Taking on a design project at a course you know well, as a member or frequent player at some point in your life, is a special challenge for a golf architect, as Adam Lawrence found out
What do you think is the most critical skill for a golf course architect? Routing, perhaps? Being able to read a topographic map and understand immediately what the ground represented there looks like? Perhaps drawing, whether freehand or on a CAD system?
In actual fact, useful though all those skills are, the most fundamental, basic skill of the golf architect is selling. If you can convince someone to let you build, or work on, their golf course, you are a golf architect. If you can’t, you aren’t. It’s really that simple.
Selling requires building relationships, whether with a developer or a golf club committee. If a course that you’re bidding to work on is one that you know well from playing there for some time, perhaps even being a member of the club, it’s pretty likely that you will already have relationships with a lot of the other key people at that club. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that quite a few golf architects have ended up working at clubs of which they have been a member, or courses where they have played a lot. The relationship-building part of the sell is already worked out.
But changes to well-loved golf courses are rarely without their critics. With a normal client relationship, the golf architect has a degree of separation from this: they might have to face up to the critics before and during the project, but after it, once the work is done and his fee is collected, it’s rarely their problem. That isn’t necessarily the case at a course you know well. If you’re still a member, there’s the possibility of bumping into a critic every time you go to play; even if not, if you have friends there, will they still be friends after you have dug up their course?
Australian architect Lyne Morrison first saw the Royal Canberra course at the age of six, when she went there to watch a golf tournament with her mother. “The course was amazing – I had never seen anything like it before,” she says. “That piqued my interest, and I began to play golf when I was nine. In 1976, I joined the club as a 16-year-old. I played with adults – because there were no juniors – and I saw people of all levels playing the golf course, and how they approached it. Playing with men, I’d realise how much stronger they were than women, and that helped me develop an interest in how courses played for women and those with slower swing speeds. The course didn’t have great practice facilities, and I always enjoyed practice, so I thought that was a shame. I’d see bunkers that were poorly drained or shaped, and again, I’d think to myself, ‘That needs fixing’. And that was the seed of me eventually becoming a golf architect.”
Morrison moved away from Canberra at the start of her career but later moved back after establishing her own firm. “Coming back many years later, the things I’d observed as a junior were still there,” she says. “The course had been extended from 18 to 27 holes while I was away, and the new nine was links-style, in what is really a parkland environment. This beautiful classic course had an overlay of links-style architecture with deep pot bunkers – on clay, with no drainage. Women would take a penalty to get out of them.
“Somewhere along the way, the superintendent had a chat with me. At the time – in the 1990s – it was becoming obvious that stronger players were beginning to overpower the course. He had some ideas about extending the course and, over time, we did that. It was fairly obvious that the bunkers needed work. The practice putting green we had was overshadowed by a mature tree, so it was very difficult to have good turf. With my bigger picture thinking, I was able to show that the club could have a larger putting green, a decent chipping green and a better practice range. The putting green was the first USGA green on the course. I brought more contours into that, and the chipping green, so that players would be stretched a bit more. I did bits there on and off for about 15 years. I tried to encourage the club to stop looking at projects in an ad hoc way and have a masterplan to take the course in the right direction for the future. I prepared a preliminary plan for the club but eventually the club decided it needed a proper one, and I wrote to the board and said, ‘Don’t consider me; this isn’t something a member should be involved with’, and they went with another architect in the end. The course has been under reconstruction since 2013, it’s finally getting there, and it’s looking good.”
Practice facilities at Royal Canberra were designed by consultant architect Lyne Morrison, who grew up playing at the club (Photo: Lynn Morrison)
Morrison says that, although her knowledge of the course as a long-time member was the basis of her work there, she had to keep her own opinion at arm’s length throughout. “It takes discipline,” she explains. “I had a perception of the course from my young eyes, but as their architect, I had to look at the course more broadly and figure out what was best for the course from an architectural perspective. Take the pot bunkers and mounds – I didn’t like them personally, but they were part of the course. We improved things – better access, better sand – but if it had been left entirely to me, I would have started again. When I was a kid, I really loved the sweeping views of the course, but over time trees grow, and captains want to beautify. I would have preferred it with fewer ornamentals, but you can’t dictate as an architect – you have to work with the people who are there.”
One of the inevitable consequences of the massive number of mixed-use golf and housing developments is that there are bound to be quite a few golf architects who live on golf courses! And surely, if a club knows it has a resident architect, the temptation to ask them first if there is course work needed must, on occasion, be impossible to resist.
Architect Kevin Atkinson has lived on the development surrounding the Red Rocks Country Club to the southwest of Denver for over 20 years. “They hired me as their golf architect, we did a sample project, and it went well,” he says. “They wanted to give me a perk, an upside. ‘We want you to be our architect, but we also want you to be part of the club’. So, they gave me a membership. I worked for free for a number of years – there’s no way I will ever catch up – but eventually we renegotiated and I started getting paid for the work!”
Given that Atkinson lives on property, he is a very active member of the club. “My friends are here, and I socialise here,” he explains. “Everyone knows me – I’ll go to a holiday party, see some old friends, people I really want to hang out with, and I will run across a member who has a bone to pick about a particular hole. I’ll say, ‘Look, I’m happy to talk to you about it, but I’m here to socialise with friends. This isn’t the time or place; I’m a member of this community and I’m here to hang out’.
“The golf course was originally designed in 1975 by Stanley Harwood, the rancher who lived on the property. The members ended up acquiring the course in the late 1990s, and there was a lot of work that needed doing. It had kind of a funky routing and several holes that needed improving. He definitely had his heart in the right spot – he tried to keep on top of technology and built his greens with the Purr-Wick method. The setting of the community is stunning, with beautiful views of the Red Rocks amphitheatre, downtown Denver and the Rocky Mountains. We must have done 15 projects in the time I have been out here. It’s almost like I’m a full-time staff member. Four years ago, we did a greens reconstruction – to make them drain properly.
“Generally, I love the role I play, but there are times when you just want someone to ask about your kids, or your business, rather than complaining about a new bunker. There are many times when I think, ‘I just want to go have a beer with my buddies and not be hassled about the golf course. That gets tiring after a while. But I do love what I do, and I’m very proud of what the place has become, so it’s a badge of honour. When I first started as their architect, I was just their architect. But as I became more involved, I became more interested in the area, and the property, so we wrote a book about the history of Red Rocks Valley. Now, we’re integrating that into the clubhouse so the members can share in what we have learned about what has happened on this land over the last few hundred years.”
Kevin Atkinson, left, with friends and neighbours at the Red Rock community (Photo: Kevin Atkinson)
David Hoekstra knew the municipal Bos Landen course in Pella, central Iowa, long before he became a golf architect. “It’s literally my parents’ backyard,” he laughs. “It was built in 1994 by Dick Phelps, and I actually played the back nine before it was grassed. I was only 12 at the time – very neat to see that process so close to home. I worked on the maintenance crew, which got me into the turfgrass side, and I did my internship there. It has gone through some ups and downs and in 2020 the superintendent reached out to me. They wanted to make the course more player friendly; it was a very difficult golf course, with lots of undulations. You used to lose a lot of golf balls, and I think that hit their rounds. Ever since, I have worked with them expanding fairways, adding more shortgrass around the greens and doing tree management.”
As a muni, Bos Landen is maintained by a small crew and operates on tight budgets, which Hoekstra says impacts the work that can be done. “Working with the city has on occasion been kinda difficult,” he says. “The city wanted to see some improvements, so they hired a new head pro, and he’s done some great work. There have been 19,000 rounds this year, which is a record for them. The city was reluctant to allocate funds until they saw the numbers rising, so hopefully that will improve matters. The super does a lot of the tree work himself in the off season, and we’re now starting to look at bunkers – which is a bigger challenge. Obviously, that incurs costs, but then putting bunkers back in play after heavy rain incurs costs too. We have already done the bunkers on four holes, which has been received really well – they don’t wash out.”
David Hoekstra learned to play golf at Bos Laden in Iowa and has been overseeing renovations there since 2020 (Photo: David Hoekstra)
Jay Blasi has recently started working at a club in Madison, Wisconsin, of which his family were members for years. “I grew up playing municipal courses,” he says. “When I was in high school, my parents joined Maple Bluffs. We always lived on the other side of town, so it made no sense to join, but my dad wanted to because he knew it as the best in town. It has been 18 holes since 1916. I played there for several years, and while I was there, they went through a masterplan process with Art Hills – I remember sitting in on a presentation about it, which was interesting given that I knew it was what I wanted to do. A couple of years ago, they reached out to me and said they were interested in doing some work.
“I’ve put together a masterplan, and we’re in the process of selling it to the members. It includes tree management, all new greens and bunkers. They did the irrigation two years ago, but the course needs regrassing.”
Blasi says his close connection to Maple Bluffs has made him stop and think about the project on occasions. “One person on the committee – a former president of the club – is a close family friend who held me as a baby!” he smiles. “It’s very awkward. When they invited me to come and talk to them about working there, I immediately got excited. A week or two later, a lightbulb came on and I thought, ‘Uh oh. Have I just stepped in a hornet’s nest?’ But the people at the club have been great – people keep coming up to me and saying, ‘Say hi to your dad’. Nobody has thrown a tomato at me yet!”
Eleven-year-old Jay Blasi, centre, at Maple Bluff in Wisconsin, where he is now the club’s architect (Photo: Jay Blasi)
“I played the Georgia Junior at Pinetree CC in Kennesaw when I was 15,” says Bill Bergin. “I played my first State Amateur there, we played high school matches there, and when I was a pro, they used to let pros practice out there, and a bunch of us used to play together there.
“In 2007, we did a full redo of Pinetree. It was really kind of average, and I think it’s a pretty good test now. I knew a lot of the people there, which was pretty exciting. Being local was certainly a good thing. They basically were very trusting – I knew the pros and the influential members, and I still work with the club – and I think they’re less trusting now! Pinetree had four greens that had slopes of five per cent or more, which would have been absolutely unputtable at today’s speeds. None of the bunkers came into play for a decent player: only bad golfers were hitting them. The greens were tired.”
The twelfth hole at Pinetree in Georgia, where Bill Bergin played school matches. Bergin renovated the course in 2007 (Photo: Bill Bergin)
Bergin, who lives in the Atlanta area, has worked on other courses he has known for many years in the region. “I just finished a renovation at Marietta CC – which I’ve known since high school,” he says. “They sold off their old site, and Bob Cupp, my old boss, built them a new course just before I went to work for him. My college roommate was a member there, and I played there with him a lot. In high school, I shot 64 on their old course – the best round of my life at the time! I know a lot of members there, and it was very interesting to present in front of friends. The members are over the moon with the work. They have been very smooth. At Marietta, my college teammate invited me to be their member-guest. They were doing a renovation of their Cupp course with Cupp, and it was so contentious that he left the club!”
This article first appeared in the January 2026 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.