Design Notebook: Public Golf Course Projects to Track in 2025

Happy New Year! Welcome back to Design Notebook, your regular Club TFE check-in on what’s happening in the world of golf architecture. Today we’re discussing the public golf course projects you should be paying attention to in 2025. But before we dive in, let’s discuss what will be different about Design Notebook—and more generally with golf architecture coverage in Club TFE—this year.

First, we’re going to move the publication cadence of Design Notebook from once a week to once a month.

Does that mean you’ll be getting less from us in 2025? Quite the opposite: we plan to give you more short-form, discussion-oriented articles on golf course design in Club TFE. These will include a weekly edition of “Chocolate Drops,” a quick round-up of industry scuttlebutt. The monthly feature known as “Design Notebook” will be more substantive and will arrive on the member website on the second Tuesday of each month.

Why are we making this adjustment? One of our New Year’s resolutions is to give Club TFE members more opportunities to engage with golf architecture-related topics. We think publishing shorter, more frequent blog posts will do the trick. The important thing, though, is that we’re not changing anything about the volume or quality of our member content. We’re just tweaking how we deliver it to you.

One more thing before we dive into today’s main topic—as Andy Johnson wrote in last Friday’s newsletter, Tommy Naccarato, a legend in golf architecture circles and one of Fried Egg Golf’s longest-tenured supporters, lost his home in the Palisades Fire. He is also still in recovery from a recent stroke. To help him through this difficult time, Adam Lawrence set up a GoFundMe page to collect donations for him.

I met Tommy when I began writing professionally about golf course design several years ago. His knowledge, passion, and generosity with his time are all unparalleled in the industry. I look forward to chatting with him again when this dark period passes.

Public Golf Course Projects I’m Tracking in 2025

I started working for Fried Egg Golf in June 2019. Back then, I would have found it inconceivable that golf architecture could be a full-fledged news beat. Even as the world recovered from the Great Recession, golf construction remained a sluggish business, coming nowhere near the Tiger-manic highs of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Popular firms like Coore & Crenshaw, Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design, and Hanse Golf Course Design felt lucky to be working on one new-build project at a time. Most top architects took on more renovation commissions than they otherwise would have in order to fill gaps in their schedules. Golf wasn’t hot. This was the new normal.

But then, as you know, Covid happened. Recreational golf surged and so, in short order, did golf development. Suddenly, the most popular firms were juggling three, four, maybe more projects simultaneously. Younger architects who had spent the previous decade shaping bunkers and greens for their mentors got more shots at pursuing their own ideas. Golf course contractors—the companies tasked with infrastructural necessities like drainage and irrigation—found themselves booked out for years in advance.

All of this demand on a niche labor force, along with general inflation, drastically drove up costs, which has put a governor on the spread of golf development. Whereas the boom of the 1990s produced many different kinds of courses across many different regions, the post-pandemic uptick has been more specific. It has taken on an exclusive, upscale hue, and it has focused on the southern U.S., where land is cheaper and regulations looser. Readers have often asked me why so many new courses are 1) private and 2) tucked away in odd corners of Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. The answer is pretty simple: that’s how developers can make the numbers work these days. Get funding from a small group of well-heeled members, and avoid cities.

This overall trend doesn’t tell the whole story, though. There will be a broad variety of golf course projects unfolding in 2025, including some in the understandably fretted-about “affordable public” category.

Warmouth Sands, a new municipal course in Vidalia, Georgia, designed by Mike Young, is on track for a spring debut; Poppy Ridge, a daily-fee facility in Livermore, California, owned by the Northern California Golf Association, is set to reopen mid-year after a complete reimagining by Jay Blasi; Miami Lakes in Florida is undergoing a transformation by Bruce Hepner and could open for limited play before the end of 2025; and Shelby in Nashville is also getting a touch-up from Hepner and will be back in operation by early fall. As a Portland-area resident, I’m hopeful that Dan Hixson’s redesign of suburban muni Lake Oswego will finally be unveiled after many delays in the construction of the surrounding buildings.

In addition, I’m keeping an eye on projects at Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. (Gil Hanse), Hooper in New Hampshire (Jeff Stein), Whirlpool in Niagara Falls (Ian Andrew), Jekyll Island’s Great Dunes course in Georgia (Stein and Brian Ross), Swope Memorial in Kansas City (Todd Clark and Ron Whitten), Buffalo Dunes in Kansas (Clark and Zach Varty, with superintendent Clay Payne), and Old Dane in Nebraska (Trev Dormer). All of these will be underway in some form in 2025 and will likely bear fruit over the next few years.

At the pricier end of the spectrum, Jim Urbina wrapped up his renovation of Pasatiempo late last year, and all 18 holes are now open, with a $405 walking rate available to non-members. The increase in Pasatiempo’s green fees (they were $345 prior to Urbina’s work in 2023, $325 in 2022, and so on) is both a sign of the times and an inevitable consequence of rebuilding a full set of greens and bunkers.

The destination-resort sector will continue to expand in 2025, both in the U.S. and abroad. A lot of activity will be concentrated in the fall months: the Scarecrow course at Gamble Sands, David McLay Kidd’s second 18 at the Washington State resort, is scheduled for a full debut in August; Tom Doak’s Old Petty at Cabot Highlands in Scotland is expected to start preview play in September or October; and 7 Mile Beach, a duneland course built by Mike Clayton and Mike DeVries in Hobart, Tasmania, is eyeing a launch before the end of the year. Also, Cabot Citrus Farms, which has been hosting preview play for months now, will officially open its doors on Tuesday, January 21. The Brooksville, Florida, resort will boast four courses: 18-hole Karoo, designed by Kyle Franz; 18-hole Roost, designed by Franz, Mike Nuzzo, Rod Whitman, and Ran Morrissett; and two short layouts, the Squeeze and the Wedge, both designed by Nuzzo. Got all that? (And can you please remember it so I don’t have to type it all out again in future Design Notebooks?)

The next two years will be busy ones for Dream Golf, the destination-resort company led by Michael and Chris Keiser. The first courses at Rodeo Dunes in Colorado (designed by Coore & Crenshaw) and Wild Spring Dunes in East Texas (Tom Doak)—along with the Commons at Sand Valley, a family-oriented 12-holer created by longtime Coore & Crenshaw lieutenant Jim Craig—are all in the midst of construction and may come online in 2026. Meanwhile, a new Dream Golf resort in the Florida Panhandle, Old Shores, is in the planning stages.

Seems like a lot, right?

Of course, it’s worth differentiating individual examples from macrotrends. Clearly the overall tendency of the industry right now is toward premiumization and regional imbalance. That’s a problem for the future of golf, and it won’t be solved until costs and incentives change. But I’ll take a win where I can get it: at least we have more public golf course architecture to talk about than we did six years ago.

Are there any other projects I should be aware of? Head down to the comments section and let me know.

Chocolate Drops

As I mentioned (briefly) above, Whirlpool Golf Course, a 1951 Stanley Thompson design in Niagara Falls, is undergoing a multi-year renovation by Ian Andrew, per Canadian Golf Traveller. Andrew’s work will involve “returning tee boxes to their original locations and eliminating bunkers and side mounds not part of the original design.” This is great news. Whirlpool is a terrific, accessible course operated by Canada’s Niagara Parks Commission, and Andrew knows Thompson’s architecture better than anyone.

During my trip to Australia in December, I learned about three ongoing renovation projects that I should have given more coverage before:

1. OCM’s redesign of Peninsula Kingswood’s neighbor Long Island Golf Club, now owned by The National Golf Club. OCM plans to execute a “course within a course” concept at Long Island, building 20 greens that will accommodate three distinct 18-hole routings.

2. OCM’s renovation of Huntingdale Golf Club, a Sandbelt course designed by Charles Hugh Alison in 1941.

3. Crafter + Mogford’s renovation of Metropolitan Golf Club, a highly ranked Sandbelt course where Alister MacKenzie did some work during his famous tour of the Antipodes in the mid-1920s.

Kawonu Golf Club, an in-progress new build by Andrew Green in Greenville, South Carolina, has been unusually transparent about the process of construction. Here is Green’s latest blog post, from just five days ago.

Richard Humphreys at Golf Course Architecture and Tim Gavrich at GolfPass published their own “here are some new courses to look out for in 2025” pieces, and since they’re disciplined journalists, they did so closer to the actual New Year.

A Course We Photographed Recently

Commonwealth Golf Club (Oakleigh South, Australia)—designed by Sam Bennett in 1921, revised by Charles Lane in the 1920s and 30s, renovated by Brian Slawnik in 2024

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Quotable

“The temptation to copy the greens of some famous course may frequently present itself, but the temptation should be firmly resisted. To yield to it is invariably fatal. At the same time, there is no harm in remembering the features of famous greens and trying to incorporate them in your scheme, always bearing in mind that the size and shape depend on the length of the shot leading up to it. Also it must not be forgotten that a great deal depends on the character of the ground in front.” – Tom Simpson and H.N. Wethered