By Design - February 2020

6 | By Design T he short game area at Bay Hill Club & Lodge near Orlando, Florida, was previously quite small for a club that hosts an annual PGA Tour event, providing golfers with limited opportunities to safely practice anything more than chips and bunker shots. With no land available adjacent to the practice area, opportunities for expansion were non-existent without reconfiguring another component of the Bay Hill property. Arnold Palmer Design Company’s Thad Layton, ASGCA, and Brandon Johnson, ASGCA, oversaw a project that would give the club a short game area that matched its reputation. “To make room for the new amenity, we truncated Bay Hill’s twenty- seventh hole [the ninth on its Charger nine] from 467 to 308 yards, building a completely new, drivable par four that is the first of its kind on the property,” says Layton. “This shift freed up two acres of prime ground adjacent to the clubhouse that was reshaped into a robust short game practice area featuring four greens, seven bunkers, swales, and equal parts rough and fairway.” The area they designed allows golfers to replicate every shot they could expect to hit inside 100 yards on the Bay Hill course, with enough space for 20 golfers to practice safely. Each of the four greens, the largest of which is 12,000 square feet, differ in style and size. They are complemented by bunkers that also have different characteristics, as described by Layton: “A ‘splash’ bunker for practicing downhill shots, a bunker with variable depths of three-to-six feet, a revetted ‘Road hole’ style bunker, a steep-faced and flat-bottomed bunker built in the Raynor/Banks style, a large but relatively-shallow teaching bunker, a small pot bunker, and a fairway bunker to practice longer shots.” Bay Hill is also using its new short game area to test different grass types and bunker liners for future use on its championship course. Practice made perfect A new practice area at Arnold Palmer’s famous PGA Tour venue in Florida is designed to enable golfers to hone a wide variety of short-game skills. Image: Arnold Palmer Design Company ASGCA DESIGN EXCELLENCE BAY HILL CLUB & LODGE