In the early 1990s, Phil Friedmann declined to invest in his friend’s loony scheme to establish an ultra-remote golf resort. He soon regretted this choice. His friend—and partner in the recyclable greeting-card business—was Mike Keiser, and the resort was Bandon Dunes. To assuage his FOMO, Friedmann convinced Keiser to join him in buying a cliffside property just north of what would eventually become Old Macdonald. In 2000, Tom Doak and his Renaissance Golf Design crew, with associates Don Placek and Jim Urbina playing important roles, crafted 13 greens on the windswept site. This was the original Sheep Ranch. For the next 18 years, it was a choose-your-own-adventure course: players invented their own routings, teeing up wherever they wanted and playing to whichever green they chose. As fun as this arrangement was, it wasn’t a business. So, in the late 2010s, when Bandon Dunes absorbed the property, Keiser hired Coore & Crenshaw to replace Doak’s design with a regulation layout. The new Sheep Ranch opened to accolades in 2020.
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Take Note…
An old road. If you pull up Sheep Ranch on Google Earth and turn on the “Roads” layer, you’ll see that Whiskey Run Lane used to run along the edge of the bluffs. Coore & Crenshaw used some of that road’s earthworks to form the central spine of the 15th green, which is one of the most eccentric and memorable contours at the resort.
An old quarry. To get material to construct Sheep Ranch’s original greens, Tom Doak’s crew dug a sand quarry at the northeastern section of the property. Coore & Crenshaw saw potential in this feature, just as they did in the remnants of Whiskey Run Lane. They simply knocked down one wall of the quarry and built the 11th green inside. The result was striking, and it’s unlikely that any architecture would have dreamed it up from scratch.
An old fire truck. Doak’s Sheep Ranch had no irrigation system. The caretakers watered the greens by hooking up retired fire engines to the water main. When I visited Coore & Crenshaw’s course during grow-in, one of these vehicles—vintage-looking and painted white—was parked in a clearing east of the site, next to a new sand quarry that the construction team had created. The resort considered a fire-truck theme for Sheep Ranch’s logo but ended up going with a minimalist shepherd’s-crook concept.
An old wind farm. The most telling fact about the history of Sheep Ranch’s property is not that it may have, at one time, been home to a flock of sheep. It’s that one owner tried to use it as a wind farm, but the weather was so severe that the windmills broke. That’s right: it was too windy for windmills. Set your expectations for the conditions at Sheep Ranch accordingly.
