What Changes Should Course Designers Make for the 21st Century?

What Changes Should Course Designers Make for the 21st Century?: "

 

Driving in the the office today, I caught a bit of Matt Adam's "Fairways of Life" program, and on it, he talked about how golf course designers are going to have to do more than make new courses longer and longer to accomodate evolving golf equipment.  In other words, courses need more features that challenge a player than a requirement to sling three hundred yard arrows into a given fairway in order to have a good chance to score.

Good point.  In my opinion, the best courses have challenges for players of all levels - scratch, low, mid, even high handicappers are confronted with tasks that are suitable for their ability - and have varied and interesting holes. It could be a requirement to shape a shot a certain way, for example, something a scratch player can usually do with ease, while a mid-handicapper might find that task quite challenging.  A scratch player might be confronted with a need for precision approach shots over hazards to get into an optimal place to putt, for another.  In short, there's a myriad of ways to make a golf courses challenging and fun for everyone...and that's what the great designers do.

Clearly, there's a need for change, but thoughtful and good change.

Writer and course designer Geoff Shackelford also took up the same subject recently on his site. Geoff has some provocative opinions about course design, and he's more than willing to share them.  When he says

[G]olf architects have shown almost no daring or creativity since the Golden Age of the 1920's.

he has a point.  A lot of courses built since the 1920's or 1930's tend to be cookie-cutter and ultimately very similar.

At the same time, I am not sure that I agree completely with that statement, after all, I live a mere fifteen miles from the Mike Strantz monster known as Tobacco Road.  Opened in 1998, "The Road" (as we call it here in central NC) is a unique, challenging, confounding and damnable course that truly requires every club in the bag, plenty of local knowledge and lots of derring-do -- if you want to achieve whatever your normal score is.  It's not your run-of-the-mill Donald Ross course (Tobacco Road is surrounded by them) instead, it's something that's completely unique and original.  Strantz was a man unafraid to break the mold, and there are two examples of his work within an easy drive of my house. Unfortunately, cancer claimed Strantz at too young an age, cutting short a promising career.

So while Geoff is generally correct, I think that there are specific courses that have recently been built that have modern sensibilities already incorporated into them, but that they are few and far between.  Golf is evolving, as it always has, and it will continue to do so.  Courses must be part of that evolution, and that's something that courses designers today and from now on really need to think about if they want their creations to last the test of time and be well respected, say, in the 22nd century.

The whole issue begs the question: if you were a course designer, what would you put into your course to make it modern and challenging, all the while staying friendly and welcoming?  Here's one minor thing I would do: build two sets of junior teeboxes that young players could use, and not rely on plaques in the middle of the fairway; one set for older jumiors, the other for the little kids who are learning the game.

I'm sure that there are a lot more things that can be done.  Thoughts?

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