Golf Course Design Elements
An Interview by Colin Goehring with Golf Course Designer &
Architect Kevin Norby
What are the most important considerations for a golf course
developer when choosing a golf course designer?
What is really important is knowledge and experience. As an
owner, you want to make sure you’re working with someone who can
guide you through the project approval process and provide some
assurance that, when complete, the project will be successful.
In particular, it is important that the client determine who
they are building the golf course for: Whether the course is
designed for private, public or resort play will have a
considerable bearing into the design elements. These are important
factors as an owner considers what their maintenance budget will
be, as well as the caliber of golfer that will play the course.
A golf course architect is also valuable to the owner in terms
of providing guidance regarding maintenance facilities, maintenance
equipment, sighting of the clubhouse, the amount of parking
required, finding good contractors, where to look for when hiring a
manager or golf professional. In many ways, we become a sounding
board for the owner because we have a wide variety of experience in
getting these golf course projects up and running smoothly.
That’s where having an experienced golf course designer is
particularly helpful for a golf course owner; simply in having
worked through a lot of the unforeseen challenges that an owner can
have when setting up their golf course.
It’s also important that you find someone whom you can work well
with. You’ll want to find someone who is really willing to listen
to your goals and your concerns. You want to make sure you’ve got a
golf course designer who isn’t just imposing their personal biases,
style or budget onto your golf course. Issues like sizes of greens,
species of grass, the type of sand in your bunkers are all
important considerations which all affect the initial construction
budget and ongoing maintenance budget.
A designer without experience may lack the necessary
understanding of how all these elements can affect the final costs.
The last thing you want as an owner is for your costs to skyrocket
and to jeopardize the success or the project. This is where
knowledge and experience will be invaluable.
Having an experienced golf course designer is essentially like
having access to a Rolodex of industry professionals whom your
designer has a relationship with and they can call upon for
specialized knowledge when necessary.
What is your philosophy of golf course design?
What is really important for us is to have a clear understanding
who will be playing the course and their level of skill. We will
design a public course much different than a private course. The
public and semi-private courses will typically have more play by
higher handicap players. If you don’t set the course up to
accommodate that, you will end up with a course that won’t be
enjoyable for the customer and will suffer from slow play. People
just don’t want to come back to a course that takes more than 5
hours to play. So in that case, we intentionally design this type
of public course to be a little more forgiving, with wider fairways
larger greens and more forgiving hazards.
Having said that, one of the real tricks to golf design is to
create a great course that is fair and relatively forgiving for the
beginning golfer, yet strategic enough that the better player feels
challenged. We can do this by not only providing multiple tees but
by manipulating the angle to the green, contouring of the green and
landing areas, placement of bunkers and hazards and also by
adjusting the width and angle of the fairways.
What are your considerations about how the course will look and
photograph when you set up a golf course design?
Golf is a very visual game. I think that when people come out
and play the game, they want to have a great experience that they
will remember. Typically the holes that people will remember the
most are the ones that will have some dramatic effect or elevation
change. For that reason, we try to design a course so that the
holes are visually exciting. As a general ruel, we try to take
advantage of dramatic elevation changes by putting the tees up
higher and the greens and landing areas lower.
People also want to be able to see how the hole lays out in
front of them, where they are supposed to hit the ball. For this
reason, I generally avoid hidden sand traps and hazards.
My favorite type of hole to design is the short par 4. These
holes we design so that there are several options with varying risk
/ reward opportunities. We set it up so that a player who really
wants to go for it from the tee may have the opportunity to drive
the green or get very close to it. The more conservative option is
to lay-up and have a longer approach shot. Those are really fun
holes because they give a wide variety of playability options.
As it turns out, it generally ends up that the holes with some
elevation change or some elaborate bunkering or water are the most
photogenic.
What can you tell us about designing an “Environmentally
Friendly” golf course?
It pretty difficult in this day and age to find a piece of land
to design a golf course on that doesn’t have some sort of
environmental constraints. It may be as simple as a few stands of
trees, some wetlands, or a drainage corridor with some potential
for erosion. As a rule, we are looking for ways to preserve and
possibly incorporate these sensitive areas rather than to modify or
eliminate them.
It seems that these days everybody likes to claim that they are
environmentally friendly but there’s a right and a wrong way to go
about doing that.
We’ve been fortunate to have been involved in some projects that
really showcase how golf can co-exist with nature. One of the
examples of that the Refuge Golf Club in Oak Grove, Minnesota. We
worked with about 340 acres and about 100 acres of that was high
quality wetlands, as well as a pretty severe problem with diseased
oak trees. We were able to go in and route the golf course so as to
preserve the wetlands. In the end, those wetlands became an
important part of the golfing experience and strategy. A few months
after that project was done, we were notified that the department
of Natural Resources had submitted and ultimately awarded the
project an award for environmental stewardship.
Currently, we’re working with a new 18 hole golf course on Lake
Rathbun in south central Iowa. The project is part of a new State
Park and is being administered by the Iowa Department of Natural
Resources. We worked with six different routing plans on that
project before we came up with one that avoided all the sensitive
plant and animal communities. We also made use of vegetative
buffers, native prairie restoration, and a variety of water
management and monitoring practices to insure that the project does
not negatively impact the existing plant and animal communities.
This is another great example of how a golf course can co-exist
with nature.
How about considerations of fertilizers and pesticides that can
affect the drainage and water systems – what do you do with that
when you’re designing a course?
Frequently, we are either required or requested to bring
somebody in to monitor these situations so we know that the amount
of chemicals or nutrients that enter the water supply are at least
no greater than they were prior to development. There are a number
of studies that show that golf course developments can actually
reduce these problems with run off. This can happen because golf
courses make use of storm water ponds, vegetative buffers, and also
because golf course superintendents are licensed applicators.
We often will bring in storm water specialists, biologists, and
engineers to monitoring the sites. Often the erosion and chemical
contributions from a golf course will actually be reduced to a
water supply. A golf course can be actually enhance the environment
and animal species that live there.
What will inevitably happen is that there will be people in the
community who will be concerned and outspoken about the possible
negative environmental impact of the proposed golf course. An
experienced designer can assist the developer by clarifying the
issues and clearly articulating the solution to those concerns.
How can people reach you for a consultation about their golf
course or if they are considering hiring a golf course
designer?
They can call me directly at 952-361-0644 or I can be reached at
by email at golfnorby@earthlink.net.
Our website is www.HerfortNorby.com
Golf Course Architect
Kevin Norby
This article may be re-published or posted to your website as
long as it is published in its entirety and you send a note to
Kevin Norby acknowledging where you have posted it.
Copyright 2007, Kevin Norby, Herfort-Norby Golf Course
Designers
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