Design Notebook: Industry Stories to Watch in 2024

In this rare Wednesday edition of Design Notebook, we kick off the new year by looking ahead. Garrett runs through three industry stories he’ll be tracking in the coming months, and Andy talks about five courses he’d like to see in 2024.

As always, if you have any questions or suggestions, leave them in the comments below or email Garrett at garrett@thefriedegg.com.

Three design stories to watch in 2024

The golf course industry is stirring to life. Localized construction booms are underway in the Southeast U.S. and Texas; destination resort companies like Dream Golf and Cabot are expanding aggressively; private clubs continue to plow millions into restorations and renovations; and a handful of municipal golf systems, from Nashville to Sacramento, are investing in their facilities. Architects who spent the post-Recession years moving dirt for leading firms are starting to get solo opportunities. While the industry has not returned to the highs of the 90s and early aughts, the dark times of the 10s appear to be over.

Working in golf architecture no longer feels like an exercise in futility. Nor does covering it.

Here are three major stories I’m tracking in 2024:

Cabot’s bet

The race for Golf Developer of the Future, a title I invented five seconds ago, is heating up. 2023 was a statement year for Michael and Chris Keiser, who opened two innovative courses at Sand Valley and began work at Rodeo Dunes, a new Dream Golf joint outside of Denver. In 2024, Cabot founder Ben Cowan-Dewar, best known for developing Cabot Cape Breton, will become more widely recognized as a power player.

Cowan-Dewar recently acquired properties in Florida, western Canada, the Caribbean, and Scotland. This year, his company will shift into marketing mode. Coore & Crenshaw’s Point Hardy Golf Club at Cabot St. Lucia made a controversial appearance on Golf’s top-100 ranking last October before opening for play in December. Two regulation courses and two short courses are set to open soon at Cabot Citrus Farms, an overhaul of the World Woods complex north of Tampa. Finally, later this year, construction will near or reach completion on Tom Doak’s course at Cabot Highlands (formerly named Castle Stuart) and Rod Whitman’s design at Cabot Revelstoke in the wilds of British Columbia.

Cowan-Dewar’s big idea is combining Keiser-grade golf architecture with upscale real estate. The land plan for Cabot St. Lucia is particularly heavy on housing. (So were, to be fair, those for Pasatiempo and Bel-Air, among other Golden Age greats.) It remains to be seen, however, whether Cabot’s touch with real estate is light enough to retain the end-of-the-earth aura that golfers have come to expect from destination golf.

Who’s next?

For most of this century, the pecking order among top golf architects has remained fairly consistent. The juiciest new-build opportunities have gone to—in approximately this order—Coore & Crenshaw, Tom Doak, Gil Hanse, and David McLay Kidd. The most prestigious restoration commissions have been dominated by Hanse, with Andrew Green making inroads in the past five years. Many less fashionable but still lucrative jobs have flowed to Tom Fazio, Jack Nicklaus, Rees Jones, and Greg Norman. Very few newcomers have been able to break in.

This state of affairs has shifted recently. While Coore, Doak, Hanse, and Kidd are still holding strong, several young(ish) architects have started to get a hold of fresh sites. Within the past two years, Tad King and Rob Collins finished audacious courses at Landmand and Red Feather, and right now they’re busy with a pair of projects in South Carolina: a reversible nine at Palmetto Bluff and an experimental effort at 21 Golf Club. Brian Schneider has also established himself as a top new-build designer with co-credits at the Lido and Old Barnwell.

In 2024, I anticipate two new entrants into the “who’s next?” discussion: Kyle Franz and OCM.

Franz came up as a shaper for Doak and Coore and proved his bona fides as a restoration architect at Mid Pines, Pine Needles, and Southern Pines, a trio of Donald Ross courses just outside of Pinehurst. This year, we’ll get our first sample of Franz’s original voice with his designs at Cabot Citrus Farms in Florida, Broomsedge in South Carolina, and Luling in Texas.

OCM—led by Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking, and Ashley Mead—already has a résumé in its home country of Australia, and it is poised for an American coming-out party in 2024. The firm’s ambitious reconstruction of Course 3 at Medinah will turn heads, as will, on a smaller scale, its two 18-hole designs at the (quite) private Fall Line Golf Club in Georgia. In Cocking’s appearance on our podcast last October, he mentioned that one of Fall Line’s courses would be inspired by the Australian Sandbelt and the other by the English heathlands. Color me intrigued.

Bubble alert

The macro-economics of golf are tremendously hard to predict. The old heads among us remember when the National Golf Foundation insisted that one golf course per day should be built in the U.S. to meet future demand. It was a reasonable-sounding forecast in the heady days of the 90s but not, in retrospect, a wise one.,

Fortunately, the current uptick in golf development comes nowhere near the rampant overbuilding of the pre-Recession era. Still, two trends give me pause:

1. Rising construction costs. Several architects have told me that irrigation installation has become particularly onerous and expensive. The top contractors are booked out for the next few years, and new companies can’t enter the market because skilled labor is so hard to find. Basically, demand for golf course irrigation has spiked while the supply of workers to install it has remained steady. In this construction climate, new-build golf facilities will need either patient investors or strong, immediate revenue in order to be viable. So I hope everyone’s business plans are rock-solid.

2. Over-saturated hotspots. In the U.S., a lot of recent golf construction has been concentrated in a few areas, particularly Hobe Sound, Aiken, and exurban Texas. Developers believe these regions will support a specific type of golf club: private, relaxed, targeted at well-heeled professionals, and a few hours off the beaten path. The question is, how many of this kind of club can a given area, no matter how golf-crazy, accommodate? I don’t have a confident answer, but my intuition is whispering that not all of them can survive.

Which other golf architecture stories will you—or should I—be following this year? Let us know in the comments below. -Garrett Morrison

Five courses I want to see in 2024

Every January 1, I make a list of five courses I want to check out in the coming year. The list usually contains five courses in five different areas, with the idea that each course will serve as the centerpiece of a trip. Often I end up seeing only two of the five courses because other Fried Egg Golf and personal responsibilities lay waste to the start-of-the-year dreaming. My highest number ever is four of five. But hey, why not aim high?

So here’s my 2024 list:

Royal County Down – Newcastle, Northern Ireland – Old Tom Morris and Harry Colt

A general goal of mine is to see more Old Tom Morris and Harry Colt courses; incidentally, both worked here. I have seen many photos of Royal County Down through the years, and most are of the same hole. So I’m most excited about the potential for discovery: because I haven’t seen photos of most of the course, I don’t know what to expect, and that excites me.

Prestwick – Prestwick, Scotland – Old Tom Morris

The OG Open course, and I’ve heard only rave reviews of it. I’m hoping to tack on a visit to Prestwick during a Royal Troon scouting mission. I’d particularly love to play it on a day when the original 12-hole routing is open. Either way, seeing the original Alps hole would be a thrill.

Memorial Park – Houston, TX – Tom Doak

I’m kicking myself for not having gotten to this one yet. I’ve talked extensively with Tom Doak about his renovation of Memorial Park and watched a few Houston Opens hosted by it, but I have yet to play it myself. Hopefully this will be one of the easier courses for me to knock out in 2024.

Friar’s Head – Riverhead, NY – Coore & Crenshaw

There’s a faction of the golf architecture aficionado community that considers Friar’s Head, not Sand Hills, Coore & Crenshaw’s greatest course. That’s reason enough for me to prioritize it this year.

Pine Valley – Clementon, NJ – George Crump

This has never been on my list of five before, and I guess I have run out of reasons not to include it.

We’ll see how many of these I get to in 2024. In the meantime, let’s see your lists of five. -Andy Johnson

A course we photographed recently

Quicksands at Gamble Sands (Brewster, WA)—a 14-hole short course designed by David McLay Kidd, opened in 2020

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Quotable

“[I]n most sports the spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak. In golf it’s the other way around. We know that our bodies are capable of producing the requisite shots. We just can’t get our brains to make our bodies produce them, at least not often enough, not consistently enough. This criticality of the brain is what makes golf the most enticing of sports. Great golf seems always within the reach of the body and only rarely within the grasp of the mind. To play golf well, a golfer need only master himself, need only discipline his own brain. I use the word only advisedly. Because, of course, mastering oneself and disciplining one’s own mind are the greatest of challenges, for all their seeming simplicity. When we do manage to make the brain the servant of our golf games, the satisfaction is profound. We play in search of that satisfaction.” –Bob Cullen