In an interview with Fried Egg Golf, Tom Doak remarked, “When I started building courses on my own with High Pointe, I deliberately made the fairways wider and gave you more room to play. That was one of the hallmarks of my work early on, when other guys weren’t doing that yet. And it’s just kept going that way for 35 years. The best new course is often the biggest new course; that’s just the way it works. Just like the tallest guy wins president a lot. And it’s gotten to the point that I see some new courses and I just think, ‘This is crazy wide.’ I mean, you are just inviting everybody to swing for the fences and it doesn’t matter because they’re still going to find it 60 yards offline and they’re still going to have a 9-iron into the green. And I don’t think that’s good architecture. So I’ve been looking for a place to do something different than that…. I didn’t just want to do it for a project that wasn’t going to be a big deal. If I was going to do it, it had to be somewhere that really attracted attention.”
When Michael Keiser called Doak about the property where Sand Valley’s latest course, Sedge Valley, sits, he had something smaller in his mind. It was the rare match of a developer and architect sharing the same concept. Doak’s centered on his admiration for a few courses in the England Heathlands that he saw in the 1980s: Rye, Swinley Forest, and the Addington. Each course had something in common. They were shorter and had a par under 70, but from a golf architecture standpoint they all felt world-class. The concept of a sub par-70 golf course had not been built in modern golf architecture but makes a lot of sense for a big resort such as Sand Valley. On long Wisconsin summer days, visitors often pack in as much golf as possible, and Sedge Valley now provides another option for a faster round at the resort with its par 68, 5,829-yard tipped-out layout. It also ushers in great variety for the resort with a course that sits on the complete opposite end of the spectrum of architecture from the expansive Mammoth Dunes, with the resort’s original design, Sand Valley, somewhere in the middle.
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Take Note…
Early bird. If this author was planning a trip to Sand Valley, I would attempt to play Sedge Valley first off in the morning. With the shorter nature of the golf course, it gives you the opportunity to zip around unlike either of the other big courses.
Same, but different. Sedge Valley’s construction coincided with Doak and Renaissance Golf’s build of the Lido. Associates bounced between the two during the final days of the Lido. Have there ever been two more different golf concepts built by the same architecture firm at the same time?
