On a swath of Caledon, Ont.’s Credit River Valley, an hour north of Toronto, professional, amateur, community and destination golf are coming together on a unique campus, one that honours the Canadian game’s past, embraces its present and supports its future.
TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley is the new home of Canadian golf. And while it doesn’t have the history of St Andrews or the aura of Pinehurst, it will have an unwavering commitment to serve the game’s national interests. It will do so remaining true to the golfers-first values of Osprey Valley founders Roman and Jerry Humeniuk while catering to the contemporary requirements of a uniquely Canadian destination.
Sitting in his office inside TPC Toronto’s gorgeous clubhouse, Chris Humeniuk, Roman’s son and the hand-picked successor to run the family business, described TPC Toronto as “unapologetically Canadian.”
“That’s not a political statement,” qualified Humeniuk, TPC Toronto’s president, referencing the state of U.S.-Canadian relations. “We’re just proud of who we are and our place in the game. When people come to the home of Canadian golf — touring professionals, people on buddy trips, daily fee players, industry folks — we think their experience should have a Canadian flavour.”
To be clear, the “Home of Canadian Golf” title isn’t self-proclaimed, nor is it a paid-for branding designation like the deal Osprey Valley struck with the PGA Tour to become Canada’s first Tournament Players Club. To borrow from an old Smith Barney television commercial, the public facility got the designation the old-fashioned way: “They earned it.”
TPC Toronto’s North Course — one of three SCOREGolf Top 100 courses on the property, along with Heathlands and Hoot — will host its first RBC Canadian Open next week and is set to become the tournament’s semi-permanent home like Oakville’s Glen Abbey once was. And as it did at Glen Abbey for decades, Golf Canada will set up shop at TPC Toronto with a new Golf House under construction beside the 13th hole on the North Course.
It will have company. The Canadian Golf Hall of Fame and Museum will also be on site. Exhibits are on display in the 65,000-square-foot William Hicks-designed clubhouse, including glass-fronted lockers dedicated to honoured Hall of Fame members. Other archives will be amalgamated throughout the campus and there will be a proper library for Golf Canada’s collection of 7,300 books, photographs and periodicals.
Several Canadian Golf Hall of Fame items are on display inside the 65,000-square-foot William Hicks-designed clubhouse at TPC Toronto, situated behind the 18th hole of the North Course.
Rounding out the two-phase project are 17 luxury villas for stay-and-play guests, VIP suites, conference space, high-performance training facilities, a reimagined practice area and a second clubhouse to service Heathlands golfers.
It’s an ambitious project that once upon a time would have been unimaginable.
Osprey Valley’s location in rural Ontario north of Toronto has always given it an isolated feel.
In 1992, TPC Toronto was founded as the Osprey Valley Golf Club, and it featured only the Heathlands course. Designed by Doug Carrick, Canada’s first links-inspired layout was built on 165 acres of flat, nondescript, middle-of-nowhere land with a series of low areas from an old sand and gravel operation. In a country inundated by parkland courses, Heathlands was a refreshing outlier.
The Toronto-based course designer returned to the site in 1999. The Humeniuks had acquired Osprey Valley after financial issues plagued the original owner. Purchasing several hundred more acres of surrounding property, the brothers commissioned Carrick to design two more courses: Hoot, a wasteland-style tribute to New Jersey’s Pine Valley Golf Club, and Toot, a Winged Foot-inspired rolling parkland course with wide playing corridors, deep bunkers and tricky green sites.
“Jerry’s rationale at the time was: I don’t know anything about golf, our location isn’t great, but I think we need two more courses up here to create a destination,” Carrick recalled.
Osprey Valley’s location in rural Ontario north of Toronto has always given it an isolated feel.
He was ahead of his time. Named for the train that once ran through the property, Hoot and Toot opened for play in 2001 and 2003, respectively. Hoot joined the Heathlands on SCOREGolf’s Top 100 ranking in 2006 and Toot did so in 2014.
Despite their dreams of a hotel, golf cottages and a conference centre, the Humeniuks kept operations low key. A trailer at the end of a gravel parking lot was Osprey Valley’s first pro shop/clubhouse until a two-level, log-cabin-like building was erected during construction of Hoot and Toot. Staffing was lean, advertising was strictly word-of-mouth and green fees were a bargain.
“It was world-class golf with a mom-and-pop mentality,” said Bob McClure, the club’s pro/general manager from 1999 to 2017. “Osprey was a unicorn property, like World Woods in Florida (now Cabot Citrus Farms). Incredible golf, great value, but an obscure, remote setting not around the corner from anything. Jerry and Roman knew what they had but downplayed it.”
To McClure’s point, golfers at Osprey Valley felt a long way from wherever they called home, despite the club’s location just a 40-minute drive from Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. The vastness of its property, coupled with surrounding conservation areas, gave it a sense of isolation. The place earned a cultlike status with knowledgeable golfers, who referred to this as the Osprey Valley mystique.
“Heathlands came along like it fell out of the sky,” said Greg Krar, an early employee and now TPC Toronto’s lead marshal/course adviser. “It was so different. Real avid players knew about it, but tried to keep it a secret. Honestly, there were a lot of beautiful days here with maybe 10 or 15 cars in the parking lot. After Hoot and Toot got built, well, the secret got out. The golf was way too good.”
Even then Osprey was rarely bustling, and by the end of the 2016 golf season the Humeniuks had come to a crossroads. With Jerry in failing health (he passed away in 2020) and Roman not getting any younger, the brothers realized their vision wouldn’t be fulfilled under their watch. The long-planned on-site accommodations had never come to be, even though Osprey Valley Golf Club had become Osprey Valley Resorts along the way.
Ian Andrew renovated the North Course in advance of the RBC Canadian Open.
The wastelands-style Hoot Course ranks the best among the three TPC Toronto courses.
So, they passed the torch to Roman’s son, Chris, who left a successful financial career to honour his dad and uncle’s legacy by finishing what they started.
Humeniuk initiated an ambitious business plan that involved a more progressive management model, a significant investment in Osprey’s pre- and post-golf guest experience and, at long last, a resort component reflecting Caledon’s remote location. Villas, a new clubhouse and a major practice facility expansion were deemed top priority. The goal was to create a “one-of-a-kind golf experience, where excellence meets accessibility in an unmatched setting.”
All to complement three of the best golf courses in Canada.
“I’ll be honest, our decisions would have been dramatically different here if we had three mediocre, middle-of-the-road courses,” Humeniuk said.
Osprey Valley reached another level of acclaim in August 2018.
The hefty licensing fee was well worth it.
Soon Osprey Valley regulars who once had the run of the place were circling the parking lot looking for a space.
“Becoming a TPC branded club did two things,” said Humeniuk. “It reminded a lot of people we were here, and it brought us attention to golfers who, for whatever reason, had never been here or heard of us before.”
Meanwhile, Golf Canada was on the hunt for new digs. ClubLink, Glen Abbey’s owner, was fighting to turn most of the course into homes and stores, a battle with the City of Oakville from which it ultimately bowed out after years in court. As well, Golf Canada had deemed Glen Abbey too small a footprint for what it wanted to turn the RBC Canadian Open into. Officials scoured properties — both existing clubs and vacant land — that had appropriate acreage within 40 kilometres of Toronto. Osprey Valley wasn’t among its initial targets because it lies outside that radius. The TPC deal, however, made Golf Canada reconsider.
Garrett Ball, Golf Canada’s chief operating officer, vividly recalled his first time on the property and the two-kilometre drive to the clubhouse. “Like golf paradise,” he said. “Osprey blew me away.”
At first, however, Humeniuk was indifferent about such a partnership.
“We had pitched the previous regime once before about possibly being their permanent home and never got a response,” he revealed. “When the new regime took over, I turned Laurence (Applebaum, Golf Canada’s CEO) down twice before agreeing to meet him at the 2019 RBC Canadian Open at Hamilton. I came away from that meeting thinking, man, I hate to admit it, but I really like the direction he wants to take golf in Canada. I could see us being a part of it.”
Negotiations on a new Golf Canada building began, and in 2022 a deal was struck for a fully integrated Canadian golf campus modelled off Golf Australia’s campus at Sandringham Links in Melbourne. With the ink barely dry, speculation about an RBC Canadian Open surfaced. A TPC facility that would be Golf Canada’s future home made too much sense and the private clubs that were lined up to host the Open — Hamilton, St. George’s and Oakdale — were noncommittal about becoming part of a regular rotation.
Plus, TPC Toronto had already hosted PGA Tour Americas (nee PGA Tour Canada) tournaments and would soon welcome Canadian Open and U.S. Open qualifiers. That fact, along with the resort’s wealth of space and acceptable proximity to Toronto (satisfying title sponsor RBC), connected all the dots.
“Right place, right time,” said Humeniuk, “but there was a lot of work to do to make it happen.”
The North Course, the original host of PGA Tour Americas’ Osprey Valley Open, was the easy pick of the three courses given its parkland design and phenomenal closing hole. But for a PGA Tour event, it was too short at 7,145 yards.
Canadian golf course architect Ian Andrew was picked to lead an extensive North Course renovation, which began after the long weekend in August 2023. His task was tricky: add length and teeth to challenge the game’s best but keep the golf course a fun playable experience for the public golfers who remain TPC Toronto’s most important visitors.
Having experience with previous renovations at St. George’s and Oakdale in advance of their Canadian Opens, Andrew delivered. He pushed North — formerly Toot — to 7,445 yards, tightened landing areas off the tee, moved bunkers to more strategic positions and rebuilt several green complexes. For the Open, the course will be converted to a par 70.
“We wanted to make players hit longer clubs into the greens occasionally, and the only way to do that was to stretch some of the par 4s and convert some of the par 5s,” said Andrew, who worked with the PGA Tour on the project. “The decision to lengthen the course out has to do with technology and personal philosophy, but it was done so that tee-to-green play becomes just as important as putting. I think that’s important when we’re talking about a Canadian Open golf course.”
Rory McIlroy is a two-time winner of the RBC Canadian Open.
R.J. Johnston Toronto Star
Golf Canada and RBC officially announced TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley as host of the 2025 RBC Canadian Open on May 20, 2024. Unofficially, it will host the tournament in 2026 as well.
Reminded of that moment and that the likes of two-time champion Rory McIlroy, 2023 winner Nick Taylor, Corey Conners, Taylor Pendrith and more will all be playing a national open at what was once the humble Osprey Valley, Humeniuk leaned back in his office chair, took a second and shook his head.
“Hard to put it all into words,” he said with a hint of emotion. “Just a few years ago, I dared to dream of a Canadian Open here. Look at the partners we have — the PGA Tour, TPC Network, Golf Canada. I’ve thought about my dad and Jerry a lot through this process. They were the original authors of this story. We wanted to celebrate and honour their contributions, which is why we named the clubhouse restaurant Two Brothers. If it wasn’t for them, we never would have had this opportunity. We wouldn’t be the new home of Canadian golf.”
“You’re all authors of a Cinderella story,” he was told.
