A new golf course is being created near the city of Hurricane in south-west Utah.
The course has been designed by architect Dale Beddo, and will form part of a 943-acre golf course community.
GCA spoke to Beddo to find out more about the design and his vision for the new course.
“The site itself features a nice grassy valley for the front nine, while the back nine cuts its way through hillier land, shadowed by Pine Mountain and with a back drop of beautiful red cliffs to the north,” Beddo said. “The land allows gentle movement throughout the entire course, offering me as a golf course designer the chance to place greens on hillsides and use ridge points for tee locations.”
Beddo describes his design approach as being of the naturalist style.
“I am an old school designer, and I prefer to follow the water with my routings,” he explained. “I am very much a naturalist – I do not enjoy moving a ton of dirt. If we could design our course onto a great big clear piece of plastic and then lay it down over the ground and let mother nature yield what she yields, it would not hurt my feelings too much. Assuming she knows what golf is of course!”
Beddo is sharing some of the design work at the new Hurricane course with Jeff Brauer. He explained some of the unique factors when it comes to the type of golfers the course is looking to, and likely to, attract.
“Our course is in the sunbelt of the Wasatch Mountain Range,” he said. “Our average player is around 48 years old, and we are very diverse in our public golfers. Our market is a US$55-$90-dollar green fee base. The courses here run between 35,000 and 40,000 rounds per year, and there was nearly US$175,000 brought in by out-of-area golfers last year. Collectively, that’s around US$4 million dollars in revenue generated by ‘recreational’ golfers.”
A self-professed recreational golfer himself, Beddo says there is a need for ‘average length courses, generous fairways with marginal forced carries, playable greens, no blind hazards and bunkers that you have a 50-50 chance of recovering from’ in this part of the world. However, the course will play 6,865 yards from the back tees, with Beddo saying this will help to keep the golf competitive for stronger players.
“Golf is and always will be a service-oriented recreational business,” he explained. “For me, that starts with a course that is practical, fun and rewarding to play, and it should come in that order. Still, I am also a scratch golfer and I want to compete, so we are creating a course that is demanding off the back tees. We can move our pins to the corners and really bring the teeth out in her.”
As well as the course itself, a new practice facility will be created – something Beddo feels strongly about.
“I believe that a good practice facility should be a part of the main focus for the golf course to be a complete product,” he added. “Our driving range will be 345 yards, which is long enough for players here. We will create a four-acre short game facility, complete with short bunkers, tight lies, three cuts of rough, and downhill, sidehill and uphill lies to practice from.”
The course will have a soft opening in spring 2018 and will be fully opened in September 2018.