Golf Course Architecture - Issue 64, April 2021

WOMEN IN GOL F DES IGN found a passion for the game that would draw him back to the Kingdom. Having first been recruited by the Saudi Golf Federation in 2010 as chairman of its Technical Committee, Al Sorour’s focus shifted to driving golf participation in the country. “My goal was to develop and create one of the most sought-after national team programmes,” he says. Working with public golf courses, primarily around Riyadh, Al Sorour’s initiative offered complimentary golf club memberships for young players, the best of whom would go on to represent Saudi Arabia in national team events around the Middle East region. Collaboration with the Ministry of Education and schools has already seen over 18,000 children participate in the game. The fuse has been lit for a new generation of Saudi golfers. By the middle of the decade, alongside the chairman of the Saudi Golf Federation – Yasir Al Rumayyan, who is now also the governor of the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia and chairman of Saudi Aramco – the conversation turned to the creation of new golf facilities and a drive towards mass participation. “When we started building the strategy, we looked at pillars,” says Al Sorour. “In order to get people to play golf we have to build the golf courses. To turn the rest of the world’s minds towards the Kingdom we have to host events. And to sustain golf, we have to create mass participation. It was a puzzle we put together.” The first of a new generation of courses in the Kingdom was completed in 2018, with the opening of Royal Greens Golf & Country Club. Royal Greens is located in the King Abdullah Economic City, one of the Kingdom’s ‘megaprojects’, on the Red Sea coast north of Jeddah. The course saw Dave Sampson, designer of Safaa Golf Club’s nine holes, return to the Kingdom to lay out an 18-hole course that would provide environmental benefit to the new Emaar Properties community built around it. The 80-hectare site has just 40 hectares of maintained turf, the rest being the native desert landscape of exposed sand and wadis (valleys). The golf course also provides storm drainage capabilities for the development. “The network of wadis and streams carry water away from the housing and into four large saltwater lakes on the course,” said Sampson, in the July 2018 issue of Golf Course Architecture. The opening of Royal Greens also gave Saudi Arabia a course of the quality and with the surrounding infrastructure required to host the European Tour. A deal was signed and the Saudi Invitational was born, with the first event of a three-year SAUD I ARAB I A The Rolling Hills club in Dhahran (above) was converted to grass in 2002. Fifteen years later, the country’s first European Tour host course (right) was built alongside the Red Sea at Royal Greens Golf & Country Club Photo: Bloomberg/Getty Images 74