Architecture
by STEPHEN GOODWIN
TRANSITIONING to the
GROUND GAME
Course design moving toward minimalist, hard and fast approach
Lately, the difference has become less
clear-cut. More and more American courses
are being designed, or renovated, to bring
the ground game into play. Brad Klein, the
architecture editor of Golfweek, sees the
growing emphasis on the ground game as
“verging on a trend.”
“This grows partly out of a realization
that modern courses had become way too
difficult for most players,” Klein says, but
he notes that many other factors have come
together to give impetus to the movement.
For one thing, advances in agronomy—
new strains of grass, updated methods
of amending heavy soils and modern
maintenance practices among them—have
given more clubs the resources to create the
dry, firm and fast turf. These conditions are
typically needed when the ground game is
favored in a design. The move away from
lush conditions, with wall-to-wall grass, can
result in major savings on water, chemicals
and fertilizers, and can make courses more
environmentally sustainable as well.
DESIGN ELEMENTS DICTATE
ALTERED STRATEGY
Two of the most highly ranked modern
courses, Sand Hills Golf Club in Nebraska
and Pacific Dunes in Oregon, are rugged,
28
soulful layouts that showcase lay-of-the-land
design, [