A couple of questions -
- are there some pin positions that are only really accessable when the course is played one-way?
- are any maintenance practices envisaged to be different to a 'conventional' course?
- how was the prevailing wind taken into consideration in the routing and lay-out?
1. I tried very hard to build the greens so that there was no wasted space. I didn't want them to have to be way larger than normal for the concept to work, or to have half the green pinnable in one direction and the other half pinnable in the other. I think we've succeeded in this. The greens average around 6000 square feet or maybe 6500 [smaller than the last three courses I've built], and I think the hole locations work well enough that they can just use the standard "front, middle, back" setup rotation that many courses do ... the difference being that when you are alternating the direction of play every day, some of that is working backwards, but it works that way too.
2. The main difference in terms of maintenance is how much more fairway there is. For example in the diagram you can see the fairway disappearing off to one side of the page, because it connects right from #1 green to #2 fairway and from #1 tee back through #18 green and up that fairway. You could putt a ball from #1 tee all the way to #3 green before you had to get it airborne over a bit of native rough on the par-3 4th. That's an enormous amount of fairway [probably 40% more than a normal course] because the fairway comes all the way back to the tee instead of starting 150 yards out. But otherwise there are really no special maintenance practices, apart from keeping straight that you have to move the tees every day, sometimes from one side of the green to the other.
3. Same as usual ... we think about the prevailing wind when thinking of approach shots, but we know the wind could blow from other directions so the main thing is to give some leeway for wherever it might be blowing. That is particularly important on links courses, and despite the trees at the margins, this really does feel and play like a links in many respects.
For me, one of the best takeaways from the project is how much more the design is focused on golf shots rather than visuals. We made the decision early not to concentrate too much on the visuals, because what works better one way tends to work worse the other. That's not to say that it isn't interesting to look at, just that the focus range is narrower, and the coolest things only come into view when you get close to them, which is a feature of St. Andrews.