As golf courses age, many tend to shrink. Trees grow, branches hang over fairways and greens and lines of sight and play get blocked, fairways get narrowed, greens get smaller and smaller as those mowing try not to cut into the collars, bunkers loose their shapes and recede from the fillpads separating farther from the green surfaces, approaches become bottlenecked and ground game options get reduced,…
Some courses can make a dramatic improvement to the playing characteristics by simply undoing what has evolved. A good example is a course I provided a written recommendation report for in SC called Robbers Row. Everything I talked about above had happened to that course over the years. The Superintendent did a brilliant job (on a very limited budget) to bring that design back to life. Anyone playing it now will see greens that have been expanded, approaches that have been widened, bunkers that have been edged and enlarged, fairways that have been widened and now connect again with the bunkers (a pet peeve of mine), trees that have been limbed up or removed,…It almost feels like a new golf course and a million dollar renovation wasn’t needed to get it that way. The greens were re-grassed in the process but otherwise the work was done in house. I am sure others have examples of courses that can or have made these kind of improvements and it has really helped their golf course.