Diamond Springs Golf Course

Favorite Hole

No. 15, par 4, 322 yards

This one-of-a-kind short par 4 is draped over a curve in Diamond Springs’ central ravine. The options from the tee are starkly presented: either lay up to the 50-yard-wide fairway on the left, leaving a short but blind approach to a green that pitches away; or go for the green, which is visible to the right, perched on the edge of the gorge. Drives that land left and slightly short of the green will sometimes filter on, but the margin between an eagle putt and a penalty stroke is very thin. Stronger players will often end up long as a result of playing aggressively while still giving wide berth to the ravine. They will find it difficult, however, to get up and down from there; the trees, native grasses, undulating surrounds, and narrow, tilted green make for a formidable short-game test.

The best aspect of the hole’s architecture is its restraint. There are just two bunkers, both green-side and intended to provide some forgiveness for tee shots that come up barely short. The green is subtly sculpted, sitting more or less flush with the natural terrain. Shumaker and DeVries knew that nature had given them a gift here, and they didn’t monkey with it.

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Overall Thoughts

In a time of rising costs and looming environmental collapse, golf facilities of all types need to rethink their design and maintenance practices. How can green fees and negative ecological impacts both be kept in check? What is important to the golf experience, and what is an unnecessary extravagance? How, specifically, can less be more?

Diamond Springs Golf Course offers a persuasive set of answers to these questions. Its model of design and maintenance can and should be emulated by any golf facility seeking to provide a great product at an affordable rate. I would summarize this model in four key points:

1. Strong site selection and routing

Diamond Springs’ property is not, at first glance, exceptional, but it is ideally suited to the purpose of affordable golf. For the most part, its slopes are quiet and gradual, meaning that Kris Shumaker and Mike DeVries did not have to spend money moving large quantities of earth in order to make the course playable and walkable. At the same time, the site has a few outstanding natural assets, so the architects did not need to rely on artificial landforms to give the course interest and variety.

Specifically, Shumaker’s routing takes full advantage of the property’s pair of long, winding ridges (which DeVries likes to refer to by their geographically precise name of “eskers”) and its large, beautiful ravine. The first eight holes and Nos. 10-13 play among the eskers, often using natural rises for tee and green sites. The rest of the holes make spectacular use of the ravine, crossing it twice—on Nos. 14 and 17, both par 3s—and employing it cleverly as a strategic hazard on the ninth, 15th (profiled above), 6th, and 18th. In each case, the way that the ravine interacts with the hole and influences play is slightly different.

Because Shumaker did so well in choosing the property and routing the holes, artificial hazards and green contours rarely have to carry the load at Diamond Springs, and natural landforms almost always play the starring role.

2. Simple bunkering

As evidenced by his work at Greywalls and Kingsley Club, DeVries is capable of producing intricate, even extravagant bunkers. At Diamond Springs, however, he kept his style of bunker design simple to allow for cheap, easy upkeep. Most of the course’s 42 bunkers have straightforward saucer or kidney shapes, lacking the lacy, maintenance-intensive edges that have come to signal naturalism in 21st-century golf architecture.

At the same time, Diamond Springs’ bunkers are certainly not unnatural-looking; in fact, they seem perfectly at home in the landscape. This is due partly to the tawny sand color, which is a good match for the overall hues of the property, and partly to DeVries’s meticulous way of matching bunker edges with their immediate surroundings: that is, the edges abutting fairways and greens are clean and simple, whereas the ones adjacent to natural areas are eroded and seeded with brownish fescue grasses. Naturalistic bunkering doesn’t have to be terribly complex.

3. Sophisticated green design

Building an affordable golf course is often an exercise in working within constraints. Perhaps, in ideal circumstances, you would prefer to move more dirt or craft more stylish hazards, but because of financial and maintenance realities, you have to do something different. Sometimes these constraints breed creativity; other times they’re just annoying.

When it comes to creating greens, however, the architect of a low-budget course has somewhat more freedom. You don’t need a lot of money to construct or maintain a set of unique, beautiful, strategically interesting greens. What you need, instead, is ingenuity and, preferably, the time and skill to operate equipment on your own. This was Mike DeVries’s primary contribution to the Diamond Springs project.

For instance, I’ve literally never seen a green like the one he built on the par-3 fifth hole. As Andy Johnson has said a few times before, it’s like a combination of Macdonald and Raynor’s Redan and Biarritz templates: the front half of the green slopes away from the player and to the right like a reverse Redan; the back half of the green contains a trough and plateau that resemble, in slightly downsized form, the elements of a Biarritz green like the ninth at Yale or the third at Chicago Golf. This is the kind of heady, advanced design that most architects don’t have the guts (or the client backing) to try at affordable public courses.

Just as importantly, though, DeVries picks his spots to push the envelope at Diamond Springs. If every green were as wild as the fifth, the effect would wear off, and the course might alienate some players. So DeVries saves his most flamboyant green concepts for the quietest parts of the property. Where the land provides sufficient interest—such as on the back-nine ravine holes—he tends toward more understated contouring.

4. Bare-bones turf presentation

Since Shumaker was a superintendent by trade, he knew exactly how to hard-wire Diamond Springs for efficient maintenance. First, he made the bold, smart choice to grow the course in with only two heights of cut: 3/4-inch dwarf bluegrass on the interconnected teeing areas, fairways, and green surrounds; and a more conventional tightly mown bentgrass on the greens. From tee to green, therefore, the vast majority of Diamond Springs’ playing surfaces can be mown with the blunt instrument of a large gang mower. Plus, the slightly higher-than-usual fairway cut (according to the USGA, 0.35-0.5 of an inch is more typical) allows the turf to be hardy and potentially less vulnerable to disease.

Another of Shumaker’s unorthodox decisions was to install old-fashioned single-row irrigation. I can’t speak to the agronomic or environmental benefits of this system, but two notable effects at Diamond Springs are 1) fairways that, in spite of the 3/4-inch cut, play unexpectedly firm, and 2) native grasses that haven’t been overwatered and, as a result, are sparse enough to allow players to find their balls.

The result of this philosophy of turf presentation is that, to this day, Diamond Springs can be maintained by a small crew with a modest budget.

Yet I’d like to resist the tendency to praise the course solely for its economy and affordability. Sure, low costs and a stable green fee are happy consequences of Shumaker and DeVries’s principled approach to design and setup. But I also think Diamond Springs flat-out looks and plays better than courses that are maintained more expensively. It fits in with its environment, echoes the rugged roots of golf, and delivers an authentic-feeling experience of nature while also providing consistent playing conditions.

Many golfers say they value the rustic and outdoorsy aspects of the game. All would prefer to pay less. So why aren’t more courses designed and presented like Diamond Springs?

2 Eggs

It may seem odd to say that humble Diamond Springs is an important golf course, but it is. I know of no other American course with a comparable quality of architecture that embraces minimalism—not only in design, but in presentation—to the degree that Diamond Springs does. Its two heights of cut and single-row irrigation help to keep the course’s costs low (and, to my eye, promote a pleasingly natural aesthetic), while Shumaker and DeVries’s subtle and sophisticated architecture over-delivers on the $50 green fee. This is public golf done right.

Course Tour

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