAM keeps loaner clubs for juniors who don’t have a set, paid for with partner grants, and supports Youth on Course along with the Muni’s women’s and men’s groups. The course’s summer PGA Junior League roster grew from 16 players in 2025 to 24 this year, filling every spot. This fall, Warren reports, more than 60 juniors ages 5 to 13 are going through First Tee clinics at the Muni, and 18 more are playing a fall Junior League season.

In March 2025, the Muni began working toward certification as an Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary, an Audubon International program for golf courses that is earned one area at a time and typically takes one to three years, and FOAM volunteers are doing much of the work. They built the pollinator garden above the 11th green, planted native wildflowers across about four acres the course doesn’t play through, and spent several winters clearing invasive plants, while native, low-maintenance areas now sit in front of the 13th through 16th tees.

For the past two years, FOAM has hosted a BioBlitz, a day spent cataloging everything living on the course. In 2025, the event drew 82 people and placed the Muni second in the world in Audubon International’s community engagement category.

“I see golf courses as sacred,” Bonesteel says, “places where magical things happen, not with the golf ball, but with human interaction.” Watching the front nine grow over with weeds and saplings has been hard on everyone who loves the place, he says. The board’s answer has been to set the frustration aside and ask a simpler question: “What can we do right now to make Muni the best it can be?”

The Muni opened in 1927 as a Donald Ross design and, according to FOAM, was the first public municipal course in the Carolinas; in 1954, it became one of the first municipal courses in the Southeast to integrate. Before the flood, the Muni hosted more than 40,000 rounds a year, about 22,500 of them by local residents, and generated more than $300,000 a year for nearby hotels, restaurants, and shops, by FOAM’s count.

Affordability is the point, Bonesteel says: “Without affordability, you don’t get a diversity of economic and racial players. You just don’t get it.” His goal is a municipal course that golfers talk about the way they talk about Charleston’s, affordable and well kept, and worth planning a trip around.

Getting all 18 holes back is central to that goal. With a full course, Bonesteel told 828newsNOW earlier this month, the income potential is “more than twice what you can generate with the back nine only.”

The city approved the front-nine design contract in July 2025, with Biohabitats leading a team that includes Forse Golf Design, a specialist in Donald Ross restorations, and Cutlip Golf Design. FOAM board members who previewed the design in May say it keeps the holes essentially where Ross put them, following his original plans, with flood mitigation built in.

In FOAM’s September newsletter, Chris Corl, the city’s director of Community and Regional Entertainment Facilities, wrote that the city is awaiting approval of the 30% design documents from FEMA and other agencies before moving to the next steps. The city expects construction to begin in 2027, with the front nine reopening in 2028.

Even a restored front nine won’t finish FOAM’s list. The Muni has a hitting bay but no true practice facility, and the board has bigger ambitions for the space in and around the clubhouse, from a putting area for Youth on Course to an indoor simulator bay. Projects like those would give juniors and other groups more room to learn and practice at the Muni.

None of these improvements are tied to storm damage, so recovery funding won’t cover them, and Lingle says FOAM won’t spend its current funds on those projects while that money is needed to keep the course running on nine holes. After two years focused on keeping the course open through the storm’s aftermath, the board is starting to look beyond Asheville for support, especially among golfers who grew up playing municipal courses and still care about public golf. “I firmly believe there are more folks out there that would support the story of this community coming back to its full potential,” Lingle says.

Bonesteel puts FOAM’s biggest need plainly: “We have nine board members, but we need 900 members.” You don’t need to play four days a week to belong; the membership runs from course regulars to parents of curious kids to neighbors who care about the green space. Lingle’s summary is simple: “It’s really just a place to connect and build community.”

The easiest way to meet the Friends may be to show up on Saturday, October 10, when FOAM joins First Tee – Western North Carolina and RSAA for a free Community Day Fall Festival at the Muni from 1 to 3 p.m. Expect golf games and challenges, trunk-or-treat, and activities for all ages, whether you play every week or have never swung a club.

Two years after the water came through, the Muni is still open and still full of regulars. It turns 100 next year, on the anniversary of its May 21, 1927, opening. And if the city’s timeline holds, the front nine will be back in play the following year.

Until then, the course will keep doing what it has done for nearly a century, giving anyone with a set of clubs an affordable place to play. Keeping it that way through the rebuild is work for the City of Asheville and Commonwealth, but it also takes the golfers and neighbors who care enough to pitch in.

For Bonesteel, that is the lesson of the last two years. “I’ve learned I just can’t show up to Muni and expect it to be what I want it to be,” he says. “I’ve had to get involved.”

Special thanks to Paul Bonesteel and Luke Lingle for agreeing to be interviewed, and to Friends of Asheville Muni for providing photos and historical information for this article.