Designing Courses for the Weekend Golfer

If, by chance, you shot your best round of golf last season at Baker National Golf Course in Medina, give yourself a pat on the back. Then consider sending a note of thanks to Michael Hurdzan, the Columbus, Ohio–based architect who designed the 18-hole course.

“I would like people to shoot their very best round of the year on our golf courses,” says Hurdzan, principal of Hurdzan/Fry Golf Course Design, Inc., who also designed the Troy Burne Golf Course in Hudson, Wisconsin “People want to shoot a good score. If they are having their best rounds of the year on our courses, I will be the most famous golf course architect in the world, because I’m satisfying the people that play this game.”

In fact, Hurdzan and his architectural colleagues wield more power over your on-course performance than you might think. On any given hole, the placement of a green-side bunker or the direction and degree of a fairway slope can be the difference between putting for par or settling for a double bogey.

Consider, for example, this potentially familiar scenario: You tee up your ball on a 250-yard, par 3 hole. You get good distance on your drive, but like most middle-of-the-road right-handed players, your ball slices from left to right. Fortunately, the fairway is wide enough to accommodate less-than-stellar drives. And when your ball finally lands, rather than rolling down a hill into an unforgiving rough, it glances gently off an upward slope and stays on the fairway, leaving you with a playable shot onto the green.

Though you might assume you got a lucky bounce, you’re more likely the benefactor of a thoughtfully planned design aimed at helping you shave strokes off your round. “It’s too easy to make a golf course hard,” says Garrett Gill, principal of Gill Design, Inc., in River Falls, Wisconsin. Gill designed the new Meadows at Mystic Lake in Shakopee and recently redesigned the 18-hole Highland Park National Golf Course in St. Paul. “The challenge is making the course fun,” he says. “The overriding goal, at least in my opinion, should be for the golfers playing your course to have fun.”

Hurdzan concurs: “You want to build a golf course that looks hard but plays easy.” Yet, he concedes, that’s much easier said than done. “I don’t think people realize the amount of hardcore engineering that determines how a golf course will be laid out,” he says. Environmental restrictions and legal concerns also contribute mightily to course layouts, he adds.

“We hear a lot about how creative a lot of the old architects were,” Hurdzan says. “I guarantee you that a lot of them would absolutely die if they had to work with the limitations we have today, and yet be expected to be creative on top of that.”

Golf’s origins trace back nearly six centuries to Scotland’s eastern coast, an area marked by small hills, sand dunes, native grasses, and the occasional tree. The early golf courses that evolved from this dynamic landscape conformed, simply and elegantly, to the character of their physical environments.

By the beginning of the 20th century, several hundred golf courses, which similarly blended with the landscape, peppered the United States. Meanwhile, a class of master designers from the U.K., including Donald Ross and Alistair MacKenzie, began elevating golf course design to an art form. Ross is credited with revolutionizing greenskeeping practices and constructing faster, more contoured, and more challenging greens. MacKenzie, in turn, is best known for transforming bunkers from natural, sandy-soil features into more free form, amoeba-like shapes.