By Design - Spring 2020

20 | By Design a significant role. Here are three examples, each at a different stage of the process, of a golf course that was either abandoned or nearly so that is now on the rebound. The beach is back In 2012, the premier private equity country club in suburban Jacksonville’s Atlantic Beach, Selva Marina, was running out of gas. Conditions had been spiraling downward for years and the membership rolls experienced a similar plunge. Needed maintenance was deferred again and again. The club was having trouble making payroll. In 2012, bankruptcy was tap-tap-tapping at the door. Site of the only double eagle that Jack Nicklaus, ASGCA Fellow, recorded in his PGA Tour career, at the par-five 72nd hole in the 1966 Jacksonville Open, Selva Marina prospered from 1958 until early in the 21st century, when it was drenched with water woes. Things began sinking fast. Enter Erik Larsen. A Past President of ASGCA, Larsen had spent nearly 30 years designing courses for Arnold Palmer, ASGCA Fellow, so it’s likely he knew a thing or two about heroic recoveries from the man who practically invented them on the golf course. In the case of Selva Marina, it was personal. Larsen was a member. “By the early 2000s, the golf course was literally dying from within,” said Larsen. “Simply, the club had poor irrigation water. It was drawn from Sherman Creek, which cuts diagonally across the property and it was almost brackish. You really needed a new irrigation source in order to resurrect the golf course.” What the club did have, Larsen noted, was remnant land. “I proposed selling the extra land, and letting me re-route the golf course. A developer would build new homes and mandate membership purchase on the new homebuyers, which would create guaranteed revenues through dues. That would let us make more improvements and because of that, we would attract even more members. And that’s exactly what happened. And it only took us two years to do it.” Larsen’s plan was shepherded through the process by his friend and fellow club member Pete Rodriguez and also by then club president Mike Carlin. Entitlements and financing complications slowed the process, but in time these issues were overcome. Eventually, 178 new single family units emerged of mostly high- end homes. By 2014 Selva Marina began morphing into Atlantic Beach Country Club. The developer was also required to provide a golf course of at least 6,900 yards, and contribute to a new clubhouse. The community rallied behind the project and Larsen delivered a superb golf course. “It had to be a wow!” says Larsen. “It had to look like something authentic to Atlantic Beach. It couldn’t look like anything else in Jacksonville.” It didn’t. Most distinctive were the dunesy- The newly-named Atlantic Beach Country Club was cleverly reworked to accommodate some housing lots and a new design aesthetic that is authentic to the area Photo: Atlantic Beach CC GOLF REBORN