Design Notebook: How to Stand Out in the Nebraska Sandhills

Welcome back to Design Notebook, where we certainly appreciated the week off on the professional side as it allowed for everyone to get properly excited for Royal County Down. For today, though, we’re focusing not on the Irish links but on another tremendous natural golf canvas: the Nebraska Sandhills. Stay tuned for a look at Pelican Beach, too.

The Nuances of Routing a Golf Course in the Nebraska Sandhills

By: Matt Rouches

It’s no secret that the Nebraska Sandhills region provides an unrivaled inland golfing terrain. Places like Sand Hills Golf Club and the Prairie Club have gained notoriety in the modern era as great destinations for the golf obsessed in the Cornhusker State. The mesmerizing, grass-covered dune landscape is ideal for golf, delivering perfect soil conditions for firmness, playability, and turf health, along with dramatic undulating hills that are often sized perfectly for building golf holes. You could drive north of North Platte for 30 minutes on Highway 97 and discover hundreds upon hundreds of golf holes just sitting organically. They’re practically fully formed, requiring no earth-moving or even design expertise in order to lay out any single good hole. But to craft a cohesive 18-hole golf course that allows players to walk easily without compromising the routing with weak holes is a serious challenge, and one seldomly accomplished.

I’ve been lucky to visit just about every golf course within the Nebraska Sandhills and, having lived there for over six months, I’ve grown intimately familiar with the terrain and climate. A recent road trip back to the area gave me the opportunity to see many of these courses again (some of them I’ve actually seen several times), allowing me to rediscover and formulate my own broad conceptions about the way golf is designed, routed, and built within this unique region.

Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw famously spent more than two years walking, surveying and discovering over 130 golf holes on the site that became Sand Hills Golf Club. Some may think this is overkill when it comes to building a golf course on such terrific land. “There are golf holes everywhere,” they argue, so why bother with the extra work? The truth is, that this is exactly the kind of patient and methodical approach required to route a truly magnificent golf course within this complex environment.

The Sand Hills Constellation Map

There are so many options and possibilities for building golf holes that it’s quite easy to string one, two, or even six holes together in a compelling sequence. But assembling 18 one-of-a-kind golf holes that can be easily traversed on foot and require minimal intervention from man? That takes the mind of a genius. Many of the courses in the Sandhills have truly great golf holes that are both incredibly fun to play and unlike anything else in the United States. But they can also require long transitions between holes, the utilization of uninspiring par 3s as connectors, or they’re simply built in a way that rules out the possibility of walking altogether. Very few courses traverse the land in a mindful manner while maintaining seamless transitions from hole to hole to create a beautiful flow to the round.

Courses like Sand Hills and Dismal River Red do an excellent job taking players up and over the dramatic landforms that lend each hole individuality, and they do so without compromising walkability. In Dismal Red’s case, the land is very severe, but the course mitigates strenuous uphill walks extremely well. That’s in part because the routing didn’t need to be a true loop; the 18th green is about 700 yards from the first tee. Tom Doak’s routing starts about halfway up the property’s large slope, which tilts down towards the Dismal River. The first three holes climb up this slope to the high point of the site, and then the final 15 holes slowly take players down to the river’s edge in a way that balances level, slightly uphill, and dramatic downhill holes. The first three holes climb roughly 70 feet and the last 15 drop over 180 feet, but it never feels like you are just repetitively blasting driver downhill due to the thoughtful sequencing. It’s an ingenious method of routing a golf course over drastic Sandhills terrain without eliminating the option to walk the course.

Note: Having said all that, the culture at Dismal River Club is heavily favored towards taking carts. There are no walking paths from hole to hole or tee to fairway despite the course being quite walkable. The original concept was to drive a cart from the clubhouse to first tee and have staff members transport the carts down to the 18th green.

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Bill and Ben’s routing at Sand Hills traverses severe land in a similar way to Dismal Red while still taking on the bold landforms that create memorable golf holes. From the bottom of the first fairway to the second green, players climb over 70 feet up to what I call the edge of the world (see image below). The next six holes then gradually take you down this large slope with a variety of downhill, uphill, and level golf holes. You then climb up a slope on the ninth hole which sets you up for three consecutive net downhill holes at 10, 11, 12. Then there’s an uphill climb on the 13th, the downhill 14th, uphill again on 15, a substantial plunge down the 16th, and finally a heroic climb back up the 17th and 18th. This sequencing takes players over the biggest climbs in short intense sections on No. 2, No. 9, and No. 13, intentionally spaced out so as to minimize the impact. The back nine then has perfect distribution to balance out the uphill and downhill portions. All of this adds up to an exhilarating walk that allows players to experience the most interesting portions of the property without killing their legs.

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Sand Hills and Dismal River Red have some of the most severe landforms out of all the Sandhills golf courses, but remain walkable due to their well-designed routings. Taking advantage of these dramatic sand dunes is a huge asset in terms of the ability to create memorable holes that are a joy to play. Other courses in the region play over similarly severe land that makes for very fun and exciting golf, but can create extremely taxing walks as the routings tend to challenge the landforms head-on without any reprieve.

While not every course in the world needs to be walkable, I think there’s something special about traversing through a natural environment like the Sandhills of Nebraska with two feet on the ground and your bag over your shoulders. It provides a harmonious connection between the golfer and landscape, one that’s reflective of how the game was once played in the early days of Scotland. Traveling to the remote Sandhills where the cattle greatly outnumber humans is a spiritual journey. It deserves to be experienced without any filter between you, the land, and the golf course.

A Course We Photographed Recently

Pelican Beach (Hyannis, NE)—designed by Dan Proctor, original holes built in 2000 (now nine holes)

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Quotable

“All artificial hazards should be made to fit into the ground as if placed there by nature. To accomplish this is a great art. Indeed, when it is really well done, it is – I think it may truly be said – a fine art, worthy of the hand of a gifted sculptor. They should have the appearance of being made with the same carelessness and abandon with which a brook tears down the banks which confine it, or the wind tosses about the sand of the dunes. In nature, rock, tree-roots and turf bind the soil, and when wind or water assails it, the less resistant portions give way, forming depressions or elevations broken into irregular lines. Here the bank overhangs, while there it has crumbled away.” –Robert Hunter