Just to inject a little rigor, here are the numbers we have so far in The Confidential Guide:
- 7 - - Sweetens Cove
This is outrageous! The course averages 20 catch basins a hole.
Jaeger,
I was going to abstain from posting on this thread, but since you brought the discussion into the realm of the absurd, I feel like I need to respond. We got a good laugh about your email to Patrick after your round where you suggested that "more attention should have been paid to surface drainage." Clearly, you have no idea what the nature of the property was pre-construction even though the featureless fields adjacent to the second and third holes provide a clear idea to the discerning eye. There was actually a "golf course", a term which should be used very loosely, on the site before we started formally known as "The Sequatchie Valley Golf & Country Club," a moniker which was bastardized by the locals who commonly referred to it as "Squishy Valley," for obvious reasons. The raw land, which sits on heavy clay soils at the base of several mountains and rests in a floodplain, possesses all of .00055% fall from the west to the east end of the property, a percentage that equates to one foot over 600 yards.
I'll attach a few pre-construction photos of the seventh and eighth holes that give a representative example of what the property was like pre-construction. This is a photo of the approach to the old seventh green:
This photo shows the drainage ditch, which is now buried underneath the combined seventh & eighth fairways:
Obviously, surface draining to an open ditch was not an option. As you can imagine, architects have to work within the confines of a budget and upon the piece of land that they are given, and therefore, importing vast quantities of fill in order to achieve surface drainage was impossible. In the case of Sweetens Cove, we completely replaced every feature on a 72 acre site for one million dollars less than they spent at Sewanee, and the result of that process allows the current course to play as an inland links in spite of its inherent geographical limitations. I bring up the budget because our methods allowed the course to be constructed for an extraordinarily cheap price, a hard number that would've sunk the project had it been exceeded.
Prior to construction, the rain that hit the day before your visit would have rendered the course unplayable for at least two weeks, whereas, we had carts off of the path within 24 hours. Today at Sweetens Cove, drives were bouncing down the fairways as if they landed on a concrete cart path. In sum, we had to sacrifice surface drainage on the alter of achieving firm and fast playing characteristics, a decision that I would wholeheartedly make again.