Relocating, reducing, and even eliminating course features is trending in top golf communities nationwide. As a result, golfers are playing faster, enjoying more options, and having more fun.
For the better part of four decades, the building of new courses resembled an arms race. Fueling the boom was real estate sales, which meant that difficulty and eye-candy appeal often outweighed strategy, walkability, playability, and maintainability. Design excess drove up costs, slowed down play, and hurt the environment given the extra water and labor required to maintain such layouts.
When Covid hit, rounds surged, because golf’s outdoor environment made it a safe, family-friendly space. Post-pandemic, tee sheets remain full both within and outside residential enclaves. Designers are embracing the influx with course renovations that suit players of all ages and skill levels while elevating the fun factor, concentrating their efforts on five areas of subtraction where taking away is proving a plus.
1. BUNKERS
After 15 tough winters in eastern Idaho, the David McLay Kidd-designed bunkers at The Tributary needed a refresh. He did more than cut fresh new edges: Early in 2024, he removed 25 bunkers from the original 150, part of an overall plan to get higher-handicap players to have more fun.
“The guys I’m playing with these days are in their 60s and 70s,” says Kidd. “They’re good players, but they don’t hit it as far as they used to. I have to give them corridors to be able to play through, where accuracy is rewarded and not force them to put it in the air with 250-yard carries. They don’t have that anymore.”
In October 2023, Beau Welling’s revamp of Sea Island, Ga.’s, Ocean Forest debuted—with purposefully less sand. “If you look at the data, good players play out of sand really well and not-good players don’t play out of sand very well,” says Welling. “We believe that sand is a fundamental design element and the golf course should have sand, but we’re big proponents of removing sand. We think that a closely mown slope next to a green presents more of a challenge to a good player, but it’s fun and enjoyable for everybody else.”
Welling also noted that from an operational standpoint, bunkers are some of the most expensive and labor-intensive parts of a golf course. Given the negatives, it’s little wonder he slashed the square footage of bunkers at Ocean Forest in half, while making the bunkers he kept more visually dramatic by raising the faces.
Examples of bunker sand reductions are everywhere. In 2023, Andrew Green reimagined Tom Fazio’s Vaquero in Westlake, Texas, in part by reducing the acreage of sand bunkers from 6.95 acres to 2.58 acres. Oddly, he bumped up the total number of bunkers from 61 to 92, but the current versions are significantly smaller and less obtrusive.
In 2022, Nicklaus Design’s senior associate Chris Cochran returned to the Lakes course at Florida’s Bear Lakes and significantly reduced the sand footprint—for the second time. When Nicklaus Design crafted the first version in 1984, the site was a vast cattle pasture with very few trees, so the 250,000 square feet of bunkering created instant character and definition. The Nicklaus team reduced that figure to 150,000 in a 2003 renovation and the latest go-round saw 15 bunkers eliminated, larger bunkers converted into smaller complexes, and overall square footage of sand slashed to 100,000.
2. FORCED CARRIES
Rees Jones has performed a fistful of recent renovations in the Southeast, and nearly all share a common trait. “Florida used to have elevated greens with frontal bunkers all over the place,” says Jones. “In the re-dos, we’re trying to make sure that the ground game is functional. We’re trying to blend the aerial game and the ground game so that as you get older, or you’re not that proficient, you can still access a lot of holes through open entrances or a slot.”
With design associate Bryce Swanson, Jones successfully infused that combination during his 2023 reworking of The Preserve at Ironhorse in West Palm Beach. At the par-five 14th, they removed two bunkers that were fronting the putting surface. “The green is still elevated,” says Jones, “but the approach now has more options.”
At Boca Woods, in Boca Raton, Jones’s 2024 renovation made corridors wider and green entrances more open. “It’s actually a young membership at Boca Woods,” he says. “A lot of people live there year round, including young families. We’re making sure the kids can play it, too.”
In Rising Fawn, Ga., Jones’s co-design of McLemore Resort’s 36 holes (one a redesign, one a new course, both with Bill Bergin) deemphasizes forced carries. “We’re using the wetlands in more parallel fashion,” says Jones. “We do have one par five where we have a forced carry on the second shot, but for the most part, we’re giving golfers choices so they can avoid the forced carries.”
3. ROUGH
One of the most welcome trends in upscale residential community golf is the paring of rough grass from along the fairways and around the greens. No one is benefitting more from this than the slower-swing-speed crowd.
At Bonita Bay’s Cypress course, a 1996 Tom Fazio design in Naples, Fla., the club voted in 2021 to overhaul infrastructure, while further improving an already popular course by making the experience better for golfers of all abilities and ages.
“The average age of the membership is early 70s,” says Tom Marzolf, Senior Design Associate for Fazio Design, who directed the renovation. “They’re not playing championship events out there.
“With better budgets and equipment, we can cut the turf lower easier, which was harder to do in the 1990s,” says Marzolf. “So we dried out the front of the greens, putting drainage and sand in there, then reshaped the greens and installed low-cut turf all the way around the greens. That allows seniors and high-handicap players to bump, roll, or putt the ball up the slope and recover.”
Establishing a short cut around the greens to replace rough not only made rounds less taxing, but more interesting. Another subtraction, often combined with eliminating rough, is shortening the course with more forward tees. Marzolf determined that the standard forward tees from 1996—anywhere from 5,200 to 5,600 yards at most East Coast clubs—were too long for a still healthy, but older, population. Those realities prompted the creation of two new sets of forward tees at 4,400 and 4,700 yards at Bonita Bay.
David Kidd at Utah’s Entrada, Andrew Green at the Pine course at Florida’s Grey Oaks, and Chris Cochran and Chad Goetz of Nicklaus Design at Florida’s BallenIsles (East) are three others who recently replaced hard-to-extricate rough with swales and slopes around greens.
4. TREES
Trees that are properly spaced and pruned add definition, character, beauty, and strategic interest to a golf course. Poorly placed or overgrown, they can create safety issues, turf troubles, strategic strangulation, and obscured vistas. Tree management has been a major concern at courses across the country, with Welling leading several prominent communities through the process in the past two years.
“Shade is a big consideration when you’re looking at an existing asset and trying to make decisions about tree management,” he explains. “So, making decisions about whether to keep a tree starts with agronomic considerations.”
Welling adds that from a design standpoint, trees can shrink both course width and aesthetics. “Some of these places, the trees have grown out so much you can’t play to a certain side of the fairway without risking hitting a tree branch. If you can create more width and more space, that creates more options. And visually, it opens up views. At Ocean Forest, we did a lot of clearing there to open up the views. A lot of people say that we put the ‘ocean’ back in Ocean Forest because you now see the Hampton River and the Atlantic Ocean from the interior parts of the property.”
At North Carolina’s Peninsula Club on the shores of Lake Norman, Welling and Senior Design Associate Chase Webb engage in strategic tree clearing to expand sightlines across the golf course, which reopened in late October. Not only did it open up handsome views of the lake, but it helped transform the design.
“At Peninsula’s 5th hole, we took out a lot of fairly large trees to make that space much wider,” says Welling. “We converted that hole [which dropped from 353 yards to 331] into more of a drivable par four, which they really didn’t have before.”
Among other top community courses that have benefitted from tree management in recent renovations are Belfair (West), a Tom Fazio creation in Bluffton, S.C., and Pawleys Plantation in Pawleys Island, S.C., which saw longtime Nicklaus Design associate Troy Vincent work the pruning shears.
5. WATER USE
Augusta National Golf Club has long been the standard-bearer for what a championship golf course should look like. But while lush, green grass makes for pretty television, overwatered courses not only waste resources but rob golfers of some of the joy and variety inherent in the bouncy type of golf the Scots invented.
In recent years, many notable clubs have turned off the spigot—or at least reduced water consumption—by utilizing more efficient irrigation systems, planting innovative strains of turfgrass, or removing acres of turfgrass.
This past September, the Cochise course at Scottsdale’s Desert Mountain Club reopened with its original Jack Nicklaus Signature design completely restored by Nicklaus architect Chad Goetz. Among the changes was implementation of an irrigation system that utilizes fewer, and more targeted, sprinkler heads. The club also installed misters in areas that dispense even less water than an irrigation head.
The old system made the turf play too soft, and as John Lyberger, the property’s Director of Golf notes, drier is more fun than soggy. “Golfers want roll on their ball. They want to hit shots off the tee as long as they can. Second and third shots from firmer and drier fairways is desirable because the club won’t dig into the ground, causing shots to be hit fat. More roll, better scores, quicker rounds.”
At Vineyards Country Club’s South course in Naples, Fla., architect Kipp Schulties led the club on a transformative renovation that included upgrading to a state-of-the-art irrigation system, improved drainage, and replacing nearly 12 acres of turf with tall native grasses. The landscape initiative was expected to reduce water and chemical use by 10 to 15 percent, following the reopening in December 2023.
“The new South course is very playable, with wide-open fairways and firmer, faster playing conditions throughout,” says Schulties. “The ball will roll much further, offering a better-quality course.”
Wider targets, longer drives, and faster pace of play—plus economic and environmental benefits? That sounds like fun. It also proves the adage that sometimes, less is more.
Good food for thought