Golf Course Designers

By: ColinJames

What is your philosophy of golf course design?

What is really important for us is to have a clear understanding who will be playing the course and their level of skill. We will design a public course much different than a private course. The public and semi-private courses will typically have more play by higher handicap players. If you don’t set the course up to accommodate that, you will end up with a course that won’t be enjoyable for the customer and will suffer from slow play. People just don’t want to come back to a course that takes more than 5 hours to play. So in that case, we intentionally design this type of public course to be a little more forgiving, with wider fairways larger greens and more forgiving hazards.

Having said that, one of the real tricks to golf design is to create a great course that is fair and relatively forgiving for the beginning golfer, yet strategic enough that the better player feels challenged. We can do this by not only providing multiple tees but by manipulating the angle to the green, contouring of the green and landing areas, placement of bunkers and hazards and also by adjusting the width and angle of the fairways.

My favorite type of hole to design is the short par 4. These holes we design so that there are several options with varying risk / reward opportunities. We set it up so that a player who really wants to go for it from the tee may have the opportunity to drive the green or get very close to it. The more conservative option is to lay-up and have a longer approach shot. Those are really fun holes because they give a wide variety of playability options.

What can you tell us about designing an “Environmentally Friendly” golf course?

It pretty difficult in this day and age to find a piece of land to design a golf course on that doesn’t have some sort of environmental constraints. It may be as simple as a few stands of trees, some wetlands, or a drainage corridor with some potential for erosion. As a rule, we are looking for ways to preserve and possibly incorporate these sensitive areas rather than to modify or eliminate them.

It seems that these days everybody likes to claim that they are environmentally friendly but there’s a right and a wrong way to go about doing that.

Article Source: http://www.bettergolfarticles.com

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