Sandy Golf Links resides in one of golf’s greatest neighborhoods, next door to both Royal Melbourne Golf Club and Victoria Golf Club. This publicly owned facility has long served as a port of entry for young golfers in Melbourne, Australia. Originally known as Sandringham Golf Club, the course dates back to 1946, when the local city council purchased the property and hired Vern Morcom to design nine holes. Morcom expanded the course to 12 holes in 1951 and finally to 18 in 1955. Over the ensuing decades, the details of Morcom’s architecture faded, and Sandringham's playing corridors became crowded with gnarly tea trees.

In the late 2010s, the facility received a $19-million makeover funded by Golf Australia, the country’s governing body of golf, and the Victorian government. Sandy Golf Links is now home to the Australian Golf Centre, which includes a state-of-the-art practice area as well as the headquarters of Golf Australia, the PGA of Australia, Golf Victoria, and the National High Performance Centre. As part of the project, OCM Golf (Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking, and Ashley Mead) redesigned Morcom’s course, fitting 18 holes into a smaller footprint. The par-65, 5,319-yard course — with its firm playing surfaces, amoeba-shaped bunkers, and risk-reward strategic concepts — offers an authentic taste of Sandbelt golf at an affordable rate. As Ogilvy put it in my interview with him from early 2025, “It’s like a small version of the bigger Sandbelt courses.”

Take Note…

Sandbelt royalty. The original designer of Sandringham Golf Club, Vern Morcom, was the long-tenured superintendent at Kingston Heath Golf Club and the son of Mick Morcom, the founding superintendent at Royal Melbourne. Both were prolific golf course builders and architects, and their influence on the Australian game cannot be overstated.

First-rate agronomy. The playing surfaces at Sandy Golf Links — Bermudagrass fairways, bentgrass (“Sutton’s Mix”) greens, fescue surrounds — are strikingly similar to those at neighboring Royal Melbourne. There’s a reason for this: ever since the redesign by OCM, Royal Melbourne's crew has overseen maintenance at Sandy.

Hotbed. Many accomplished Melbourne golfers received their introduction to the game at Sandringham/Sandy. Ogilvy estimates that he played 80 of his first 100 rounds at the course, and his partners in the architecture business were regulars in their early years as well.

‍Don’t call them “templates.” While Sandy does not have any replicas of famous Sandbelt holes, Cocking told Brendan James of Golf Australia magazine that the course does features a few loose homages. Sandy’s double green, housing the pins for the fifth and 10th holes, bears some similarity to the eighth/16th green at Kingston Heath; the seventh green emulates the contouring of the fallaway third green at Royal Melbourne West; and the uphill par-3 16th hole borrows from the lost seventh at Royal Melbourne West as well as the famous 15th at Kingston Heath.

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