Bringing the UK Golf Club Model to the U.S.

00:00:00
Speaker 1: When American golfers go to Great Britain and Ireland, they often think, why can't it be this way back home? Specifically, why can't we have more private golf clubs that accept public play, Real clubs with strong local memberships that also welcome visitors on a daily basis. There are a number of reasons that this kind of golf club is rare in the US, some tax related, some having to do with history and culture. But the good news is that it is possible to create a golf club in the US that roughly replicates the UK model, and right now in Michigan, a group of people is trying to do just that. The architect behind this project is my guest today, Mike Derees. Mike is a decorated golf architect and a partner with the firm Clayton, Devrees and Pont. His solo designs include Kingsley Club, Gray Walls and Diamond Springs, all in his home state of Michigan, as well as Cape Wickham in Tasmania. And in this episode, I'm talking with Mike about the effort to bring the UK club model to the US by turning Dunham Hills Golf Club into proving Ground golf Club. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is designing golf. So, Mike, mainly what I wanted to speak with you about today is a project that you're involved in in Michigan. This project is in its very early stages. It involves reimagining Dunham Hill's golf club in the town of Heartland, Michigan, reimagining that facility as proving ground golf club, which, if the project happens, would be a very different kind of club. So could you give me the backstory of all this? Take me, start me at the beginning and take me through kind of what has gotten you to this point in in this venture.

00:02:03
Speaker 2: Sure. So, Ben Cowen, young man, you know a forty issue. I'll just say young man, I'm old. So but he's been, uh, he's been in the golf business in the past. He's a he's a father of two young daughters and is you know, he's been enamored with golf for a long time and it has always thought, hey, why can't we why can't we have a place that's you know, can have a private club aspect to it as well as provide you know, open tea times for the public. And so it's that UK model Australian model where it's accessible to other people that want to get there in play, but the focus is really on sort of taking care of the members or as as Ben wants to call him, patrons. So they're sort of patroning the the golf club and you know, they look after it. They provide you know, sort of the base support and then new members either come and go. But also you bring in the opportunity to have outside play at certain times of the day and that's controlled and stuff. So you have a really nice environment, just like you would in the UK where you have a great course. You have this camaraderie that you would have with your buddies that you know, you play with and stuff. But it's a welcoming place to bring people in from the outside. So and he's had this idea for a while and we've we've looked at other sites and things like that in the past. I got to know Band met him or ten fifteen years ago, a long time ago, and he was involved with the Walking Golfer Society. Not that he's anti KRT. He just you know, there's people out there that want to walk and you know that's a way that you experience the game also, and I'm a big proponent of that. Also, you get a different sense of a golf course when you're on two feet and there's four people walking down the fairway and you know and this, you know, we both hit it to the right side of the hole, and we kind of walk together and talk, and the next hole, you know, we're on the left side with somebody else or whatever, and you get a sense of sort of the social aspect of the game. I think that's that's an element that we don't really talk about sometimes, that that's a little bit lost in sort of the shuffle of all the excitement of golf and things. And so Ben's idea was really to bring this in and so he identified Dunham Hills, which is about fifty sixty years old. This has been a course in southeast Michigan, which is anybody that knows the roads, if you're you know, if you're in Detroit, the very southeast portion. Ann Arbor's a little west of that, in little south of that US twenty three runs through goes north south essentially out of ann Arbor and out of Detroit. I ninety six goes towards Lansing. Those intersect at the town of Brighton just north of ann Arbor a little bit, and then a little bit north of that, M fifty nine goes over to Pontiac, and so that's sort of there's east of M. Twenty three are some rural communities, but still then some city centers and smaller, smaller towns and stuff like that that are sort of outskirts suburbia for Detroit. Some people manage to commute down to the city, but you're not really very far and you're and the golf course is only about ten minutes from that intersection, which is a major thoroughfare for anybody that's coming up to Michigan from southern Michigan from ann Arbor or say Ohio coming up and going going further north to Northern Mission for summer vacation or the cottage or something like that. So it's a really interesting location in that it's it's within this town or village of Heartland, and the golf team has been playing the high school golf team's been playing there, the women's and the men's for oh, you know, at least fifty years probably, and the two coaches are involved with ben as you know as part owners and involved in you know, building this sort of contingent that is really involved in wanting to transform the golf course into something a bit more because it really hasn't had. It has old irrigation and an old maintenance building, and there's a clubhouse that they built about twenty twenty five years ago and they're doing some upgrades to that. But it's, uh, you know, it's a it's a really good piece of property, has a lot of mature oaks on it, some wetlands. It's bordered on a couple of different side by basically farm land. There's some development it kind of filtered off to the side of one of the holes, but it's really you know, it has a kind of country setting to it, and and and the ground is it's really excellent. You know, it's good soils. The routing is not not bad. But we're going to make some alterations to that ultimately. But the ideas is they're up and running now, operating as they did in the past as a public golf course, and we're doing some things like some tree management and things like that now that we know we're gonna need to do in the future. And you know, just help the golf course get the turf grass up to snuff, and then they'll they'll go on a on a money raised to do the full thing, which would be you know, full new irrigation. There's some a few whole changes that we're doing routing and stuff like that, and we'll rebuild greens and teas and and you know, get some some changes. But we'll be using most of the corridors that are on the golf course currently, so a lot of things will feel similar, but it will play differently and the routing will be a little bit adjusted to you know, four five holes are really a little bit different in alignment. Or there's a par five the twelfth, the current twelfth that's going to get broken up into a short four and a par three, and that's going to help to sort of weave things together a little bit.

00:08:37
Speaker 1: So I want to get into the club model story a little bit later, but first maybe a few more details on the architectural project here. First of all, what needs to happen in order for this this redesign project to go through.

00:08:57
Speaker 2: Money. It's always about money, It's.

00:08:59
Speaker 1: Always that's a it's a it's a common answer to these questions.

00:09:03
Speaker 2: Got a couple of bucks. So yeah, you know that's always that's always a factor. So you know, it's a it's affordable golf, and the idea is that it should still continue to be affordable golf, but you know it's still you're you're putting an irrigation. Irrigation now is a very expensive proposition.

00:09:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, since Covid irrigation contractors irrigation materials have just gone through the roof and that's a major story in golf course construction that not a lot of people know about, but it's having a huge effect on what people can do.

00:09:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, major budgets, all that sort of stuff. So the thing is is that's an incredible amount of disruption. We also want to change a few whole alignments and stuff like that. So that involves either in some situations, you know, cutting some trees here or doing earthwork there, so really sculpting a brand new green not on the same green area where you know where the soil might be halfway decent, but then consistency with trying to trying to build the same thing. So we'll import green's mix and things like that. All that comes with the cost, but long term, that's going to make it much more viable for for the basically, you know, the long term life of the of the golf course. There's an old maintenance building that really need they need a new maintenance building. And so we've identified a location where we can build a new maintenance barn and that's not going to affect the golf course is going to be better and the current the current maintenance bireing can can be taken out because we can realign the entrance to the club, which would be a better, more appropriate entrance to the club and will help the practice area also. So some of those types of things are they're just needed improvements and those come at a costs. So I think we can do irrigation. You know, this is not the desert where it's one hundred and ten degrees and you know you have to you know, if you don't, if you don't have water going on it, it's going to die. It's just going to be dirt. This is this is a moderate temperate climate. But you still need to have irrigation. So I think there's ways that we can do that effectively and economically, and that's going to be you know important. So I think if that if we can do that I think that's going to be really really helpful. And then it's it's essentially kind of an existing site, but we're really building a new golf course. Think of it that way. So, because there's certain areas that are going to get disturbed, even though the turf is improving and getting better where it is now, we're going to be overseating that or stripping that and then putting down new seed that's going to be so we'll have new varieties of that grass, ascue, bluegrass, et cetera that will be better, you know, better drought tolerance, pess aside, you know, those types of things, using less of all of those types of things. So it'll be economically friendly to manage and maintain. And we already have a you know, we've already figured out a budget for that, and that's a very conscious sort of aspect of the project.

00:12:28
Speaker 1: So what are you proposing to do with the redesign? What is the intention of that work, whether it's rerouting some holes or reshaping greens and hazards. What are you going for with the redesign of the course. How do you hope to improve it?

00:12:45
Speaker 2: Do you? I mean, just in with with regards to the overall character of the golf course or character.

00:12:53
Speaker 1: Of the golf course. Yeah, architecture design.

00:12:56
Speaker 2: Sure, sure. So there's there's really good undulation on the property, So some of it very rolling, some of it lightly rolling. The key to all of that, I think, and some of the keys to the changes that we're making are trying to make better use of that and transition between those areas. So we're trying to get the flow of the property to better match that in the cadence of the players. And to me, that's where those key elements of how do you transition from one hole to the next and do that? You know, if you've got a big hill and you're you know, you have this beautiful hole that goes down the hill, well, ultimately you're probably going to be back to the top of that hill. So so you don't want to go down and then go straight back up. That's sort of a waste of energy. You want to try and be able to use that and yeah, you want to get to a peak, but you want to sort of absorb that and stay there for a little bit and then you want to transition to another area or another level. And this is a we have a sort of a high ridge in the middle and it peels off on both sides and to the north, so there's a fair amount of elevation there and how we get about doing that involves a little bit of dirt work to be able to do that, to make there's a couple of extreme sort of situations in the routing now where we can do a little bit of earth moving, We can do that effectively, but it's in a smaller concentrated area, and we can make that transition work better. And that may not have been a focus of there's you know, sixty years ago, or they didn't have the equipment to do that, or there wasn't the vision for that. Maybe, so we're trying to do that type of stuff, and I think that's the thing that's I'm going to make the difference. The greens will greens will have character to them. Most people know that I like like a little bit of in my greenes and interest, so that's you know, that'll be part of it. And not that their greens are horrible, but there are some of them that are very playing and they need some help. And so we're going to want to have that sort of be consistent and broad across the in the in the consistency and quality of the of the maintenance across that. So that's that's part of it of redoing those types of things.

00:15:32
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00:17:21
Speaker 2: Well, first of all, it's what I call reactionary architecture, so we're reacting to what that's giving us versus having a static Nothing against SETH Rayner or CB McDonald if they had a very stringent, organized way that they did think right.

00:17:37
Speaker 1: Or Langford to Moreaw or you know, there's a number of architects who kind of have a style.

00:17:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they were very rigid about that so and that there's nothing wrong with that, and they built great stuff. But I guess I think the thing that's really interesting about golf is our palettes constantly changing. So we're those unique features. How can we pull those things out to give us something that's unique and special there that we don't have someplace else. So for the most part, yes, I'm trying to react to what's there. But I think you come in with an idea or a concept that could be, you know, we're going to do big, flashy bunkers, or in this case, we're doing you know, about fifty bunkers probably.

00:18:27
Speaker 1: Which is relatively minimal compared to a lot of projects these days.

00:18:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I'm thinking this the scale of this in it where there's a number of shared fairways and things. Also, the scale of some of these bunkers is going to be larger than normal, I think, than I would normally build. Like a lot of times you build, you build clusters.

00:18:48
Speaker 1: Just because the scale of the whole shared whole corridors is going to be big. So you need bunkers to compete with that.

00:18:55
Speaker 2: I think so. Yeah, And I think so in some cases there's there's going to be, you know, some larger bunkers than say I would normally be apt to build.

00:19:06
Speaker 1: I see.

00:19:07
Speaker 2: And so the number of the sheer number isn't isn't the point? The point is how do they fit in? And how do they do that? And I've drawn in a number that have little islands and buttons in them and stuff, and that's a you know, that's sort of a throwback to what Mackenzie and Maxwell did at the University of Michigan and in Crystal Downs where I grew up and stuff. And there have been times when I have built little islands and bunkers and things like that, but I think there's an opportunity to make this feel really old school with some of that, and then kind of having where there's two greens sort of flanking each other and there's a large hazard in between with little islands in it and stuff. That effect is going to be really really strong. So part of that's a visual thing. It's like, hey, they're setting up these holes. Both climb sort of, you know, uphill a little bit, so you're going to get a little bit of a that's there's trees behind them in the background, but you're going to get a bit of a skyline feel of of those and this massive crater kind of between them. So I think there's things like that that we're trying to do. But then as I'm building it, that stuff also evolves and we find other stuff or we run into something that we don't that we didn't expect, and then you have to change and figure that out. And that's always something funky with old with old golf course properties at Bloomfield Hills not very far from Dunham Hills when we're it's an old colt course and there was a there was a huge basically cistern that was six or seven feet wide. It was like an old boiler nine feet deep. And some farmer a long time ago, because nobody and the golf course knew this there and we were cutting some sod off and they ran into this metal lid and all of a sudden, you know that, we open up this lid and there's there's water coming into this and a pipe leaving out that you know, drained down to the end of the fairway and connected into the main drainage of the deal. So some some very practical person, Hey, we've got this old boiler unit. Let's throw this in there and make a big it's basically a huge catch basin, and it's just it's all internal underground, and people are like, what are you gonna do with that? I'm like, it's working.

00:21:32
Speaker 1: I'm not doing I wouldn't do it that way now, but hey, look at it's perfect.

00:21:36
Speaker 2: It seems to be doing that. That guy was smart man, So yeah, no, it's so you run. I mean, I've never seen anything like that. And there's a guy that was a maintenance guy there. He's I didn't see him, but he'd been there back like fifty sixty years ago. He didn't even know that it was in the ground. So it's really old. And you know, who knows what we're going to find und Dunham Hills. It might be something weird, but hopefully nothing too crazy.

00:22:03
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's the thing with golf courses that have been there for a while. Sometimes you find stuff good or bad that you're not expecting. You know, the courses has been there for a while. That's interesting what you're saying about going in with a kind of general idea of some new stuff that you want to do. These shared corridors and maybe some bigger bunkers with those little Perry Maxwell islands in them. He did like those, he did, he did some of those at Prairie Dunes, He did some of them at Southern Hills. Actually that the kind of have come back, not all of them have come back. And and so it's you know, is that how influence sometimes works with you. Do you think of particular architects and think Hey, I want to kind of pluck this and see if I can do something with that on this project.

00:22:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's an evolution. I guess I'm never not very often like specifically trying to like focus in. I think maybe owners have clients have more of that, like, Hey, I want to have a thirteenth O Augusta, or I.

00:23:08
Speaker 1: Like Fisher's Island. Look, can you give me something like that? So do I who doesn't?

00:23:14
Speaker 2: So?

00:23:15
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:23:15
Speaker 2: I think you know, a lot of times they're sort of looking for that type of stuff. Ben hasn't given me any sort of directive that way. You know, he's kind of letting that do. And he's i mean, he's very interested. He's an architecture junkie. So I'm sure like once we get going, he's gonna be like, hey, what about this? What about that? And that's all. That's all fine and dandy. It's just it's trying to like bring everything together and have it be cohesive. And sometimes you go in with an idea or a whole and it just doesn't fit somehow. It doesn't necessarily mean it's bad or terrible, it just doesn't work out quite right, and so you have to you have to adjust and you have to figure out a way to make things work. And that's not the that's that's a difficult thing to do because once you're really like, wow, that's wow, this is this is awesome, this would be so great. Well, if it doesn't work with the other three or four holes on either side of it, how do you get those How do you get those to all come together? How do you get those to merge and to be really functional? Because you know, if you have one great hole on a golf course and you have seventeen marginal ones, it's not a very good course, even if it's the most spectacular hole in the world.

00:24:38
Speaker 1: So got to make the puzzle pieces fit together. And whatever looks like a stylistic flourish is sometimes just a response to what's going on in other holes or good needs that arise on a particular one as you're building it.

00:24:52
Speaker 2: But you know, a little bit further from that too, I think is you know, we're influenced by all of those guys, you know, whether it's Mackenzie col you know McDonald, donald Ross, Tillian Hans, you're right down the line, Flynn, those those things, or like the old links courses and the stuff that they have. All of that cumulatively helps you build things or do things, And I think that is it doesn't have to be that direct. Just the influx of all of that type of stuff is really what is making a difference.

00:25:31
Speaker 1: Having kind of a rolodex of ideas that you've seen elsewhere and maybe one pops up as you're constructing the course. Yeah, I've heard Brian Schneider and Blake Conan talk about that a lot when they're when they're looking at a particular game. Oh, this reminds me of some obscure course that I that I saw, you know, way up in the north of Scotland, and and it's uh yeah. Having that kind of memory is both impressive and it seems useful. So the club model, the kind of business model story here with proving ground and what you're doing and transforming Dunham Hills is really interesting that the idea is to replicate a kind of UK club model, And from your description of it, it sounds like this this involves a kind of balance of public play accessibility but also a membership culture combining those two. What do I have that right? First of all, is there a better way to describe what the UK club model is for our audience, and if you could talk a little bit about what the benefits of this are.

00:26:41
Speaker 2: You know, you're I think you're describing it properly. And I think the thing is that the UK member clubs, even the more exclusive ones, they might have limited time, very limited times where it's accessible where you can be introduced by your club pro maybe you're traveling over there, et cetera. Or you know, you have you know, charter groups and you know, golf tour groups and things like that that that you know, find access and ways to do this sort of stuff. So there's ways to do that, you know, maybe at a premium though, And I think what that affords is it helps it helps those clubs on their bottom line, so there it maybe keeps their dues down a bit because they're having sort of a premium guess that comes in and usually those people end up being fairly serious because you know, they're they're paying more money and they're you know, they're respectful of it, they're excited about it. So the idea with with dunnan Hill's new proving ground would be that as we build this membership and we get to you know, one hundred and two hundred, three hundred members or whatever, we get the opportunity to have less space available because maybe there's more demand by the membership. So certainly when there's only one hundred members, there's many other t slots available for public play now that may still be restricted in certain times of the day, et cetera. So you know, if you're traveling through the area and you like, hey, i'd really this is a I've heard a lot about this new golf course, let's go try and play it. And you call up and hey, I want to you know, I want to tee off at nine thirty. Well, our tee offs are going to be at eleven o'clock that day, because you know, our member play is that morning up to eleven o'clock or something. So that can all be that can change or be shifted around a bit, I think depending on how many members they have and how they want to sort of control that environment. So it gives those members that kind of ability to have, you know, I feel like they're unencumbered. They're playing at a steady rate. You know, they know the golf course bing bing bing bing, you know, they play, they play more rapidly, and they don't feel pressure from Billy. Bob and his guy's drinking a bunch of beer, so nothing that's drinking beer, you know, yeah, exactly.

00:29:26
Speaker 1: Seems like a cool guy, Billy.

00:29:29
Speaker 2: But have you seen that the Landman series. He's he's amazing in that. He does a great job, Billy Weuthorne fantastic exactly.

00:29:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a proud name.

00:29:40
Speaker 2: It is. Absolutely, he's a credible actor. So I think really it's to try and provide a sort of a balance between that and say, you know, this becomes you know, wildly popular and they you know, there's a massive list of people getting in. You know, it may evolve into something else where it's going to be more restrictive. But I think the whole goal is is that they would Ben would like to have this be something where the public is available to get play a cool golf course that's walkable, it'spawn they'll still have golf carts and things like that. But then it's also and like I said, the women's coach and the men's coach at at the Heartland High School, those those two coaches are involved in this. They've been playing there for years. They're still going to do that. They're still supporting say youth golf and and you know, bringing in the regional you know, golf championship or whatever for you know, whatever this division is. So there's that activity of being involved in the community and doing that type of stuff. I think is it's if people want to talk about growing the game, that's how you do it. That's that's really you know positive.

00:30:56
Speaker 1: You know, in the US, clubs like this we often refer to with the cut all term semi private, which is, you know, as a term it doesn't really really make sense, but it does set set apart these courses that function as clubs with memberships and dues and initiation fees maybe even, but at the same time allow consistent, fairly easy public access where you can make a tea time. These models, these semi private models are structured in different ways, and I'm not sure I understand the nuances of every single different type of structure. But at Pasa Tiempo, for instance, that's a little different in my understanding, because the membership's kind of function as shares and you can you can sort of sell them, and there's that element to the club. But then you also have have club cultures at places like Wildhorse Golf Club in Gothenburg, Nebraska, where that feels and really functions like a public course, an affordable public course most of the time. But there is a healthy club membership and affordable membership that is drawn upon by many of the locals in that area. So I guess there are varieties of these clubs, but still relatively rare. You know, you go to the UK and just about every single club is It's rare to find a club that doesn't really allow outside play and doesn't use that outside play to fund its operations. So I wonder, what do you have a theory of why these models are so rare in the US?

00:32:38
Speaker 2: I don't. I think there's a The US I mean has a different view of golf too. You know, from a conditioning standpoint, everybody watches the Masters in April and like, hey, Frank, we got to go cut those bunker edges and make them look like a laser went through there and you know, slice them down, and like, you know, the Masters is awesome. You know, I love the Masters since I was a kid watching with my grandfather. That's one of the reasons that you know, I got excited about golf. I mean, it was the beginning of the golf season here in the North, So that was super fun. But that's appropriate there, it's not necessarily applicable to all the other places. And so I think there's a difference in sort of the perception of golf in the US that, oh, there's a munique golf course that anybody can go play and it's not in good condition, it takes forever to play and drinking beer and you know, but if you go to the country club, it's cultured and has this and there's a big variety in those in the US too. There are places that are much more low key, and there are places that are just and you have that in the UK also, But I think I think the opportunity to to do these sorts of things leads to something that's more. You know, golf, like we were talking about before, is a very social game, and so there are places that you go into that do allow outside play, and you tend to find that they're they're like, hey, Garrett, welcome, Oh where are you from? You know, what do you like to play? You know what what brought you here or something? You know, You're you're sort of engaged, and a lot of times you go to the UK and like you get a caddy and the caddy is the you know, the captain of the club or the president of the club, and he's just like he's a farmer or something, but you know, he's not farming anything that day, so he just wants to make a few extra bucks. And he also sort of serves as your guide, which is which is really interesting and it leads to this sort of thing of of sharing and and that golf courses in Scotland and Ireland and England are sort of a fabric of the community. They're not just wholly owned by those those members. And I think maybe that's maybe a difference between the America, you know, the Americas and stuff, where it's sort of like, well, we're the owners of this club. You know, it's private. Private means you know, stay off, et cetera. I don't know that that could be part of it, but you know, those are good examples that you gave. There's Belvedere here in northern Michigan and charlot Wai, which is a great example, Tasket golf course and they have you know, they have a fair amount of slots available and depending on the time of year, but it's control too. So like if there are certain days where you know that whole morning is blocked off because is that's a that's the normal member play for Men's Day or Women's Day or whatever. And Gray Walls in Marquette Golf Club they've got thirty six holes, but Gray Walls of course that I built for him twenty five years ago. That's that has public play. But they have six hundred and fifty or seven hundred members and they're busy and both golf courses all the time. And the original golf course was Langford and Moreau nine holes of that. David Gill added another nine to it in the sixties. So there it's a place that is you know, they're welcoming people and bringing people in and there's a there's a huge different variety in and that's also the up is a different place. I mean, it's it's it's it's not that far away. Everyone thinks it's totally remote, but you know, there's a lot of access to get in there.

00:36:54
Speaker 1: This is the old Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

00:36:56
Speaker 2: For correct for people people that don't know where.

00:36:59
Speaker 1: Where Martet Golf Club is now, I assume that most of those hundreds of members. At least a portion of that membership lives elsewhere right.

00:37:09
Speaker 2: Now, most of them are local, most of them are there. So yeah, so Marquette's a good sized town, okay, sort of the hub of the Upper Peninsula.

00:37:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, now I haven't been there that This is on my bucket list to go see Marquette and Gray Walls.

00:37:23
Speaker 2: It's a glaring o mission.

00:37:26
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously I have many I have many of those omissions in my my resume.

00:37:31
Speaker 2: We all do. But it's the town's probably twenty to twenty five thousand people. But then there's a surrounding area to that too, in Northern Michigan. University is there, there's the major hospital for you know, a good section of the of the of the Upper Peninsula there. So you've got doctors, lawyers, you know, you know, college professors, you've got students, you have guys that work in the mind. You've got you know, insurance and skies, you've got all, you know, sort of this well rounded breadth of people that are that are there, and they love being outdoors up there, and so they take advantage when it's and it's gorgeous in the summer. They there if it's if it's laid out there. They're playing golf pretty this time of year. They're putting golf carts away at quarter to eleven at night. I mean they're they're playing right to dark, and it's Eastern time zone, far north and west, so it stays light really really late this time of year.

00:38:34
Speaker 1: It's pretty interesting that Michigan has quite a few, i mean, relative relative to other states other areas, has quite a few examples of of courses that have managed to balance club culture with public access. And it seems like many of these places are in some vacation spots. Right. If they go closer to Detroit, the suburbs of a Detroit, they're awful lot of private clubs that are more exclusive. But you get farther north in Michigan and you start encountering some of these places where yes, there's a club, but you can also figure out how to play the course fairly easily. And so there's something interesting there in the culture of Michigan golf that allows that to happen. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but I'd love to figure out in general what it will take for more courses to adopt this model. This is something I think a lot of American golfers hunger for is not only a club to join that doesn't feel like an ultra exclusive or expensive club, but also in a array of golf courses that while they have their club thing, will also accept some outside play. And so I just wonder what it'll take for that to happen in American golf. I think there are some tax issues related to a nonprofit status in the US that I don't entirely understand. Yeah, I just I'm just trying to figure out how, how how more of these places can exist.

00:40:08
Speaker 2: I think, Well, I think part of the issue is or the or the result of that is there that there are a lot of clubs that are in a resort area and so they're smaller, you know, a little more laid back towns. The membership might be really seasonal. They might be people that are only there, you know, part of the year, snowbirds that go south or whatever. And then you know there's the Midwest, nice people are just sort of they're a little bit more. Yeah, I've experienced the same thing happens in Wisconsin or Minnesota, which are big golfing states also, and they tend to have that that same sort of cyclical you know, they got serious winter and then you know, the summer comes, it's beautiful and people are coming back. And so I think that might be part of it. That doesn't explain why, you know, it can't be someplace else, because there's there's plenty of other friendly places in the country, but that I think that's maybe part of it. There are people that say, you know, they haven't been around, and you know, they've moved here. We have some new neighbors that that just you know, are coming in the Sheen couple and they're like and they've been in Chicago for a number of years and stuff. And you know, Chicago is pretty nice, but it's a big city, so there's a lot of energy going on and people are you know, they're tense or trying to get their traffic's bad or whatever.

00:41:35
Speaker 1: You don't always know your neighbor exactly. But I've lived in an apartment build in apartment buildings in Chicago and not really done my neighbors.

00:41:43
Speaker 2: So but I think that you know, they're like, everybody's so nice. They're like, yeah, you know, you go down the street and everyone says hi, and that sort of stuff. And that I think that gets with that sort of smaller community. You know, where you're where you where, You've got sort of a connection to people where you see him. You see him at the school or the church or the drug store or whatever, because it's where everybody. You know, everybody has to go there or you know, use that facility or something. So I think that's maybe part of it.

00:42:25
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00:45:49
Speaker 2: Well, certainly what you begin with as always a big factor. So when you think about what your soil type is like, how is that that's going to affect a lot of what you have to do to make things work. If you've got solid clay and flat ground, you got to move a lot of dirt. That costs money just because it's equipment time, it's fuel, it's a labor all of that sort of stuff and moving dirt, it just costs money.

00:46:19
Speaker 1: So is you got you got to make a drain on flat clay sites. You got to figure out how to make a drain, and you need to move to make that happen.

00:46:27
Speaker 2: You got to get You gotta get water to the plant that's irrigation. You got to get water away from the plant that's draining. So those are the first two critical things you know that you have to do. And so if you got if it's flat, hardpan, clay or whatever, you're going to have to do a lot of different stuff that's underground that no one really sees besides oh this is a perfect dan hole or you know, you know all the stuff, the strategy and the stylistic stuff you want to talk about, you've got to make it actually function and work. So uh So, in Michigan, because of the glaciers, we've had a lot of areas where there's good, rolling, diverse terrain because the glaciers moved all this stuff pulverized the sand and the stone down into like a very well drained, nice sandy loam, sand gravel, types of things that are very effective at moving stuff through the ground. But there's still enough fertility. You just go by any old farmstead and in the Midwest and you know there's a lot of plant growth there. So there's still a lot of good growing medium in that and so we're starting with good we're starting with good product. On all of those courses that you talked about, pilgrims run the same thing. You think about gray walls. Now, there's a lot of rock there, that's why it's called gray walls, but there's also pure sand on that site. And even when there was a big rock out cropping, we could go over fifty feet and stick the dipper down and like we're just pulling pure sand end up. Now. I don't know why that is or how that worked there, but you know, that was one of the fortunate things about the site was we were able to utilize materials on site. We didn't have to import materials there, so that leads to a cost you know, less earth moving. Now you've got fine shaping and things like that where you're doing details, so bunkers, greens, tea work or fixing, moving a little a little bit of dirt to make this whole other, bigger area more functional. That's very economically effective. So you can move a little bit of dirt in one area and make three or four holes work instead of having to shape three or four holes continuously. That's good. That's that's the essence of a good routing, you know, being able to find those types of things and make them function.

00:48:56
Speaker 1: That's interesting. You're talking about basically not not going hole by hole and shaping each hole into what you want it to be, but looking at the routing and looking at some of those gathering points or concentrations of activity and shaping that whole thing. You know, moving as you say, a little bit of earth to make all three or four of those holes work in one area.

00:49:20
Speaker 2: Absolutely absolutely, So that's a that's a concentration or efficiency of sort of efforts, time and money you know, involved in that to make that work.

00:49:32
Speaker 1: Do you take a different approach to shaping bunkers that a course that intends to be affordable than you would at another course, or or do you not?

00:49:41
Speaker 2: I don't, we don't shy away from doing anything. If it's appropriate for the golf hole, it makes the golf better. I think that's important. And if that involves a little bit of detail that goes into that we want. We're very conscious of always building something that's it can be done with a larger machine, or how do you how do you get this done or that? And and part of that is having the superintendent or the future superintendent and the growing guy like on site early in the process, because I will ask them questions or they'll come up with stuff and say, hey, I don't know about maintaining that. I'm like, well, what are you using? You know? Oh, well we're going to use a triplex there? Okay? Is it all wheel drivers? It too? Will drive is you know? So we'll work through the process because there are people that will be like, well I can't do that, well why is that? And maybe they haven't ever been exposed to it. There's a lot of extreme things and that that gets in again the experience at Crystal Downs there, you know, I had a direct drive thing and the tenth te falls off and it's it's railroad ties holding it up, Like doesn't seem real safe, right, Okay, So how are you how are you managing that? Or there are ways to manage things, but how you do it or how you approach that makes a big difference. And if you there's guys that you have that that are going to say, yeah, okay, I can do that. I got to figure out a way to do it, or I don't know about that, Okay, what do you think about this? And maybe we alter some stuff. So like when we were building Kingsley, the seventeenth hole was the big drop off after the landing area and if you if you really bomb a drive, you go down the hill and you got to mid iron into the green or something or short iron for some of the guys, but if you're back on the hill, it's a three wood or something to try and get home in two. And So there was this big valley and it was all full forested trees there, and there was a there was a gas line that ran through this, so there was a road. There was this track going through there, and I took Dan there. Dan Lucas who built the golf course and grew in it was the super there for almost twenty five years. I took him there and I said, can you mow this? Meaning this this big hill that we could see kind of under these full grown trees, and he says, you mean his fair way and I said yeah. He goes, yeah, because I got three wheel drive and for all the other crazy stuff you're building, so.

00:52:21
Speaker 1: This will be no problem might as well, so.

00:52:24
Speaker 2: You know, hey, but Dan had that sort of thing of like, okay, he was always trying to, you know, problem solve, how do we do this or that? And there were things that he would say, hey, like that's really hard for me to do, and I say, well, how hard, you know. And there were things that you know that we maybe tussled over here or there, but for the most part, you know, we're trying to we're trying to solve that and make that and it's a very efficient golf course to maintain actually, even though it's a big area, you know, with the fescio grass and all that, and so you know, there's some compromise is that you have to have there, like the second green, there's very small margins for getting the triplex around there and trying to cut stuff. But I was like that was really important and we needed that space for play space and stuff too, and those margins of error it's a short part three, but we wanted it to be this demanding shot and people make decisions. You know, if you go to the back of the green, it's fat. If you go to the front of the green, it's really narrow, and you know, there's sharp drop offs to bunkers or rough and Dan's like, yeah, that's a real paint in the butt to maintain, and I'm like, yep, but that detail really makes a difference in that case. So that labor that that's extra labor there to do that. You know, we could have made it blander and easier and stuff like that. It still would have been a really good hole, but it wouldn't have had that little extra you know. That's that next that's that extra five per set, you know, those those little detailed things that you have to put into it. And then just recognizing that, hey, we've got to do a little bit more on that with the guys, and they have to understand that that we've hey we've got to do that here, but over here that's fine. We've got room all around it. Like you think about the third green, you know, it's you can you can you could land a plane on that green because there's all this room around it, so it's not you know, that's a that's a different source of thing. So there's a balance there. But at the very front of that there's two there's two small bunkers, one really one in the corner, and that's pretty tight, but there's room around it to do stuff. So I think that's important to work with those guys and to get their input and there. And sometimes those guys are like, well, I'm I'm not a designer to only ask me. I'm like, no, that's not the point. The point is is how are you going to do this? And will you embrace what we're trying to do and understand what we're trying to do so that you can maintain that long term. You know, I don't want it to be like I leave and they just do whatever they want to do, and right, it happens so much.

00:55:10
Speaker 1: Right if you if you don't make that connection with that superintendent.

00:55:15
Speaker 2: It's a it's a it's a real team effort. And that's funny because at seven Mile Beach, the superintendent there Anthony too Good two Wee is his nickname. He's he's a really good golfer and his family lineage are great golfers. His dad was one of the best Australian amateurs of all time, and his his great grandfather and great uncle played in the British Open, you know in the eighteen nineties and the nineteen hundreds, I mean finished like fifth and they were like, so, yes, some real great lineage. And he's and you know, I asked him a question there early in the project. He's like, I'm not an architect, you know, don't And I'm like, and he's a really good player, so you know, he understands golf, but he was just sort of focusing on other stuff and I was like, no, I need to know kind of how you want to do this or you know, so we can you know, so we can find a way to do that. And you know, that's it's a team effort. We all got to work together.

00:56:19
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I guess the key is there, the communication between the architect and the person who's going to maintain the architecture is where the efficiency comes from. And it's where the good architecture comes from ultimately, because otherwise it's not going to get preserved. And we see that at a lot of courses.

00:56:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can, you know, Grasslandes evolve and they move, and and that happens anywhere. It happens at the highest levels of clubs. Because you've got a different guy mowing greens, you know, on different days, and they mowing a little bit different pattern and they just trying not to scalp the just it's waffer thin, but they're just they're just trying not to scalp. And all of a sudden, you know, if it's a sixteenth of an inch, in two weeks, you've almost moved an inch. And you don't really perceive that, you don't see that. But you know, over time that green margin can move one two three feet. You know, in over a decade it can move five ten feet. I mean, just because if someone's not paying attention to it. So I think, you know, great golf doesn't have to be expensive golf. And so thinking about the bunkers, and you know, how do we build bunkers, you know, back to your initial question, how do we build bunkers? Do we do that differently or whatever? Well, the bunker is a hazard, and so that bunker needs to do its job. In my opinion, it has to. It has to make you think and penalize you for your error, and that's usually an error in judgment, not necessarily an error in the swing. If you don't commit to something and say, hey, that's that I can't hit out of that bunker or I have to hit a wedge or something, and you know, then you shouldn't be playing that close to it unless you're really good and you know that you can take advantage or something by doing that attacking that. So then you play over here, and well, that doesn't leave me the best next shot, you know, so then you that you're trying to find the compromise the next time, and that's what's really engaging the golfer and making them think about it. And to me, that one really good hazard that maybe requires a certain amount of detail or is is something you have to maintain around like by hand that oh, we can't just run a sidewinder around that because it's too severe or too extreme, like that's okay. I think that's where we want to compromise and say, hey, we needed to put a little bit more into that because that element is really critical to the feel of the golf course or the strategy, but it doesn't really take that much time, and that that's sort of worth it. To me, that's more that's more worthwhile than walk mowing teas because it has a nice, you know, small narrow stripe and like, I don't really care about that, you know that that okay, we're putting it. We're putting a peg in the ground anyway, most of us are. So I'm not trying to I'm not trying to like be little teased that they're they're very important.

00:59:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, you don't need them to be pristine, perfect.

00:59:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, but the tea's are the first thing that a golfer sees, and that's their first impression of the golf course when they step on the first tee usually, and if it's a really bad tea, or it's not tied in well, or it's beat up because it's too small, there's a negative connotation to that.

01:00:02
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:00:02
Speaker 2: And that's interesting because my dad he picked up golf later in life. He was a tennis player and he and he ended up you know, loving golf, but he really struggled with it because he started when he was like fifty and and we we were we went out to play some you know, just like okay, but just sort of average you know, public golf course and stuff, and and he was like, oh, the teaser just terrible. Here. I'm like, you're putting a peg in the ground, Dad, what differences to make? I was sort of like, I was just like, don't worry about it. You know, you're not hitting the grass and this level enough. And he's like, well, it's kind of like it just doesn't look it doesn't look clean. That's kind of his thing, you know. And yeah, and so that, you know, that was the way that I didn't really think about it, and he was, you know, he was obviously going to be real straight with me. He wasn't gonna beat around the bush. Hey, what do you think about this? And blah blah blahlah. He was like, this is awful, but fix this. What's not my job here?

01:01:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, well, look at that little piece of the bunker we preserve.

01:01:07
Speaker 2: Be happy with that, exactly, exactly.

01:01:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, choose your battles. All right, Well, Mike, I think that's a good place to wrap up. Good luck with the proving ground project, potentially another great course in Michigan, So looking forward to seeing how that turns out. And thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Pleasure to talk to you. This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsam. If you'd like to support Designing Golf and Frida Egg Golf on another level, check out our membership Frida Egg Golf Club. Go to the Frida egg dot com slash membership to see what it's all about. We're building a great community of avid golfers in there, and we'd really like you to join it. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.