Over Memorial Day Weekend this year, a 50-foot flagpole went up at Avondale Golf Club, carrying a 10-by-15 flag meant to honor members and their families who served in the armed forces. It's the kind of addition that would be easy to miss if you only think of Avondale as the course behind Forest Hills, the place where a round takes four hours and the ninth hole runs along what used to be a horse track. But the flagpole isn't really a golf story. It's the first visible sign of something newer than the course itself: a nonprofit foundation that didn't exist a year ago and is now shaping what the club does when nobody's teeing off.
Forest Hills residents know Avondale by feel more than by name. The neighborhood's two gated entrances, one off Honeysuckle and one on Strahorn, put the course within golf-cart distance of most homes, and it's been that way for decades. What changed this year isn't the layout or the greens. It's that Avondale added a mission that extends past its own fairways, and the flagpole is the first thing it built to prove it.
A Course Older Than the Gates Around It
Avondale predates every home in Forest Hills by more than half a century. According to the club's own history, the land was acquired in the late 1800s by the King family, who named the small lake on the property King Lake. A red barn built around 1890 still stands near the clubhouse, and it's counted among the oldest structures in the Northwest. What's now the ninth hole was once a half-mile track where the property's owners raced thoroughbreds.
The golf course itself came later. Ownership changed hands several times before 1957, when new owners took over and eventually incorporated the club on April 20, 1963. The front nine was seeded in 1966 and opened for play in 1968, with Joe Dubsky serving as the club's first PGA professional. The back nine followed in 1971, the same year the first Board of Directors took office under founding president Hal Edwards.
The most disruptive chapter came in 1994, when the board recognized that the irrigation system was failing and Avondale Lake had suffered years of drought stress. A Denver firm, Rathert International Golf Design, drew up a master plan to rebuild the course's water system and reshape its tees and greens. Members approved the project in 1995 at a cost of $2 million, which worked out to roughly $4,000 per member. The course closed entirely on August 21, 1995, and stayed closed for twelve weeks while Adair Earthworks Construction rebuilt it from the ground up.
That's the pattern at Avondale for most of its history: long stretches of quiet golf, punctuated by occasional capital projects that reshaped the physical course. The Foundation breaks that pattern. It's not a renovation. It's a new kind of organization sitting on top of an old golf club, and it didn't touch a single fairway to make its mark.
What the Foundation Actually Does
The Avondale Golf Club Foundation was established in 2025 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, run by a volunteer board and funded by donors rather than green fees. Its own materials describe it as a charitable extension of the club's values, built around service, community, and legacy rather than course maintenance.
In practice, that means the Foundation has taken on work Avondale never used to do formally:
- Scholarships and financial aid for junior golfers, covering lessons, equipment, and tournament entry fees
- Charity tournaments that route proceeds back into local programs
- Partnerships with other Hayden Lake and Coeur d'Alene organizations rather than Avondale operating in isolation
The flagpole was the Foundation's first visible project, and it was designed as a tribute rather than an amenity. It doesn't improve anyone's short game. It exists because a group of members decided the club owed something to the people who'd served, and they built it themselves through the new nonprofit rather than folding it into general club dues.
The Club Season Still Belongs to the People Running It
None of this changes who Forest Hills residents actually see when they walk into the pro shop or sit down at the grill. Taylor Porter still runs the golf shop as head professional, the same job he's held while coaching players through Avondale's tighter holes. Talking about the course's par-3 second hole, surrounded by water and bunkers, Porter has put it plainly: "you don't want to be short." Austin Westphal, PGA, serves as general manager, overseeing day-to-day operations across the 18 holes that stretch to 6,573 yards from the back tees.
Inside the clubhouse, The Avondale Bar & Grill runs under Head Chef James Seidler, with Megan Schwenk directing food and beverage service. That's the version of Avondale most Forest Hills residents actually experience most often: a post-round meal, a Friday night out, a place close enough to reach without much planning. The course itself keeps its long-standing hours through the fall, open from 7 a.m. to dusk most days and 9 a.m. to dusk on Mondays.
The Foundation doesn't replace any of that. It sits alongside it, funded separately, aimed at a different set of outcomes. A junior golfer getting equipment support through the Foundation and a member ordering dinner at the grill are both part of Avondale's daily life this season, but they're now running through two different organizational tracks that didn't both exist a year ago.
What This Means for the Neighborhood Next Door
For a course that's operated quietly since 1963, adding a formal charitable arm is a bigger shift than it might look from the outside. Avondale spent six decades as a private-feeling, member-owned facility that happened to be open to the public. The Foundation gives it something closer to a civic identity: a mission statement, a board separate from club governance, and a project like the flagpole that exists purely to mark service and memory rather than to generate revenue or improve playability.
Forest Hills residents don't need to join the club to notice the difference. The flagpole is visible from the course itself, and the Foundation's junior scholarship work will likely show up over time in who's playing in local youth tournaments coming out of Hayden Lake. What used to be a golf course that happened to border a gated neighborhood is now a golf course with its own nonprofit, its own charitable calendar, and a physical monument that has nothing to do with par.
The course will keep running the way it has for sixty years, tee times filling through the fall before winter closes it down. But the newest thing at Avondale this year isn't anywhere on the scorecard. It's the foundation that didn't exist last September, and the flagpole it built to prove it means something.
If you're weighing what it's like to live inside Forest Hills, next to a club with this much history and a new chapter under way, Griffin Signature Living can walk you through what that proximity actually looks like day to day.
