Current Trends in Classic Course Renovation

[Terry Lavin]

The leadership at my club is trying to rally the membership to vote for a new Master Plan. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed other local clubs that have undergone significant tweaks with several things in common.


The consulting architects are pushing for enlarging bunkers, regrassing greens and fairways and the now obligatory short grass transition from green to tee. The courses look better I suppose, but it’s a process that costs a lot of money and closes the course late in summer with the hope to play by the following June on a course with turf that takes years to mature.


The skeptic in me wonders if this is just a vehicle to drum up business without enough of a payback for members and their guests. Are others seeing similar trends in your area?

[Tom_Doak]

The consulting architects are pushing for enlarging bunkers, regrassing greens and fairways and the now obligatory short grass transition from green to tee. The courses look better I suppose, but it’s a process that costs a lot of money and closes the course late in summer with the hope to play by the following June on a course with turf that takes years to mature.


The skeptic in me wonders if this is just a vehicle to drum up business without enough of a payback for members and their guests. Are others seeing similar trends in your area?

I red-flagged the short-grass transition because I'm one of the guys who helped make it cool ... and I am seeing it way too much nowadays.


If you have fescue or bermudagrass fairways, then expanding short grass from green to tee is not a big addition to the maintenance budget ... you just have a different guy mowing the same area, a little more often.


But if you're talking about your club in Chicago, you are going to have to increase your chemical budget to maintain bentgrass in those areas.  Maybe you can afford the extra cost, but it's very hard to justify on environmental grounds.


As to your last concern, yeah, the gravy train is running dry, except that clubs are so eager to compete with each other that they will continue to make "upgrades" to try and stay ahead of the neighbors.  At most, architects are only half responsible for this.  But look at the bright side: if you make the bunkers bigger, you can bring Jeff Brauer back to Chicago in a couple of years to take some of them back out   

[Peter Pallotta]

Motives and/or economics aside, is it good golf course architecture?


What architects are proposing for Chicago area clubs, does it actually 'work' and 'fit in' and make the field of play better as much as it might in say, North Carolina?


In other words, in strictly gca terms, are these current trends inherently and universally a positive?

[Anthony_Nysse]

The consulting architects are pushing for enlarging bunkers, regrassing greens and fairways and the now obligatory short grass transition from green to tee. The courses look better I suppose, but it’s a process that costs a lot of money and closes the course late in summer with the hope to play by the following June on a course with turf that takes years to mature.


The skeptic in me wonders if this is just a vehicle to drum up business without enough of a payback for members and their guests. Are others seeing similar trends in your area?

I red-flagged the short-grass transition because I'm one of the guys who helped make it cool ... and I am seeing it way too much nowadays.


If you have fescue or bermudagrass fairways, then expanding short grass from green to tee is not a big addition to the maintenance budget ... you just have a different guy mowing the same area, a little more often.


But if you're talking about your club in Chicago, you are going to have to increase your chemical budget to maintain bentgrass in those areas.  Maybe you can afford the extra cost, but it's very hard to justify on environmental grounds.


As to your last concern, yeah, the gravy train is running dry, except that clubs are so eager to compete with each other that they will continue to make "upgrades" to try and stay ahead of the neighbors.  At most, architects are only half responsible for this.  But look at the bright side: if you make the bunkers bigger, you can bring Jeff Brauer back to Chicago in a couple of years to take some of them back out   

I agree with Tom, here. Seems like 15 years ago, the only courses with connecting fwys, run off areas, green to tee shortcut was TD's courses,CCs courses and a few others that fit the landscape.
  Now it seems like every architect and club is adding shortcut, many of which I believe never had so much. It all costs money, at the end of the day, but when its bentgrass, its more spraying, more aerifying, more topdressing...…


It just seems like an special feature at certain courses has become a fad for every course.

[Joel_Stewart]

The skeptic in me wonders if this is just a vehicle to drum up business without enough of a payback for members and their guests. Are others seeing similar trends in your area?

Golf is a business and you need to keep up. It's a competitive business in gaining new members who can be the lifeblood to clubs.


At least your club is putting money into the course as opposed to a new clubhouse.

[Terry Lavin]

The skeptic in me wonders if this is just a vehicle to drum up business without enough of a payback for members and their guests. Are others seeing similar trends in your area?

Golf is a business and you need to keep up. It's a competitive business in gaining new members who can be the lifeblood to clubs.


At least your club is putting money into the course as opposed to a new clubhouse.

Agreed. Except our clubhouse needs attention. 😦


At the end of the day this sort of trend tweaking takes away from the principles that initially motivated our initial restoration and we are moving into the “keeping up with the competition” projects. It’s antithetical in a pretty profound way. Once you go down that path, I think you lose the architectural veritas that we had earlier tried so hard to achieve. C’est la guerre.

[Tom_Doak]

At the end of the day this sort of trend tweaking takes away from the principles that initially motivated our initial restoration and we are moving into the “keeping up with the competition” projects. It’s antithetical in a pretty profound way. Once you go down that path, I think you lose the architectural veritas that we had earlier tried so hard to achieve. C’est la guerre.

Well, your "veritas" included a couple of bunkers that weren't really there originally, so it's a slippery slope.  But I like the term "trend tweaking".

[Tom_Doak]

I agree with Tom, here. Seems like 15 years ago, the only courses with connecting fwys, run off areas, green to tee shortcut was TD's courses,CCs courses and a few others that fit the landscape.
  Now it seems like every architect and club is adding shortcut, many of which I believe never had so much. It all costs money, at the end of the day, but when its bentgrass, its more spraying, more aerifying, more topdressing...…


It just seems like an special feature at certain courses has become a fad for every course.

There was one of those at High Pointe, connecting the chipping area behind the 3rd green right onto the 4th tee.  I thought it would be like St. Andrews.  But we really didn't do much more of that until we restored The Valley Club, where MacKenzie [or Hunter?] had done it throughout.  Sebonack was the first course where we did it a lot. 


I wanted to say "way less than 15 years ago," but not by much I guess.  Man, time flies.

[Tom Bacsanyi]

Good topic.  One of my concerns with golf course architecture and design is a lack of variety within the courses themselves.  Generally, it seems that a course that has lots of large shortgrass approaches has 18 large shortgrass approaches.  On the flip side, a course that has lots of elevated greens with fronting bunkers and slender little tongue approaches has 18 of those.  My question is, why?  What are the best examples of large VARIETY in greens surrounds?  What am I missing?  Are architects unwilling to vary the green surround style because they fear a feeling of disjointedness or mishmash? 


I tend to view everything through the lens of a maintenance workflow perspective, so for me a hole that has a huge shortgrass surround could be offset by a following hole with a tiny or nonexistent shortgrass surround with more rough.  At the end of the day the overall acreages of each area and their requisite maintenance regime determine the budgetary requirements.  But maybe that would make for a bad "flow" or whatnot.

[corey miller]

Terry


A few questions of process and if you can't answer publicly I understand.


I had heard the original changes had made your club significantly better so always wonder if any part of this was suggested in the original restoration?


Did you hire the same consultant?  Are the same decision makers within the club in place?


The changing of the size of the bunkers seems a substantial change and one that gets to style which seemingly should have been already successfully addressed.


I have no idea about grasses but at first blush it seems a waste and as you say the transitions may be the flavor of the day but again I would fall back to the original plan...Were there financial concerns that put suggested changes on hold originally.


After a restoration at my club substantial time was devoted to creating a permanent committee (working with our architect-part of the mandate) to address any tweaks or more major changes should they be considered.  In short, they have all the juice which in our situation is a good thing because it mandates our original architects involvement.  But it is important you maintain a good relationship with your architect and probably suck it up and actually "listen".


I suspect there are still a few tweaks our guy would make that may never get done but I am also confident we will never get the crazy ass stuff that may be a current worry for you.


FWIW, when our club was considering a restoration we did receive a note from a "famous architect" which IMO was some of best free advice ever.  In essence he said that at that time (beginning or restoration surge) clubs seldom followed through on all suggestions and he felt frustration that in that once the initial phase was complete his role was then to continually talk them out of ill conceived notions. 


Good luck.


   

[Terry Lavin]

Corey,


The initial restoration probably incorporated 75% of the architect’s recommendations. The club balked at some of the tree removal recommendations. That work has been pretty much taken care of in recent years. The most recent work was done after consultation with the architects, but it wasn’t vetted by the membership as a whole.


Most of this work was trend tweaking in the form of an alternate set of tees, creating a straight short par four to alleviate a very demanding dogleg. They also got rid of some artificial elevated tees and created a couple green to tee walkoff transitions.


I should say that I really like our architects. They are terrific. But I fear that we are headed toward a new master plan that is characterized by following the hip new trends. The trend toward making all of the bunkers on the course bigger (as if all of the current bunkers were diminutive) seems a little contrived.


So, in summary, we took a course that had been dumbed down by excessive tree planting, green contour flattening, bunker softening and green shrinkage into a sympathetic Ross restoration. And we may be heading into the first chapter of drifting into practices that dumb that process down. There’s even talk of transplanting trees to places that will provide defense to players taking aggressive lines of attack on a dogleg hole.

[Peter Pallotta]

Fascinating.
I always thought that he was exaggerating a bit for effect, but he was right: all is vanity, and a striving after the wind.

[Adam Clayman]

Clubs that don't have a committee member that knows the sport, and their course, intimately, is prone to be victimized by so called architects. Playability should trump all other considerations except for Beverly. They can Obama the shit out of it.

[Tom_Doak]

Clubs that don't have a committee member that knows the sport, and their course, intimately, is prone to be victimized by so called architects.

Adam:


Sometimes it's precisely the other way around.  New committees push hard for further changes, and architects go along, fearful of losing an important former commission to a rival who will try to take credit for their previous work.  It's hard to walk away from a place that's important to your resume.


Sometimes when I lose out on a consulting job I have to remind myself that some committees aren't looking for the strongest architect; they'd rather have a guy they can direct.

[Terry Lavin]

Clubs that don't have a committee member that knows the sport, and their course, intimately, is prone to be victimized by so called architects. Playability should trump all other considerations except for Beverly. They can Obama the shit out of it.

Trump and Obama in the same non-political paragraph. Well done.

[jeffwarne]

Well the "trends"in super short surrounds  have certainly been a boon for the teaching industry.


Chipping yips are rampant but the real winners are the equipment manufacturers who can sell you a hybrid to putt in the chipping area.........

[Thomas Dai]

Well the "trends"in super short surrounds  have certainly been a boon for the teaching industry.
Chipping yips are rampant but the real winners are the equipment manufacturers who can sell you a hybrid to putt in the chipping area.........

Not a putter, but I understand that when Francis Ouimet was US Walker Cup Captain he had made for each of the players in his team for the match at St Andrews an unusual club (to most, but not all). A Jigger. A club with long/mid-Iron loft but with a shorter than standard length shaft. Perfect he reckoned for the bump-n-run ground game that would be needed from off the greens at TOC.
You can still find Jiggers, although probably not ones Ouimet made made (!) in the bags of hickory players and even on Ebay.
Atb

[Terry Lavin]

Well the "trends"in super short surrounds  have certainly been a boon for the teaching industry.


Chipping yips are rampant but the real winners are the equipment manufacturers who can sell you a hybrid to putt in the chipping area.........

True that. Getting the ball on the green from the short surrounds is bedeviling for the average club golfer. Do I flop it on?  Pitch it into the slope?  Use the hybrid?  Putt?  Options like this get the toys rattling in the average golfer’s attic.  That creates frustration, mis-hits and higher scores. The really short classic courses can use this to provide some real defense. So the “make it harder” crowd can get excited about that. Old Elm and Shoreacres have done this to great effect here in Chicago.

[V_Halyard]

Well the "trends"in super short surrounds  have certainly been a boon for the teaching industry.


Chipping yips are rampant but the real winners are the equipment manufacturers who can sell you a hybrid to putt in the chipping area.........

True that. Getting the ball on the green from the short surrounds is bedeviling for the average club golfer. Do I flop it on?  Pitch it into the slope?  Use the hybrid?  Putt?  Options like this get the toys rattling in the average golfer’s attic.  That creates frustration, mis-hits and higher scores. The really short classic courses can use this to provide some real defense. So the “make it harder” crowd can get excited about that. Old Elm and Shoreacres have done this to great effect here in Chicago.

Our bunkers are bigger than they were but pre-restoration, they represented an architectural smorgasbord of styles. Our fairway lane and putting grass was mostly original as were 13 of the greens. Most were/continue to be pushed to original forrtprints and the chipping short grass run-up areas were pushed out in character with the 20's and 30's photos. Not sure if we are a construction comparable but our courses share the same Ross lineage and roughly the same vintage. Can you not save your surfaces?

[Mike_Young]

Terry,Beverly is one of my tops.  Love it. 
I think it is critical that we all recognize the difference between the game of golf and the golf industry.  The industry is all about growing even when the game is not.  Mowers, irrigation, chemicals, fertilizers, universities, restaurant suppliers, club and ball manufacturers all are there to convince clubs they need more and more.  I spent three days at our State Am this year watching the young guys.  245 yard five irons and 340 yard drives have convinced me that we can't increase length enough on these land locked classics to keep them in check for these guys 20 years down the road.   While the average golfer can enjoy them as they are for years to come, the notoriety will be lost if the short game skills needed on these classics are not emphasized.  I think the short grasses are just one way to do such. 
Just don't forget that there are around 15,000 end users out there and all of these industry elements want a piece of that.  They are not looking out for your course as much as their own interest.  It's human nature.  It has become a huge wiener measuring contest...

[Terry Lavin]

“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is the quote running in my head. It seems like we are considering pressing “repeat” on the renovation clicker rather than finishing what we’ve come so close with.


If the entire plan gets implemented, I’m confident the course will be great as I believe in our architects. But I’m also confident that it will also remind a lot of Chicago golfers of a couple great Alison renovations in town that opened up in the past couple years.

[Nick Ribeiro]

  I spent three days at our State Am this year watching the young guys.  245 yard five irons and 340 yard drives have convinced me that we can't increase length enough on these land locked classics to keep them in check for these guys 20 years down the road.   While the average golfer can enjoy them as they are for years to come, the notoriety will be lost if the short game skills needed on these classics are not emphasized.  I think the short grasses are just one way to do such. 
Just don't forget that there are around 15,000 end users out there and all of these industry elements want a piece of that.  They are not looking out for your course as much as their own interest.  It's human nature.  It has become a huge wiener measuring contest...

Watching these young kids tear these courses to shreds really is eye opening. I think the industry really needs to throttle technology but considering they haven't done anything but acknowledge a little concern, our classics without the space for growth may be in serious trouble. I was at Trump Bedminster the other day and thought about the 2022 PGA Championship while I got around the old course. The course is 7721 yards par 70. I couldn't believe the grand scale and as I thought about it (specifically how far technology has advanced over the past few years) I wondered, will they add even more distance by 2022? Also, I grabbed one of the older yardage books, and realized they have already made changes making the course even harder. As it pertains to golf course design, I think new modern courses will be far different then they've ever been to accommodate the next generation which is a much smaller group than the last, and every club will continue fighting over...

[mike_beene]

It seems to me that an architect is the only person standing in the way of committees ruining golf courses. I am not sure why an architect subjects himself to member owned clubs. Just standing in the way is a service to the game.

[Thomas Dai]

It seems to me that an architect is the only person standing in the way of committees ruining golf courses. I am not sure why an architect subjects himself to member owned clubs. Just standing in the way is a service to the game.

Historians as well, particularly of ‘their own’ club. Then-n-now comparisons especially in photographic form, including those of past screw-ups, can be pretty persuasive tools in making members sit up and take interest.
Atb

[Ed Brzezowski]

The skeptic in me wonders if this is just a vehicle to drum up business without enough of a payback for members and their guests. Are others seeing similar trends in your area?

Golf is a business and you need to keep up. It's a competitive business in gaining new members who can be the lifeblood to clubs.


At least your club is putting money into the course as opposed to a new clubhouse.


Amen, our club has decided to push outdoor dining at the cost of fixing one of the worst holes on the planet. We are firmly entrenched in the " if we build it they will eat more" philosophy. Their thought is no one joins a club for the course, they join for the dining experience. Good Lord?