Tom, were you at all tempted to design a dramatically blind tee shot or approach at Ballyneal (more dramatic than 7 and 15)? While neither Sand Hills nor Ballyneal leaves anything to be desired, I'm a little surprised that neither course features such a hole.
Mike
Mike:
I didn't really think about trying to do it. I would generally only build a blind tee shot if I liked the previous green too much to lose it, and it was going to take more than a 100-yard walk to get from there to a place you could see where the next hole was going. In other words, I'd do it as a fallback, but not because I wanted to.
I don't know why that is, to be honest. I really enjoy hitting blind shots over big dunes, surely more than most architects do. [Maybe not as much as Mike Strantz or Jim Engh, though.] I just know that on most projects it would be a struggle to convince a client to let me build something like the tee shot on the 11th at Royal County Down, so I have become used to trying to find a way around instead. I will think about it some more on the next project where we have big dunes to work with.