Raymond Hearn Articles
THE BENEFITS OF
A REMODELING MASTER PLAN
Money, Time, and Emotional Travail Are
All At Stake
If you think good design is expensive, the old
axiom has it, you have probably never suffered from bad design.
It’s true. Just as you would not set out on a cross-country trip
without a map, devising a long-term approach to making your golf
course the best it can be – in contrast to a series of ad hoc
decisions to address problems as they arise, in piecemeal fashion –
is invaluable. The long-range master plan is especially appropriate
to golf course management because, like any dynamic entity, the golf
course evolves over time. A well-conceived master plan is an
excellent investment paying dividends in time, money, and headaches
avoided.
This is true regardless of a golf course’s
overriding objectives, whether to attract outside play or simply to
keep members happy; in other words, whether the course is private,
resort, or public. Chances for the year-in and year-out success of
the operation are immeasurably enhanced by a comprehensive
long-range master plan. In this context, the fee for such a plan,
prepared by a professional golf course architect and generally
costing $15,000 to $35,000, is negligible. The benefits of a
thoughtful and properly executed master plan are as follows:
Ø
Provides a systematic procedure, a
“road-map”, for Club/Owner(s) to bring about change.
Ø
Protects a course’s original design
integrity – particularly important on classical designs.
Ø
Promotes good shot values on each hole
and good variety on the course as whole.
Ø
Identifies problems and proposes
solutions to aspects of a course needing revision.
Ø
Saves Clubs/Owner(s) thousands, tens of
thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars in construction and
maintenance costs.
Ø
Makes the most of a course’s esthetic
appeal.
Ø
Increases a course’s playability for
golfers at all ability levels.
Ø
Boosts rounds played and revenue on
public venues, membership and morale in private clubs.
Ø
Curtails unilateral or “unauthorized”
design decisions by board members, greens committee members,
stockholders, and others.
Ø
Reduces tensions among Club personnel
that are often the product of such design decisions.
Ø
Minimizes disruption of play by
establishing efficient staging models for construction projects.
Ø
Allows for ongoing adjustments to
accommodate longer ball flights resulting from technological
improvements in golf balls and clubs.
In my 20-year career as a golf course architect,
I have seen nearly as many different problems arise from the lack of
a long-range master plan as I have had clients without one. A
common pattern, however, has been to designate the golf course
superintendent the “fall guy” for failures of ill-considered course
“improvements” instigated by board and committee members and/or
owners who proceed without a professionally prepared master plan.
Below are three cases describing travesties experienced by Clubs due
to the absence of a comprehensive master plan to guide them.
CASE STUDY
#1—“If at first you don’t succeed, try the same approach all over
again.”
A well-known private Club in upstate New York
(the name of which will remain confidential) called me in to create
a long-range master plan only after a recurring incident had
understandably become the source of irritation for the Club’s
president. Specifically, having deemed that the tee complex on a par
3 hole was too small and consequently suffered unacceptable turf
deterioration, the Club had three times undertaken to rebuild it in
a four-year period, to no avail, at a total cost of about $75,000.
Typically, the superintendent shouldered the blame, even though he
had acted on instructions from a board member. (As Robert Trent
Jones Jr. once famously pointed out: “There are as many course
architects as there are golfers. Everyone is an architect in his
Walter Mitty dreams.”)
In the first attempt to correct the problem, the
new tees, although larger, were terribly misaligned and had an
uneven surface that retained excess water. Attempt number two
corrected the alignment difficulties but in the process
significantly reduced the surface area, thus compromising the
original goal of the undertaking.
Two years later, the third attempt to fix these
same tees proved worse than the first two: The tee mix became
contaminated with this remodeling attempt and the result was a soggy
teeing surface that never dried out to the desired consistency.
This teeing complex was just one of the
difficulties – and impending difficulties -- I addressed in my
long-range master plan. As frequently happens, the immediate
problem – in this case, just a teeing area that is not big enough –
was tied to several other traffic and drainage issues that needed to
be resolved simultaneously. The condition of the tee box was only
symptomatic of the difficulties at work.
CASE STUDY
#2—“Why didn’t we think of this before we started construction?”
The facts of this case study can be
heartbreaking, but the sequence of events is by no means
unprecedented. Again, as with the above example, this could have
been prevented with a long-range master plan.
Here, a highly reputed public facility in the
Midwest found it was losing rounds each year. Feedback from
customers indicated that the course was perceived as a bit shopworn,
particularly in relation to newer courses in the area that were
eroding its market share. Management responded with a major
initiative that included rebuilt tee boxes and a new irrigation
system. Unfortunately, without oversight by a design professional
and a master plan, these costly revisions were not money well spent.
For one thing, the new tee boxes were both misaligned and petrified
as a result of improper construction; what’s more, their placement
failed to capitalize on the chance to appeal to players of varying
skill levels – a point they recognized when I later reviewed the
revisions and recommended that the tees be redone.
More dire was the inadequacy of the new
irrigation system, built at a cost of some $750,000, much of which
had to be dug up and reinstalled for reasons that would have been
evident in light of a master plan. Specifically, these included the
relocation or reconfiguration of green complexes, bunkers, and
fairways, both to improve the course’s strategic quality and to
promote healthy turfgrass. In turn, my master plan included a tree
plan that not only facilitated routine maintenance but improved the
golf experience by eliminating excessively tight playing corridors
and obstructed views of such course features as landing areas,
bunkers, and even greens.
Their comment was, “Wow, we should have hired
you in the first place so that improvements could have been better
planned.” All told, poorly planned and/or constructed alterations
to the course cost roughly $225,000 to redo correctly – an emphatic
argument for a professionally prepared long-range master plan.
CASE STUDY
#3—“Our bunkers simply don’t work.”
Focusing on a popular resort on the East Coast
for which I am currently preparing a long-range master plan, this is
an object lesson in such a plan’s usefulness to order priorities for
course improvements. It began with a board member’s dissatisfaction
with the condition of the sand in the course’s bunkers. He
therefore instructed the superintendent to remove all the existing
sand and replace it with an expensive variety that had to be trucked
to the site. Once again, this was done despite the expressed
misgivings of the superintendent, who judged the deficiency was a
consequence of the bunkers’ subsurface drainage system rather than
the sand itself.
One year later, I was commissioned to improve
shot values and strategic intrigue on a hole-by-hole basis. With
these goals in mind, the Club agreed to a comprehensive master plan
for the entire golf course. And one of my first and most important
findings was that the positioning of bunkers was, almost without
exception, obsolete – not really surprising, since the original
design dated to1960, before the advent of longer balls and clubs.
Thus, the bunker placements had become largely decorative and no
longer strategic. The board member who had authorized the
superfluous replacement of the sand is no longer at the resort;
regrettably, neither is the $215,000 required to complete the job.
Bunkers and tee boxes have now been arranged so
that the course is as enjoyable a golfing challenge in 2006 as when
it opened in 1960. Still, a little consideration of the facility’s
long-term objectives – surely improved golf club and ball technology
already existed two years prior, when the sand was replaced – would
have gone a long way.
Superintendents often ask me if their course
needs a master plan. My answer is simply, if you plan on making any
changes or improvements to the golf course – or you even think this
is a possibility, and it virtually always is -- then you need a
master plan. To reiterate, good design is comparatively
inexpensive. Construction – especially redundant construction – is
expensive work. But the benefits of a long-range master plan are
many and money is only part of the equation. A master-plan document
is a significant tool for the golf course superintendent in making
sure that everyone at the club is “on the same page” in terms of
future improvements to the golf course. It’s money in the bank from
both a fiscal and a diplomatic point of view.
In order to ensure the master plan is the best
that it can be, contact a practicing golf course architect and
secure a price to complete such a study. You and your Club will be
glad you did. True, the future is ultimately unpredictable, but
there is much to be said for thinking past the present, not to
mention doing it right the first time.
The author, Raymond Hearn (ray@rhgd.com), is a
practicing golf course architect and a member of the American
Society of Golf Course Architects. His office is located in
Holland, Michigan.
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