By Design - Spring 2020

28 | By Design dirt work, so they are inherently budget-friendly. More common is a big budget based on the materials used for conditioning and agronomics more so than making the holes work earthwork-wise. As far as not having any client demands to address, I decided the client wanted me to go find the best golf holes possible. What are your favorite elements of the completed design? What makes this exercise so special is that these holes only exist on this one piece of ground and will never be replicated for another project. Sure, there are elements of all these holes that I have designed before and will find again. However, they will only happen organically, when the ground of these future sites reveals them. A few of my favorite holes are six, eight, eleven, fifteen, sixteen, and eighteen. With every one of these examples—except for the par- three sixteenth—the essence of high point to high point is in full display. Landing areas and green sites were already in their perfect places. Connecting these features through a variety of angles is where the strategy evolved. To make things stand out even more, natural features just fell into place along those lines of instinct to create differing lines of charm—and challenge. Hole eight stands out as a natural drivable par four with a mesa landing area and a natural peninsula green site. Eleven is a monster along a dramatic ridge literally from tee to green, screaming for heroic play all the way to the hole. Fifteen is a hole that I have never come close to developing elsewhere. It is another take on a short par four that reminds me of my home of Westchester County, New York, where so many short holes play up sheer rock cliffs. The Dunns and Stiles of the day never blasted these features away. Rather they just played them as they lay. Sixteen is a Dell par three, a blind short shot that plays right over a big dune. Why not? Especially in a resort setting like the Sandhills. It will rival anything else in the area for fun and memorability. The double dogleg eighteenth makes the Sandhills routing so special to me. The par five plays from ridge to ridge with bunkers set into each slope along the way. The angles these ground features revealed make it the epitome Richard Mandell Golf Architecture design associate Jim Ryan created computer visualizations of each of his concept holes, with video flyovers. Clockwise from above, the double-dogleg eighteenth, short par-four fifteenth, the ‘monster’ eleventh and another short par-four, the eighth THE SANDHILLS CLUB