Golf Architecture 101: Routing

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Speaker 1: What is the most important step in designing a golf course. If you ask pretty much any practicing golf architect, they're probably going to tell you that it's routing. But routing is also one of the hardest aspects of golf architecture to talk about. Even to longtime enthusiasts, this subject can be pretty intimidating and mysterious. So in this episode of Golf Architecture one oh one, we're going to try to demystify the art of routing a golf course. I'm Garrett Morrison, and this is designing golf all right. As always in the Golf Architecture one oh one series, my guest slash student is PJ Clark. PJ, how you doing, Garrett.

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Speaker 2: I'm doing great.

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Speaker 3: I like our little matching sweatshirt action we got going on here green.

00:01:00
Speaker 1: We have vivid greens going on sea foam.

00:01:03
Speaker 2: After Saint Patrick's Day.

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Speaker 3: We're celebrating a day late here, but spring has sprung, so I like our little spring actually we got going on.

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Speaker 1: I mean I just wear green all week on Saint Patrick's Week. Were releasing this episode, well, actually we're releasing this episode this week. We're turning around pretty pretty fast. So so yeah, we've we're on theme. You're a little bit under the weather after an active week at the Players Championship, so I appreciate you hopping on with me.

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Speaker 2: I'm ready to go.

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Speaker 3: I had a great experience at TPC Sawgrass on Monday, and I'm ready to learn about what I should have been learning while I.

00:01:37
Speaker 2: Was out there.

00:01:39
Speaker 1: You got to see a little bit of pretty high level architecture out there. Now, I will say that when it comes to TPC Sawgrass, routing isn't the main thing about that course that is interesting because there, I mean, there are some interesting aspects of TPC Sawgrass is routing. We can even talk about that in this in this installment of of golf Architecture one on one. But there wasn't much there to begin with. Yes, So it's not like Pete Dye was looking at great landforms and thinking about how to use them. The golf course could just kind of go wherever because they were building everything Florida.

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Speaker 2: Baby, everything's flat. Just throw some stuff out there.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, golf course architecture is a different type of thing in Florida for the most part. So we are talking about routing today. What have you gathered about routing just by you know, producing the Friday Golf podcast for a little while. What sort of tidbits about this subject have have you absorbed so far?

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Speaker 3: I think the different kind of different kinds of routing, I guess. I'm sure there's a more technical term for it, but an out and back where you come back after the front nine and then go go back out again and then circle back towards the clubhouse, or if you know, of course that you just go out like all the way out and you come back in after eighteen, like there's no kind of circle back thing, and then kind of using the land to the advantage of you know, where you're placing holes, like how far is the walk necessarily between holes maybe? Or sure how close things are together? And I feel like it probably impacts you don't want too many I feel like you could say this about anything that we talked about in golf architecture what I want, but you don't want too many of the same type of holes next to each other, Like you don't want a bunch of basic, you know, straight par fours next to each other. So I feel like that probably has something to do with routing.

00:03:44
Speaker 1: Question mark absolutely all of those things pertain to the subject of routing, and we can kind of build a framework here where you can fit some of those fragments that you've that you've gathered over time. But all of that that you're saying, we're going to touch on in this discussion. So just by way of establishing a definition of routing, what is routing? Basically it means identifying the locations of the tees, fair ways, and greens for each hole and then linking those features together into full holes and sequences of holes that become the golf course. So you know, it's it's really about building up from a topographical map, from a piece of land a layout of a golf course.

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Speaker 2: As it is craziest.

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Speaker 3: I don't understand how anybody could do that. I'm not a visual learner. I don't like see things when they're on a page in front of me that I could just my brain just does that. I don't know how you could just look at a map and be like, yeah, there's a golf course there. That's the craziest thing to me. I don't understand how it ever happens.

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Speaker 1: What kind of learner are are you? By the way, I should probably know this.

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Speaker 2: I don't know. I think I need to read things.

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Speaker 3: I'm not the textual. Yeah, it's not in the abstract, not in the abstract at all. If I read it, I'll remember it.

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Speaker 2: But I don't.

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Speaker 3: I can't do anything that involves visualizing anything.

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Speaker 1: I'm kind of the same way. I'm pretty textual. But auditory also is helpful, and those are those are kind of separate paths that different students benefit from. Anyway, that's that's going back into my teacher's bag. But in any case, it is It is hard to overstate how important routing is. I'm sort of surprised, actually we haven't covered the topics so far. In golf architecture one on one, A strong routing is often the thing that separates a good golf course from a mediocre golf course. It is the skeletal structure of a course, and just from a practical standpoint, if you have a good routing, so many things about the course just work better. The course will likely be cheaper to build than you would expect, it will drain better, it will be more walkable, the pace of play will be better. And most important, a good routing is, in my mind, the key thing that makes for an enjoyable playing experience, even if the players not really aware of the fact that the routing is creating pleasure. It's not something that golfers normally think about in those terms, because you like, a good routing is harder to perceive than really high level conditioning or interesting bunker shapes or cool greens or whatever. Right, routing is sort of the invisible factor that influences everything about the course but never fully shows itself, And often it's the thing that makes you enjoy a course that otherwise might not have that much going for it. If you have a course that's not in very good shape, or has lost a bunch of bunkers over time, or is over tr read, but you play it and you're like, why did I enjoy that so much? Usually it's because the course has a solid routing. So when someone says a municipal golf course or an affordable golf course has good bones, often I think what they really mean is that it has a good routing. Does that resonate with you or remind you of any courses that you've played.

00:07:28
Speaker 2: It's a good question.

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Speaker 3: Uh, I don't know if the off the top of my head necessarily but I mean that makes sense. Like I hear you guys talk about good good bones all the time, and how you know if X, Y and Z or restored or fixed that it could get a lot better. But you need the uh, you need the basic golf holes to exist before you can put the kind of finishing touches on everything. So I feel like that's a that's a good way to think about it, that you just laid out, That just clicked, That just clicks something in me.

00:07:58
Speaker 1: There a lot of the courses at Bethpage, aside from the Black Horse, are your classic good bones golf courses. You know, the Red course has really really good bones and it's in good shape too.

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Speaker 3: I was going to say, I don't know if I didn't know if Red would apply necessarily, because I think reddis everybody here loves Red more than they love Black, honestly.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it definitely has a little bit more charm. And again, you know, Okay, so the black Horse has an exceptional routing, I think, but part of what makes makes Red so pleasurable is that it's just a little bit more fun.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, and.

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Speaker 1: So, and I think part of the reason for that is that the choices that were made in the routing of that course lend themselves to fun rather than just this kind of adventure of difficulty that the black course provides. In any case, I think you know. One of the reasons I think studying routing or no, a little not studying it necessarily, just knowing a little bit about it is important for golfers is that it can help you appreciate golf courses that don't have huge maintenance budgets, right, or that are otherwise maybe not very well known or widely appreciated. It allows you to find hidden gems and appreciate hidden gems because routing is something that a lot of unexpected courses have a good routing right. And so that's kind of what we're digging into in this episode, the ability to appreciate golf courses for more than just their kind of surface appearance or for the easy things that there are to appreciate. We're talking about some of the deeper things about golf courses that we can understand and enjoy here. So what we'll cover two main topics in this episode related to routing. The first will be how an architect goes about routing a course, and the second will be how a player can assess the quality of a course's routing, and those are really two separate things, so we'll talk about both of those things. But before all of that, let's discuss the new Cobalt QZ six slope rangefinder. The QZ six represents a significant leap in golf rangefinder technology. Most rangefinders have fixed magnification right, but the Cobalt QZ six has an optical zoom feature ranging from six x to twelve X, so when you're on the golf course, you can just see your target better. You can identify your exact landing spot more clearly, you can assess the contours of the fairway or the green more easily. You can actually see the characteristics of a pin placement. All that stuff is is pretty useful and not something you typically get with a standard rangefinder. In addition to zoom, the QZ six has Cobalts proprietary pin sense and surge technologies which make locking onto the flag fast and reliable. And it offers a total performance ranging from five to twenty five hundred yards, including six hundred plus yards to the pin and two thousand yards to trees. And I stumbled on that five to twenty five hundred yards because that's a big range right there. But that is what this rangefinder offers, and that's actually what you can do. So this thing is just built for golfers who prioritize accuracy, consistency, and trust in their equipment. Every Cobalt rangefinder is backed by a lifetime warranty and sold direct to consumer, ensuring uncompromising quality without the usual retail markup. So go to Cobalt dash golf dot com and enter the code fried egg Pod fifteen for fifteen percent off. That's fried Egg Pod fifteen at cobaltdashgolf dot com. Check it out. Okay, let's get into a topic number one for the day PG, which is how an architect routes a golf course. Now, obviously, I myself have never routed a golf course, so what I'm about to tell you is really one big synthesis and simplification of things I've learned from talking to architects and reading things that architects have written. Maybe you should find a teacher for this subject who has actually designed golf courses before. I don't know, I feel like I'm a bit of a charlotte in here. So I'll do my best.

00:12:41
Speaker 2: Though I think this is gonna be great.

00:12:43
Speaker 3: I think because I know basically nothing, I think anything is progress at this point.

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Speaker 1: One particular architect who is very informative on the subject of routing and knows a lot more than I do is Tom Doak. No one has done as much as Doak specifically to popularize the discussion of routing. It is really his signature topic. And one thing that Doak likes to say that I always think about is that routing a golf course is like putting together a puzzle, except that you never know whether you've found the right answer. There are many possible answers and results that the routing process could yield, and you just can't know whether the one you've come up with is the best one. You just have to decide that it's good enough and you sort of go with it. But most golf architects agree broadly on the goal of routing, and that goal is twofold one. You want to take advantage of a property's best natural assets, and you especially want to take advantage of its topography, which is to say, it's contour, undulation, elevation change, et cetera. You want your holes to interact with those features in an interesting way. Two, you're trying to connect the holes you found in the landscape into a walkable, compelling sequence. And we'll talk a little more later about what makes for a good sequence of holes. So those are the two goals that most architects would agree on when it comes to routing. Maximize the natural topography and connect the holes into a sequence that makes sense. So the first step in the routing process is to familiarize yourself with the site. Often this is done remotely using aerial photographs and what's called a topographic map or topo map. Have you ever seen a topo map? Do you know what these look like?

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Speaker 3: I have, because we have some on the website. I've encountered it at some point, and some designing notebooks and the whole desig contest, right, there was a map involved in that, so I'm generally familiar. I wouldn't say I know how to read it, but I've seen one before.

00:15:09
Speaker 1: You know, some people just have this thing where they're able to read a topo map and other people are baffled by them. I think most people can get to a state of competence with reading a topo map, but they're certainly those who are talented at it. And you know, what I want you to envision with a topo map is a map of a site with a bunch of curving lines one and these lines represent different elevations, and so when the lines are close together, that means it's steep. When the lines are far apart, that means that it's flatter, right, And so that's that's kind of what you and you learn to just sort of recognize ridges and valleys and different topographical features by looking at a topo map. But this is a this is a key tool in the routing process. It's really important. So you know, experienced architects will often be able to come up with a rough routing or at least a few options for routings just by studying a topo map and identifying places where they know holes will fit. But it's also critical to get out to the property, walk around and see what will work and what won't work. From the ground. Now, in those initial stages of routing, architects are typically looking first for green sites. They're looking for interesting features to build greens into because greens are the focal point of a golf course, So if you want to take advantage of a property's best natural assets, right, if that's goal number one of routing, If you want to draw the player's attention to interesting features in the landscape, the best way to do that is to build your greens into those features because players really spend the most time on the greens, and the most interesting stuff happens and important stuff happens on the greens. So again, maximizing natural topography means finding good places to put greens. You're also just looking for places where greens can be constructed and maintained relatively easily. So on steep properties, you're trying to actually identify flatter areas where you could naturally put a green that would be functional, because if you put a green on a piece of land that is too steep, then the ball is not going to stay on it, right, It's not going to work. So if you have a very hilly or just big, you know, tilted site, what you're looking for on the topa map is those places where the lines are farther apart so that you can actually naturally place a green there without having to build big structures to hold to hold the green up flat on flat properties, you really have the opposite problem. What you're looking for on flat properties is whatever topographical features there might be, and that's where you'll want to locate at the greens. So if you have a flatter property and you're looking at the topa map, you're looking more for where the lines are closer together, because you might actually have some interesting landforms there that you can tie greens into. You don't just want to build greens on plane flat land. I mean sometimes you have to do that, but it's not preferred. You want to hook your greens into interesting features. Okay. So once you have located some green sites, then you can start looking for fairways or especially landing zones for tea shots, because landing zones in some ways are similar to greens where where you need it to be functional, You need the ball to be able to stay there. You need something of the right size and relative flatness to work as a fairway. And also you want your fairways to be interesting. You don't want them just to be flat, so you know, find some top graphical features to route your fairways over. Now, often fairways are best placed in valleys or along the crest of a ridge, or just on gentle slopes or gently undulating ground. That's where fairways work. Green sites can be kind of smaller, right, Fairway sites have to be generally broader. And then finally you can find some tees or locations for putting different teas. But this isn't quite as important because tees are small and they can be built relatively easily, even on ground that isn't well suited naturally to a tee. So you found your greens, you found your fairways, you found your tees. So basically what architects are doing in the early stages of routing is looking for the best natural locations for playing areas, and that is greens, fairways and all that makes sense.

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Speaker 2: So far, that does make sense. I think when when.

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Speaker 3: You when you're looking for a green on the topo map, is that just for the green itself or the entire green complex of like what you're looking to do with the green, like bunkers or slopes to the side of it, or you just trying to put the actual putting surface down.

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Speaker 1: I think you're looking for a good place for an entire green complex, okay, And you know the reason for that is sometimes the topographical features that you use for a green complex are not within the putting surface itself necessarily. Sometimes it's just good to put a green kind of near a really interesting topographical feature. If there's like a big abrupt knoll, you're not gonna put the green on top of it because you'd have to you'd have to move some earth to to make that happen. But if you put the being kind of next to it, then it's interesting to look at because you're you're you're orienting the player's vision toward that cool landform, and you know it might not factor into the putting surface itself, but the green complex ties into it. But it's there, right, Yeah, And that's that's just you know, a lot of what architects are doing a routing is just pointing players at the cool features of the landscape.

00:21:24
Speaker 2: Cool.

00:21:26
Speaker 1: That brings us to the second major step in routing a golf course, which is connecting these sites for greens, fairways and tees into a full sequence of golf holes.

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Speaker 3: Now, this is this is where you lose it. Yeah, this is this is the crazy part where you know, good luck. I'm happy people do it, but I don't understand how we get there.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm glad you think so, because I feel the same way about it. It's it just seems impossible, right If you start by looking for all these separate green sites and fairway landing zones, how do you even start to construct golf holes out of that stuff? Much less a full sequence of eighteen holes, much less a sequence of eighteen holes as it has a part of seventy two in a yardage of the way you know, et cetera, et cetera. This is really where the puzzle metaphor kicks in, because yes, it is very tricky to link together all these different spots into anything resembling a conventional golf course. Now, one key thing that skillful architects do is that they suit the length and type of hole to the character of the land. Often this means putting shorter holes on more severe land and longer holes on less severe land. And the reason for that is that a long hole on severe land will require probably a lot of earth moving to build and will usually be very difficult to play. So it's just more practical to put short holes on the most severe kind of transitional sections of the property. But the architects should also have a sense of winter viholate that principle to create something unique and exciting. So you know, the open last year was at Royal Port Rush. A famous hole at Royal Port Rush is the sixteenth Calamity Corner. Yes, it is a par three, so I guess technically a short hole, but it's a long part three. This is not a one hundred and forty yard part three. This is a very long strike and it's on an incredibly severe piece of land. It's it's you know, kind of on the edge of this huge canyon. And that hole is incredibly memorable, really a great great golf hole, and it is it is function, it does work, it's playable. But in that instance, the architect had a sense in the architect being in this case, Harry Colet had a sense for when to use a severe piece of land for a longer hole relative to par because he was looking, he was he was shooting for the star there, right. Probably the conventional thing to do with that piece of land would have been to create a short part three there, but but he went big and ended up with with something great. So with all of these kind of rules that I'm talking about, architects violate them when when they see fit and that's what what makes golf architecture kind of in art as opposed to an exact science.

00:24:26
Speaker 3: You know, rules are meant to be broken. They're just guidelines. They're they're there. It's fine. I feel like you can you can get away. If you can do it well, you can get away with it. And that's what people make people like Calamity Corner.

00:24:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, greatness consists of knowing when to when to break the rules, as as we've seen with you know, some of the decisions that the Jets have made recently. They might break the rules, they might violate common sense, but you know, greatness is the goal and and greatness is coming in the future.

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Speaker 3: Right. Uh, people would tell you that. I don't know if Hi Wood, but people would I feel like, you know, our friend Harry Colton might be a little bit better off than the Jets are.

00:25:06
Speaker 1: But all right, obviously, you know, there's only so much you can do on properties with just purely natural golf holes. It's pretty rare that you would have, you know, a routing consisting only of natural golf holes that you just found in the landscape. So it is in this part of the process that the architect decides which natural holes to include, and then what must be done to link those holes together. So say you have two great natural holes that are just sitting there in the land waiting to be grasped, and you want to use them. You want to incorporate them into your routing. But between them you have terrain that's not very well suited to golf. Either it's extremely severe or it's too flat and boring. Something needs to be manufactured there in order to bring that hole up to the standard of the natural holes on either side of it. And it's during the routing stage that the architect decides, Okay, we'll make something out of this piece of land in order to have these two great natural holes, and really good architects are able to make it seem like that bad piece of land in the middle was actually good all along. You know where. That's where the art of construction and design kicks in later in the process. Okay, Now, once you've figured out which holes go where, you have to consider the overall sequencing of the golf course. Most clients, most developers, are gonna want eighteen holes, two loops of nine, and a par of seventy or above. They're gonna want two to four par fives, four to five, par three's, tennish par fours. So those are all the conventional things. You know. It's good when developers are willing to not have those things, I think, in order to allow the architect to just work with land and find what's there. But most of the time they're going to want those conventional numbers. They're going to want a max yardage of more than seven thousand yards, so right there, on most projects you have a lot of standards to meet. But the more important thing to me personally into a lot of good architects is that the routing have some sort of variety, balance and flow across the round. Whether that means it has the usual composition of par four's, part three's and par fives doesn't matter as much to me as long as there is variety, balance and flow. And we can talk a little bit later about about what those things mean. Variety, balance and flow. Another thing that good architects look for in this kind of connecting part of the process is something you mentioned earlier, PJ, and that is reasonably short grain to tea transitions, which we'll also talk about later. But those are the basics of how an architect goes about routing a golf course. Is there anything in there that kind of stands out to you as surprising or notable?

00:28:20
Speaker 3: I feel like not necessarily surprising, but when you have just a blank canvas trying to having the guidelines to fit, you know, I need seventy two hundred yards and I need eighteen holes of a par seventy two, So I can't get like super creative, Like I don't know, like you said, is there room for more open interpretation in new builds now, where like maybe it's a bar like sixty eight and it's a little shorter and there's more to get creative with?

00:28:57
Speaker 2: Or are are is the tradition of.

00:29:01
Speaker 3: You know, par seventy two eighteen holes nine and nine kind of thing?

00:29:05
Speaker 2: Is that still?

00:29:08
Speaker 3: I feel like it's still the prevailing theory, But is there more kind of latitude with that now?

00:29:14
Speaker 1: I think there is more latitude with that now. And that's partly because we have developers like the Kaiser family who are open to crazy ideas from the likes of Tom Doak to have you know, a PAR sixty eight course like like Sedge.

00:29:30
Speaker 3: Valley, So he does he just see that on a map, like he just gets the map and is like, I can only build you know, however long this is going to be like sixty eight hundred yards, so it's got to be a par sixty eight.

00:29:43
Speaker 2: Is that how it works?

00:29:45
Speaker 1: I don't think that in that case he looked at the map and said, I can only build a par sixty eight course here. I think what Doak did on the Sedge Valley project at Sand Valley was that he assessed this piece of land and saw that it kind of had these sort of smaller pockets in the property, like there were kind of more severe crowded undulations in that property as compared to like Mammoth Dunes or Sand Valley, which have more kind of broad slopes. And his general impression was what would fit really well here is kind of a sporting golf course that's a little bit shorter, that doesn't have the max yardage of seven thousand or above, that doesn't have the max par of seventy two. Just something smaller would fit. And I think also Doke independently wanted to build a course like this, wanted to challenge the notion that a course had to have a part of seventy two and a certain yardage, So I think it was a combination of looking at that site and just having a general sense that a smaller course would fit here, but also I kind of want to build this type of course just to get people thinking a little bit. Now. Douk, as I mentioned before, is an intellectual of routing, like this is his big subject. He's written books about the routing process. He loves talking about it, and it's something that he's brought to the four more than any architect has done, I think in the history of the profession, and so he does love these experiments in routing. He's done a reversible course, for instance, at the Loop at Forest Dunes in Michigan, and Pacific Dunes. His big kind of breakout design has some really interesting elements of its routing. It has back to back par threes, it does not have returning nines. At that point in golf architecture history, those things were unusual, and I think courses like Pacific Dunes have made them more acceptable. Yes, we are seeing more experiments and routing. We're seeing a willingness to challenge the usual conventions, and I think that's a good thing because I think that architects have often had to abandon the goal of maximizing natural topography for the sake of meeting certain conventions in the past, and I would rather architects just focus on maximizing the land. Now, if you go way back in the history of golf, you find even more interesting stuff. Before the eighteen whole round became standardized, and it was really the old course at San Andrews that standardized the eighteen hole par seventy two round or par seventy sorry again San Andrews par seventy two. I should know off that I'm getting old PJ. But in any case, it standardized the eighteen whole round. But before before that happened, before that became widely accepted, you had seven whole golf courses, you had twelve whole golf courses. People really were looking to fit a course to the land rather than create an eighteen hole, par seventy two golf course. And so there's some inspiration in the deep past of golf. But you know, we've gotten to the point with you know, USGA ratings and handicaps that it's kind of hard to build a thirteen hole golf course. But there is a little bit of wiggle room, all right, So let's move on to the second half of our episode. Here, I want to talk about how you as a player can assess the routing of a golf course. Now, this is this is really what's because neither of us PJ probably is ever going to route a golf course. I don't know. Maybe maybe we will. We've got we've got a lot of life to.

00:33:47
Speaker 3: Live, there's still time. I would call it unlikely. I think you're more likely than me, But I don't know. I could get on the sticks on two K and see what happens too, I don't.

00:33:57
Speaker 2: I haven't played around with that, but maybe I need to after this.

00:34:00
Speaker 1: That's very true. I've forgotten about virtual routing that that is definitely a possibility for both of us. But in any case, the most relevant thing to both of us would be how do you play a golf course and say whether it has a good routing or a poor routing? And I don't think this is something that comes naturally to most people, even even to people who are really interested in golf architecture. Usually the quality of a routing doesn't come up all that much, or you know, you know, usually we're talking about whole design, strategic versus penal golf architecture, or we're talking about green contouring or bunker shaping or aesthetics or how good the land is. Those things are easier to talk about, and I think the reason that routing doesn't get talked about all that much from the golfer's perspective is that it is hidden. It is subterranean, so to speak. The golf course just goes where it goes, and the player doesn't have a lot of visibility as to where it could have gone instead. And furthermore, the player really doesn't have any idea of the challenges or the limitations that factored into the routing process. Maybe the land didn't have that many natural green sites or fairway landing zones. It's hard to tell when you just play a golf course how much natural goodness was there for the architect to work with. Maybe there were environmental regulations that dictated where the holes could and couldn't go. Maybe the golf course was just one part of a real estate plan and the architect just had to accept the land that he was given. These are things that we just can't really know by playing a golf course, so we have to be somewhat humble. I think when we're talking about routing, because usually we don't know what we don't know, and if there are problems in the routing, the golf architect isn't necessarily to blame. At the same time, our experience of the golf course is our experience of the golf course, and if the routing seems bad, then it's bad. Right. Maybe the golf architect isn't at fault, But in the end, the course was built for the player, and so it's fair for the player to offer an assessment. That's kind of how I think about it. So with all that said, I have five questions that you can ask during your next round in order to evaluate the routing of a golf course. These are just five specific questions that you can ask of a golf course after you've played it to see whether you think the routing is effective fantastic. The first question, is there a variety of good natural green sites. So greens can go on plateaus, they can go in saddles, they can go on dolls or punch bowls. They can be benched into a hillside backwards or sideways. They can be on ground that tilts to the left or tilts to the right. Or back to front or front to back. They can have different kinds of surrounding topographical features like creeks and ravines and cliffs and rockout croppings and other natural hazards. So there are all sorts of different places where greens can go, and a good routing finds a variety of those places. I think we've all played courses where the greens are all kind of on the same type of landform, especially you know, on the top of ridges, just on hilltops. There are certain courses where you know, it plays from a tee down through a valley and back up on a hill, over and over and over again. This is a flaw in routing because you want variety. Yes, those greens are great, they drain well, they're often very attractive, they just work well. But you don't want only that in a round of golf. You also want greens on lower pieces of land or just more varied pieces of land. Okay, So that's the first question. Is there a variety of good natural green sites. Related to that is question two, which is do the holes have a variety of topographical profiles? And what I mean by this is how do the holes move across the land? What is the terrain doing over the course of the entire hole. So holes can move uphill, they can move downhill. You can have a flat drive followed by an uphill approach. You can have a flat drive followed by a downhill approach. You can have an uphill drive followed by a flat approach, et cetera, et cetera, all those permutations. You can play ridge to ridge like I just described earlier. You can play up and over from a low te to a high fairway to a low green. You can play sidehill. You can play side hill in reverse camber where the hole kind of goes up against the slope, dog legs up against the slope. You can play side hill in positive camber where the whole kind of dog legs with the slope. You can play straight across the side hill. You can have undulating holes in various ways. And then within each of those categories that I just named, you have a lot of different scales and iterations. Right, So that's the topographical profile of a hole. Does it make sense when I talk about topographical profile of a golf hole.

00:39:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think you.

00:39:48
Speaker 3: Not having any variety would be terrible, right, Like the point if you're playing every hole flatter, everything goes uphill, and you're just climbing, climbing, climbing the whole time, Like, I don't know what the fun is in having to hit different shots and what is presented to you. So I feel like that, at least to me, of the two questions so far, that one is an easier answer than the first one that I would be able to actively figure out as things are going, because I know a direction I'm going.

00:40:21
Speaker 1: Yes, And it's a little bit hard to you know, answer the first question. You know, what are the green sites? What are the natural features of the green sites? Because greens are often so built that whatever the natural terrain was previously might be a little bit concealed because the green was just constructed up from a piece of land. But as you see more courses, as you see more greens, you start to be able to tell, you know, look at the land in general around the green and kind of discern what it was. And in both of those questions, the topographical profiles of the holes and the natural green sites, what you're looking for is variety. You're looking for things to be changed up from hole to hole during the round because that allows us to. That keeps things fresh, that creates excitement and interest during the round of golf. It helps you remember the round of golf, It tests different shots. Variety is really the thing that a good routing generates, and variety is one of the most important aspects of a good golf course. So right there, you see the importance of routing. But yeah, I mean, you know, a clear flaw that some courses have is that they kind of you know, the whole sort of move the same way or you know, most commonly, what I see is that very rarely do certain courses play along a side hill. Right That's kind of a common flaw that I see where the architect didn't really take advantage of opportunities to have holes running along a tilt, because that can create some really interesting golf trying to hold the high side of the fairway to get an advantage, curving the ball into the slope to try to hold that there. Sidehill holes can be so interesting, but often architects disregard them because they're focusing on the ridge to ridge hole, or the uphill hole or the downhill hole. I think having that extra element of the side hill hole is really an indicator of a quality routing. All right, moving on to the third question, does the course engage directly with interesting natural features without overdoing it. Some courses, to my eye, seem to go out of their way to avoid the property's most compelling natural features, so you can look at them, but you aren't playing over them, and to me, this is really dissatisfying. Now, by the same token, some courses are too direct in their approach to severe topography and end up having too many blind shots and just end up being exhausting to play. As you know, I'm okay with the occasional blind shot, but if it's whole after whole after hole, that's an indication of a flawed routing. That's an indication that the holes are moving too directly over the most severe topography. So that's a routing flaw as well. Well routed courses incorporate the property's best natural assets while also having a sense of when to use quieter land. There's a happy medium there somewhere. Now. A giveaway of a flaw when it comes to asking this question of a golf course is when the holes are always just kind of moving through valleys, when they're always just kind of on the flatter land at the bottom of a valley, and you're instantly passing by the ridges or the knolls instead of playing into them or playing over them or doing something interesting with them. Often the easiest thing to do in routing a golf course is just to avoid the severe places, but that can also make the golf course kind of boring. Question four. Is there a well sequenced balance of whole types? And a wholes type can be defined by par length, difficulty direction, right, So this is we're starting to.

00:44:38
Speaker 2: Let this one stands out to me.

00:44:44
Speaker 3: I mean, it's a terrible example because this is like not the golf courses that we discussed on this this wonderful podcast about we talk.

00:44:53
Speaker 1: We talk about any golf courses here, any golf courses.

00:44:56
Speaker 3: Drumlin's Country Club in Syracuse, New York, where I've played more golf probably than I will ever play at any place in my entire life, because I would just play every day. You get to the top of this hill to start the back nine, and holes nine ten or nine, eleven, thirteen, fourteen, and sixteen are practically all the same hole.

00:45:24
Speaker 2: They are just like straight.

00:45:27
Speaker 3: I'll put a hill somehow in both directions and it's just straight and there's one tree on the top of this hill that basically shares like all of these holes, and it is the most repetitive thing, and like it's wide open, so you can play across the holes and.

00:45:44
Speaker 2: It's like total it's insane.

00:45:47
Speaker 3: And I, by the end of playing there for four years as much as I could, you start to play other golf courses and you go, oh, it's not supposed to be like this.

00:46:00
Speaker 1: Have to be this way. Yeah, yeah. Often we realize that about the courses that we play when we're younger. I certainly, Yeah, you come to think that certain things are normal, but then you play another course and you're like, oh, yeah, okay, yes, that is what you're describing is a routing flaw that is a fault in the routing process of the design. So that's a great example, and it's not necessarily a problem that across the round you might have holes that are this way. The problem is is that they're all back to back to back, right. The problem is that they're not spread out. So that's a sequencing issue, and that's what we're getting into right now with these kind of last three questions that we're asking about the routing of the golf course. The first three are talking about the location of the holes, the sighting of the holes. Is there a variety of good natural green sites, Do the holes have a variety of topographical profiles? Does the course engage directly interesting natural features without overdoing it? Those questions relate to where the architect put the holes. It's in you know, those are in the part of the process where the architect is maybe looking at the topographical map or walking the site and identifying good natural features to try to maximize this fourth question here, is there a well sequenced balance of hole types? Has to do with putting all those holes together and the order in which they appear in the round. So, in addition to what you're talking about, which is a you know, how how holes use the land, whole type can also pertain to par three's, par fours and par fives. You don't want four par threes in a row. You don't want four par fives in a row. You want them spread out throughout the round. A balance of long holes and short holes, the balance of difficult holes and easy holes. Again, it's okay to have five long holes in relation to par over the course of a round. You just don't want them all in the same place in the round. You want a balance of straight holes and dog legs left and dog legs right. You want maybe a few zigzag holes that move both directions. You want a balance of into the wind holes down wind holes, holes where the wind is coming in off the right or off the left, or holes where the wind is quartering. This is also a very common flaw in poorly routed golf courses where the holes are all kind of sitting along to axes right, either either going one direction or going the opposite direction, and kind of packed in like sardines on the property. That can be a very easy way to rout a golf course because you're packing a lot of holes into the property. But the problem is that, in relation to whatever the wind is that day, you're facing the same kind of shot over and over and over and over. Like you're you're looking at the sun in certain ways. So say the sun is setting and a lot of the holes point at the sun, then then you're having Then you're having a hard time. So there are many reasons that you want holes moving in all sorts of different directions. Now, you just played TPC sawgrass the Stadium course. To me, the most exceptional thing about TPC sawgrass is routing is its balance and variety in whole types difficult holes, long holes, holes traveling different directions. Something that Pete die always did is he had his par fours are almost always did is he had his par fours pointing in four different directions, and that I believe is the case of TPC Sagrass. So if you have a certain wind on a certain day, then those par threes are going to be relating to the wind differently. And also there there's a short par three there, and there's a very long part three, and then there are a couple of par threes that are maybe somewhere in the middle. So that balance and variety of par three holes is a signature of Pete Dye's design and something that he really thought about when he was designing a golf course. Is this something that you picked up on as you were playing the course, this kind of balance of different types of holes.

00:50:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely, And I mean especially after like walking it all week for the players and then actually getting to play it, I definitely had a new found appreciation.

00:50:29
Speaker 2: Like my favorite hole is to watch.

00:50:33
Speaker 3: I think I was biased ended up being my favorite holes to play as well.

00:50:36
Speaker 2: Because I was just most excited to play those.

00:50:39
Speaker 3: But I feel like everything was just sequenced so well, and it definitely helped that I was like overly familiar with the golf course, and I knew what every hole was and I knew what was coming next. But I think like, as you're going through and playing it, like you know you're gonna get beat up on, like you know, nine and ten, and then you get a little bit of a lull on twelve and thirteen might be a little bit easier, and then fourteen is going to punch you in the face again. And it's a good little like there's he puts the pedal down and then he relaxes it for two holes, and then you you maybe go up a little bit, and then by the time you get to sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, everything is just full gas pedals through the floor. And I really appreciated that that it felt like, you know, every time that you had a hole that was overly difficult, there was always like kind of a reprieve around the corner.

00:51:37
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, And that is a testament to Die's ability to sequence holes, to link holes together into balanced, flowing, varied sequences. He was so good at that. Now, a lot of what we've discussed in this episode maximizing natural features is not really pertinent to most of Pete Die's designs, because he was often building golf courses on swamps and deserts and sites that didn't have much to offer. Now, when his sites did have some natural features to maximize, he generally did a good job of going after them. But a lot of what he did with routing that was really good was create sequences of holes that had variety within them. Yes, he would always give you a kind of reprieve after a very difficult hole. You'd just consider the closing stretch. Right, Fifteen is an incredibly hard hole, sixteen is an opportunity, seventeen is scary but scorable, and then eighteen is very difficult. So you know, right there you have in terms of just difficulty, you have such a variety of holes there. And then you can also talk about just in that sequence, you know, how many different variations of a golf hole are explored, with the way the holes kind of turn or the direction that they travel, or you know, et cetera, et cetera. Variety is really Pete Die's specialty and something that comes out in its golf courses consistently. All right, Fifth question, are the green to tea transitions short enough to walk comfortably? And if they're not short, are they at least interesting? So I think one key to a good green to tea transition is that it moves you forward to a new part of the property. In those cases, the transition can be kind of long and still be enjoyable. But if the green to tea transition takes you backwards over land that you've just seen or played over, then it is less enjoyable. Then it feels like an interruption that takes you out of the flow of the round. So I think the key with green to tea transitions is yes, they should be They should be short. They really should be, because otherwise the course becomes hard to walk, pace of place suffers, and you start forcing people to use carts, which is a big bugaboo of mine. I just don't think a golf course can be great and also only be navigated with a golf cart, because I think walking is that the soul of the game. But a lot of people are less radical on that issue than I am. But the key thing really is that the green to tea transition doesn't take you out of the round. It doesn't cause you to lose your focus on the experience or the golf course. And a poor green to tea transition can do exactly that. It takes you out of it. You stop thinking about the course, you stop thinking about the land, you start thinking about the golf and you're just kind of frustrated. Okay, now where do I have to go? I have to walk backwards to get to this next tea. That doesn't feel good.

00:54:50
Speaker 3: You always want to, at least mentally for me, I feel like you always want the illusion of moving forward, right, Just yeah, move keep going in the direction that you think you're going to be going, not having to walk back. Especially if you're like me and you know you put up a big number on a hole and then you've got to.

00:55:09
Speaker 2: Walk past it to move on, it's not as fun.

00:55:13
Speaker 1: You always want to feel like you're discovering something new. Yeah, So, in that sense, a lengthy green to tea transition can sometimes be If it's like a well designed green to tea transition, it can be kind of pleasurable. And my favorite example of this is bandon trails, where there are a lot of long green to tea transitions, but you can see that the architects put effort into the transitions themselves. The paths are really interesting between the holes, and they're always moving you to something new. They're always revealing something to you. So you're okay with walking a long way between holes because it's part of the pleasure of the round. So when the green to tea transitions are long, they should at least be moving you forward, moving you to something new. But usually I would say that a sign of a good routing is that the green to tea transitions are short and very manageable. You're walking off the green and onto the next tee pretty quickly. Final question. Sixth and final question, and this one is kind of kind of funky. Does the routing have a sense of story? Does it have a sense of narrative to it? Is there rising and falling action? Is there a culmination in an exciting finish? So I think the best routings don't just pack all of the excitement into one part of the round, especially not in the beginning part of the round. They distribute the high points throughout and then save some sort of big flourish for toward the end of the round. One of the great examples of routings that have that tell different story and are more or less effective is the kind of three famous courses along seventeen mile drive in Pebble Beach, Spyglass Hill, Cypress Point and Pebble Beach. Spyglass Hill. Starts off with a bang. It takes you downhill spectacular first hole takes you plunging toward the ocean and into the dunes, and for the next few holes you're playing in the dunes. But then you climb back up into the forest and you spend the rest of the round up in the forest, and it's beautiful up there. But you're like, wait, am I done with the dunes? Like are we really Is that really it? We're just going to visit them once at the beginning of the round and we're going to spend the rest of the round up here. That's a little disappointing. Pebble Beach, on the other hand, you start inland and you make your way out to the coast. You're on the coast from hole four to hole ten. Then you go back inland, wind back and a figure eight motion and you get back out to the coast on seventeen and eighteen. So you've got that high point in the middle of the round, spectacular holes along the coast, and then you come back to the ocean for the grand finale. Cyprus Point is a little more complex, but also has a sense of narrative, a sense of story. You go into the forest and back out to the dunes, into the forest, back out into the dunes, and then finally you make your way out to the coast for fifteen, sixteen and seventeen, and then there's some falling action at the end where you climb back up through the forest to the clubhouse. That is sense of story, That is sense of narrative in a golf round right there. And it's different from Pebble Beach, but you have a feeling of a full structured round in a way that you kind of don't at Spyglass Hill. So does this makes sense as a concept, a sense of narrative and a.

00:58:59
Speaker 3: Round of gold, Yeah, I think so. I think it's something I think it might be easier to look at, well, like after you play rather than while you're playing, because you're not so worried about you know, actually hitting the shots and the action of doing but I think it's easier to look back on and see how you can see your own rises and falls throughout the round and what the course kind of provided to make that happen for you.

00:59:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, good stories are not just one high point after another that becomes exhausting. Good stories have a sense of when to go big and when to go subtle, and how to save some of the most interesting stuff. The big action scene or the big reunion between the happy couple. You know, you don't want that to happen a third of the way through the movie. You want that to happen toward the end. Maybe not exactly at the end, but but but in the closing stretch of the film. And a really good routing has a feeling of that timing. It's different at every golf course, but it's certainly something that sets the really great courses apart. And again going back to TPC Sagras, there's clearly a big finale at TPC Sagras. Die had a sense of drama, a sense of narrative in the course of that round, and he deployed those high points and those more subtle points really smartly, really well in TPC Sagras.

01:00:47
Speaker 3: Uh. Yeah, there's a there's a bit of a crescendo there at the end. You think that you're little bit you're looking forward to the whole time and then and and see what happens. But I I mean, I think there's plenty of highlights in the middle that gets you to that part. I mean, after a whole week of watching it be played in the tournament, I was excited to play every hole, but I guess in a normal week, like I don't know, even then, like I didn't feel like there was anything that was like lulling me to sleep.

01:01:16
Speaker 2: Really, I was just excited to be out there. And maybe that's me, but I don't know.

01:01:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of high points during the round. But you know, like whole three, the par three, Yes, this isn't kind of the most memorable hole in the world. You know, there are a few holes sprinkled through the back nine that that aren't that aren't gung ho and in throwing, you know, cool stuff in your face shot after shot, so there is a little bit of rising and falling action there. But it's true the TPC Sawgrass is an action packed round. It is an action movie, you know, whereas whereas other courses might might belong to other genres, they might be the historical.

01:01:58
Speaker 3: I kind of I like that. Thinking of it as a movie is like a type of movie. I like that a lot.

01:02:04
Speaker 1: Well, Tbczagra. Certainly you wouldn't. You wouldn't call it a romantic comedy. No, you wouldn't. You wouldn't call it a western. I think I think it's it's like diehard, you know, yeah, or or you know, an identity.

01:02:17
Speaker 2: In honor of ludicrous. I think it's maybe a fast and furious movie that's perfect.

01:02:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, you found it, you found it PJ. All right. So those are the six questions that you can ask about how to about a course's routing, and that can help you, you know, assess whether you think a routing of a course is effective or ineffective. So we've talked about, you know, how an architect approaches a routing. We've talked about how a player can evaluate a routing. Any big takeaways from all this, Any any moments during during this episode that will stand out to you and that you'll you'll take home with you.

01:02:54
Speaker 3: Is there a question or an aspect of routing that you feel is more important.

01:02:59
Speaker 2: Than the others.

01:03:02
Speaker 1: That's a great question, like.

01:03:03
Speaker 3: If you're ranking these in waiting or priority, like does something matter more to me?

01:03:11
Speaker 1: They're all really important, But I have a pet peeve about courses that don't have good green to tea transitions. That is not the most important thing to me, but I will mention that it's something that drives me crazy when those aren't well worked out. I think that question number two, if I were to pick a question in those six that we covered, that is most important to me. Question number two, do the holes have a variety of topographical profiles? To me, that's incredibly, incredibly important just through the course of the eighteen whole round, that the holes use the land in different ways, And it's such a clear indicator to me of a really quality golf course as opposed to one that's kind of mediocre or not as thought through from a design perspective, the courses where the holes have a variety of relationships to the land are the ones that are really well designed and that I think tend to stand up on repeat plays more than anything else. Sequencing also is you know, if I were to choose a number two in order of importance. The sequencing of the holes, the balance, variety and flow of different hole types over the course of around also a very very important factor in the pleasure that a player might take in a round of golf, and flaws in that respect really stand out to players. They can really take you out of around. If you have three holes back to back to back that are kind of similar that it ruins it a little bit. And so those those two I think I would pick out. What about you, I mean, do you think are there any that stand out to you as as more important than the others?

01:05:07
Speaker 3: I agree on the sequencing I think is probably the most important, and it does if it gets too repetitive too quick, like you said, it does kind of like ruin the immersion because you just feel like you're going back and forth too many, too many times in a row. So I think that is the one that, at least actively in the action of playing and walking and being out there, is the one that I would be most conscious of.

01:05:39
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, I can definitely see that. Yeah, I saw that the concept of sequencing resonated with you, And that's a good indication of something to look for and think more about as you're playing golf, because it clearly has an effect on the enjoyment that you take in a round of golf. And that's you know, for me, in learning about golf architecture, your enjoyment and what you find to be important to taking pleasure in a round of golf is such a great guide for what to learn about in golf architecture. Sequencing is one of those things, and the act of sequencing and routing is so complicated that really only the best architects are able to do it well. And so that immediately guides you toward great golf courses and allows you to identify great golf courses just by thinking of the sequencing of the holes. So that's definitely something to hang on to. All right. So next time on designing Golf, we're going to have some pre master's content for you. But after the masters, keep an eye out for a special golf Architecture one oh one video. PJ doesn't know about this yet, I'm announcing it to him as well as to you. We'll record this. We need to give PG a chance to get well again and recover his voice, but we're going to talk about five great golf course routings, and that will be a video that we'll post on the YouTube channel and will apply some of these principles that we talked about in this episode. So everybody keep your eyes peeled for that on the YouTube channel in a few weeks after the Masters. We're going to do this after the Masters, all right, PJ, thank you for joining me. Always a pleasure to talk to you. That's another golf architecture one on one in the books. This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsam. Thank you Will. If you've been liking Designing Golf, if you've been enjoying golf Architecture one oh one, then make sure to see what we've got going on in Friday Golf Club. Go to the Frida Egg dot com slash membership to see what Frida Egg Golf Club offers. But we've got lots of golf architecture content happening in Friday Golf Club as well as a new member forum that's been really fun to participate in. Right now, some of our members are putting together and a golf architecture family tree where they're tracing the links between different golf architects over time. It's a really cool project, and it's the example of the kind of stuff that we get up to in Friday Golf Club. Pretty nerdy, but very very fun, and we're creating a great community in there. So check out Friday Golf Club, Thefrida egg dot com slash membership. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.