Tom,
What was the thought process behind two firms routing two courses on the same property at the same time? It appears that the C&C course is mostly a large loop on the outside of the property, with your course winding around in the middle.
I’m curious as to how the process worked. Did you start out saying: “Ben/Bill – you get the outside and I’ll take the inside”? Or did one group rout first and the other second? Seems like a challenging process considering that neither firm has dealt with a situation like this before (to my knowledge).
I know your are close to Bill and Ben, but were there any moments when you said “I call that chuck of land!”, and they said “No, we want that piece!”, etc?
George,
Bill and I worked on the routing together. We didn't want to draw a line and each keep to one side of it, because while that might have given the courses some obvious differences, neither of them would have had as much variety as what we came up with. There is no way in the world we could have come up with the routing we did if we hadn't had so much respect for one another and been willing to let the other guy get his share of the best stuff.
Bill had started working on routing an 18-hole course on the site before I had a map. He was skeptical about getting 36 holes onto the site, but I said I'd start trying on that, both of us understanding that would probably mean that some of the holes he had already scoped out would wind up on separate courses ... and that's what happened. Bill's original routings were mostly in the middle of the present site; his first six holes and his 10th-13th were added to get to 36, as were my 2nd, 7th, 9th-11th, 14th, and 16th and 17th. Some of the other holes had to be changed to make all the connections work, as well, but holes 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 15 on my Blue course are pretty much borrowed from various of Bill's original routing ideas.
I am sure Bill would have preferred not to make such a long loop around the outside of the Blue course, if we were only trying to find the best 18 holes we could on site; but we were trying to find the best 36 holes we could, and that meant that we both had to take a little bit of land that was less than ideal. I can tell you, though, that some of the holes on that outlying land are some of the best holes on the Blue course, and I'm sure the same is going to be true of at least a couple of those first six holes on the Red.
Someone asked earlier about a Composite routing, but there really isn't one ... We had to change the connection points of some of Bill's original holes to make 36 holes work. Our deal from the start was that if we thought going to 36 holes compromised the quality of the original 18 significantly, we would have to punt and go use another site instead, but we were both happy with the 18 holes we wound up with, and we hope that future golfers will agree that we made the right decision to put the whole 36 holes together. Anyone who goes there is going to want to play both courses, and if you try to put together a composite there are going to be too many great holes left out.