BOWLING GREEN, Florida – If golf has a superpower, it’s the ability to fill the cracks in your mind and take away your worries. First-t nervousness. overthinking. New players are anxiously trying to figure out where to stand, where to go, what to do. Experienced players became frustrated with every mistake and saw the score they were hoping to score slip away. All the fretting about playing too slow or waiting too long.
Then there’s the scoring. An arbitrary number decided by someone you’ve never met. You thought you played that hole well, but this little card says you bogeyed. The word originates from the Scottish word for devil. So now your horrifying drama is the incarnation of a fallen angel, expelled from Heaven, who is abusing free will with his wickedness. Beelzebul is playing.
But now imagine you are being handed a scorecard with no criteria. A few tees of 50 and 56 yards. Others on 101 and 111. And 164. And 218. And till 293. A hole that can be played from 89 or 187. And on this card, a glaring omission. There is no equality. just play. Have a match against a friend. Grab some club, some drinks and go. The winner of each hole decides where to land on the next hole. You can play a six-hole loop that circles a beautiful grove of oak trees. Or play a 13-hole loop. Or play all 19. Who cares?
“You know,” famed golfer turned course architect Ben Crenshaw said recently, “this game is allowed to be played a different way.”
So why don’t we do this more often?
That question has again become hard to ignore with the opening of a new course in Central Florida. A “short course” created by The Chain, Crenshaw and longtime design partner Bill Coore is opening this month at Streamsong Golf Resort. Guests can currently play a total of 13 holes for preview play. The hope is to have the full 19 courses open by December 1, land permitting.
Streamsong is already known for its diverse three traditional 18-hole courses created by the current holy trinity of design firms – Red (A Coore/Crenshaw), Blue (Tom Doak) and Black (Gil Hans/Jim Wagner). , The property, a converted phosphate mine, was considered a wilderness risk when construction began on the first two courses in 2012. Bowling Green, Florida, is about an hour southeast of Tampa and about two hours southwest of Orlando. While this may seem far-fetched, it’s still a short sale. In a state with more than 1,200 golf courses, who would venture out here and go play golf? However, the project was delayed, as the goal was bigger than building a golf resort – it was to commercially develop reclaimed land that otherwise had little use. It worked because Streamsong’s three courses are so good and so different that it secured a place among golf’s new generation of destination resorts such as Bandon Dunes in Oregon, Prairie Club in the Sand Hills of Nebraska and Cabot Links in Nova Scotia.
Like The Cradle at Pinehurst and others, each of those resorts features a funky short course. Now, StreamSong does the same. This convenience has become a prerequisite for resort life. For guests, playing 36 holes over multiple days in a row (especially on foot) may be easier said than done. It is much more enjoyable to play 18, then take the short course for a loop. For resorts, a shorter course is an attraction, an added feature to the portfolio, uses less land, and, most importantly, encourages additional nights of stay and play.
Chen is an illustration of why this works. Streamsong guests walk across a footbridge from the hotel, stop at the new 2-acre putting course (The Bucket), grab a carry bag to tote some clubs, and play the layout of holes on the 3,000-yard walk – Here’s the key – the property is good enough to match the quality of the three primary courses. Like any good short course, its character comes from its green surroundings. Something wild and huge. Others are small and delicate. Green has a special personality, born of architectural freedom.
“You can take more liberties, or risks, so to speak, to the greenery and surroundings that you might not be able to do on a regulation course, where you have people of such varying degrees or both strengths and skills.” “We’re trying to adapt,” Coore said.
Highlights include a bunker located in the middle of the sixth green, mirroring Riviera’s famous sixth, and the long 11th, a hole that can stretch nearly 200 yards over the lake into a giant punch bowl green.
But the real attraction is what The Chain, like many of these quirky short courses, gives players. it’s different. In a game that’s so busy with individual pursuit, you and a few friends instead walk together, talk together, drink together. In a game so obsessed with numbers, there is no real scoring. In a game that takes a lot of time, you get through in an hour. In a sport dictated by strength and length, skill gaps are leveled.
It is, in many ways, a far more entertaining version of golf.
So why isn’t this version more widely available? Why aren’t publicly accessible copies of these courses coming to metropolitan areas? Why can’t golf change?
Well, chances are we’re getting there.
“I think it’s about time,” said Andy Johnson, golf architecture author and founder of The Fried Egg. “Resorts are the innovators in the golf sector because they are the most incentivized to build. Municipalities and public facilities have more limitations and regulations, so there is less appetite for adaptation. But we often see a lot of golf course trends emerging in the private space and the resort space eventually turning into a public space. Public golf, and especially municipal golf, is a very cutting edge industry. So I think the short course boom will come to public golf.
Short courses make an incredible amount of sense in metropolitan areas struggling with hyper-exclusive courses and limited public options. They just need to be made there. Chicago, Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia – cities that require an hour-long drive to the course, a five-and-a-half-hour loop around a packed course, and an hour-long drive home. One can imagine players thirsting for such an option. The most densely populated areas have the most potential golfers. There’s a reason Callaway paid $2.66 billion for Top Golf in 2021 — a lot of people go because hitting golf balls is fun. However, anyone who wants to learn the game on the golf course with driving range-esque top golf will have to deal with the stress that comes from playing with 14 clubs on a crowded, challenging 18-hole course, taking all the stress away. Are going. and the embarrassment of golf’s unsanitary rules and customs. Imagine new players getting comfortable and understanding how to experience the golf course.
Based on Johnson’s explanation of the top-down structure of golf course architecture, perhaps we will see the success of courses like The Chain that eventually allow local municipalities and private developers to renovate pre-existing, non-descript public courses into alternative short courses. Will inspire you to do so.
This, in turn, could create an entirely new access point to the game. Yes, par-3 tracks already exist, but these resort-style short courses designed by the best architects are nothing like what the average novice has seen – short does not mean simple. It’s a completely different experience. For one thing, kids and newcomers will be more likely to want to see it again.
“You’re showing the most fun version of golf,” Johnson said. “Bold design features. Cold greens. “People are getting to see the ball rolling and moving.”
This is not unbelievable. Designer miniature sources require only small plots of real estate and can be built anywhere – flat land, undulating land, choppier land. All you need is a spot for a tee and a spot for a green.
Some early examples are worth keeping an eye on. The Loop at Chaska, located just outside Minneapolis and designed by Benjamin Warren, principal architect of Artisan Golf Design, as a 1,200-yard, nine-holer with eight par 3s, one par-4 in 2024 Will open and is the first of its kind. Expressly configured for adaptive golfers. The Park in West Palm Beach, Florida is a Hanse/Wagner-designed course that is a public-private partnership between the City of West Palm Beach and the West Palm Golf Park Trust that has revitalized a closed municipal course. Along with the 18-hole course, there is also a nine-hole par-3 light for evening play.
There are others too.
There should be more.
But golf, as is so often the case, moves slowly. The best chance for change is when the math finally adds up to produce an inevitable change. If renovating an entire public course can range from $5-$15 million, renovating or building a high-end par-3 course can probably be done for less than a few million dollars. What matters most to that community?
“It’s a more palatable expense for the parks department or municipality, and they’ll create something that will bring in revenue,” Johnson said. “These things matter a lot. Just need more momentum with them and more examples of them.”
Then we’ll see what so many people are expecting.
A different way of playing.
(Illustration: Shawn Reilly / athletic, Photos: Courtesy Streamsong Resort, Matt Hahn)
