High-tech gear, competition have course designers making courses more challenging

As early as the 15th century, golf was played in Scotland with a club made of a bent tree branch and a small leather bag stuffed with feathers for a ball. Since then, the game has evolved substantially both in the equipment used and the course on which it’s played.

Today, technological advances with golf balls and clubs allow better players to hit balls farther and more accurately. As a result, experts argue that new equipment is making older courses obsolete, forcing them to make changes to their designs to remain challenging. A recent example of this is The Masters Tournament course, which was modified this year. The biggest change was yardage – the course is now nearly 300 yards longer. Additionally, tee boxes were moved, more pine trees were planted and new hole positions were added.

According to Rick Phelps, golf course architect at Richard M. Phelps Ltd., these equipment improvements combined with Boulder’s altitude are making regional golf course designs require more land for safety and liability reasons.

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?Corridors are wider than they were 10 to 15, even seven years ago,? Phelps said. ?On the Front Range, courses are getting longer and wider because the combination of new equipment and altitude is allowing golfers to hit balls even farther. In order to play the same as at sea level, the courses here need to be up to 8 to 10 percent longer.?

Increased competition due to higher availability of courses also is driving change and improvements with course designs. Last fall, Lake Valley Golf Club, north of Boulder, completed phase one of a five-year master plan renovation. To date, Lake Valley has added seven new tees, several new bunker complexes, and a lake on the back nine. Lake Valley also mounded flat areas to make the course more visually interesting.

A nine-member committee, consisting of golfers of all abilities, ages and genders, provided improvement recommendations to the club, said Mitch Galnick, Lake Valley’s general manager.

?The committee looked at the course hole-by-hole to see what opportunities there were to make the course generally more playable and interesting,? said Galnick. This fall, Lake Valley plans to add seven more tees and rebuild and add bunkers to place them more strategically into play on the front nine.

Another by-product of tighter competition, Phelps said, is that courses are trending toward a less manicured look as they allow some areas to naturalize or ?get scruffy.?

?The reasons for this are two-fold,? Phelps explained. ?It helps golf courses save money on maintenance expenses, which increases revenue. Also, it gives the course a different look, more of a classic look with tans and browns instead of just greens. For the golfer, this naturalization can mean a more challenging course as turf grass that’s longer can be harder to play out of and harder to find your ball.?

Flatirons Golf Course in Boulder is just one example of a course that is allowing areas to naturalize. Over the past 10 years, Flatirons has added eight acres of unirrigated land and even planted wild flowers in the area to make it more aesthetically pleasing.

?The original intent was for a park golf course, where we would keep the entire area mowed wall to wall,? said Superintendent Dave Brown. ?Now, we’re moving toward a more naturalized course, which then serves as a wildlife habitat and gives different textures of turf to the course.?

In addition, Flatirons also spends about $20,000 a year on trees and is working to incorporate oaks, maples and green ash on the course to replace dying trees and supplement the course with more natural definition.

This inclusion of trees is helping to distinguish several Front Range golf courses from the plethora of prairie-style courses currently available. Before Saddleback Golf Club in Firestone opened in June 2001, for example, they planted 3,000 oak, maple, cottonwood, spruce, pine and ash trees on the site.

?The tendency in the Front Range is to have prairie types of courses or Scottish links without any trees,? said Andy Johnson, architect with Andy Johnson Design. ?With Saddleback, we wanted to give the golfer a choice of a classic-style course so we planted a lot of trees to give the feeling of a wooded site and included more sculptured bunkers that are bowl shaped versus pot bunkers.?

To date, it seems their commitment to being different is paying off. Now in its second year, Saddleback General Manager Tom O’Malley reports the course is seeing a solid portion of return golfers from distances as far away as Greeley and Fort Collins, in addition to its pool of more local players from the Boulder/Longmont area and south Denver.