The Sand Valley resort was a bucket-list destination even before its latest addition. Now, it offers golfers more variety and appeal than almost any other resort in the US.
Sand Valley debuted in 2017 with 18 holes of firm and fast golf laid out by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw over massive dunes in central Wisconsin. In 2018, David McLay Kidd added a second course, Mammoth Dunes, with fairways of epic width and player-friendly contouring. In the same year, the resort opened another Coore and Crenshaw design, the Sandbox, a 17-hole par-three layout. In 2023, The Lido opened, a first-of-a-kind project that saw the historic and lost Charles Blair Macdonald course in Long Island recreated by Tom Doak and team, who replicated its blend of classic template and original holes in as precise detail as possible based on a combination of extensive historic research and modern digital technologies.
But the Keiser family – who have defined destination golf in the US with their Dream Golf business that owns Sand Valley, plus the seven-course Bandon Dunes resort in Oregon, and the upcoming Rodeo Dunes in Colorado and Wild Spring Dunes in Texas – were not ready to stop there. When exploring a parcel of land near the back nine of the Sand Valley course, they spotted an opportunity to add something different to the resort’s portfolio.
“I had done routings for three different locations at Sand Valley previously, but never looked at this part of the land,” says Doak. “When Michael Keiser first reached out, he said another architect really liked the land, but he didn’t think there was enough for 18 regulation holes. Michael asked if I would be interested in doing a shorter course – something more like 4,500 or 5,000 yards. I replied that I had always wanted to do something in the 6,000-yard range, like Swinley Forest, Rye and West Sussex, so when I received the maps, that’s what I started to look for.”
Those English layouts provided Doak with inspiration for Sedge Valley, with the architect casting aside any notion of trying to achieve a par of 72 or 7,000-plus yards, and instead routing a course that would mix par threes, short fours and par fours with just a single par five (albeit perhaps the longest in the state).
“Michael initially thought that the course would start up behind the seventeenth green at Sand Valley, which would be the closest possible spot to the main lodge, so I started trying to route from there,” says Doak. “Later on, he decided to build a separate clubhouse for Sedge, so what I routed as the eighteenth hole is now the first, and my opening hole became the second.”
On early visits, Doak had identified a rock outcropping at the western end of the site that could become a focal point for the back-to-back par threes. “My initial routing played up and around the rocks, but wandered onto an outparcel that the resort does not own, so the back-to-back par-three holes I had designed would not work,” he says. “In the end I came up with a different set of par threes at the base of the rocks, but the idea of back-to-back threes came from the parcel we couldn’t use!”
The opening holes of the final routing give little hint of what’s to come. The start is four consecutive par fours; two relatively gentle holes that provide ample width and might be reached with a drive and a wedge – a warm handshake that is immediately followed by what may become two of the toughest holes of the round – both around the 450-yard mark and the third playing over rolling terrain and featuring a cavernous cluster of bunkers that must be avoided at all costs with the approach.
From the fifth though, any thoughts of traditional par pacing are thrown right out of the window. A par three is followed by a short par four and then the back-to-back par threes that Doak did get into the routing. All four of these greens are long and thin, but oriented in different directions to the line of play, with beautiful and individual bunkering that really evokes those classic English heathlands that Doak drew on for inspiration.
“With five par threes in total and a bunch of short par fours, we felt that we should create some difficult green targets, but we couldn’t build really small greens with the amount of traffic the resort gets,” says Doak. “So, we opted for long, skinny greens. A few of them lay 90 degrees to the approach so they present as wide and shallow; while others are long from front to back, and with the bunkering we’ve done, they play much more difficult as you start to put the hole further back.”
Michael Keiser has pointed out that none of the short par fours are a walk in the park. Bigger hitters will not be able to resist the temptation of driving the green at the sixth, twelfth and eighteenth, the first two of which are under 300 yards and the closing hole a little over that. But in each case, there are several layup options that may well result in a lower score. On the sixth for example, the glory hunters will need to thread their drive through the gap between deep bunkers that guard the the deep green, knowing the punishment for a shot that leaks either side is quite penal.
“The sixth was one of the first holes I settled on,” says Doak. “You really want to place your tee shot left centre so you can hit your approach straight up the green, but the fairway kicks everything to the right, so you have to judge the tee shot perfectly depending on how long you’re hitting it.”
The closing hole has a split fairway where the choice is a partially blind approach to the L-shaped green set into a huge dune, or the inviting but exacting slither of fairway on the right.
Building the eighteenth required a different approach than some of the other holes on the back nine. “The stretch from nine to fourteen was on flatter ground, and Michael encouraged me to think about doing some significant earthmoving, as we had done for Lido,” says Doak. “Ultimately, we didn’t do so much of that, but we did move more dirt to make the short par-four finishing hole something special. The eighteenth is modelled after the fourth hole at Barnbougle Dunes, one of my all-time favourites.”
The back nine may feel slightly more conventional than the front – but still includes two short par fours, a par five that could probably stretch to 600 yards. There is also the delightful, while quite long, par-three fifteenth with a generous green that nestles sublimely against the rock outcrop but incorporates a small back-right plateau that will be an extremely challenging target when the pin is placed there.
Sedge Valley certainly feels distinctly different to the other eighteens at Sand Valley, and that in part is due to the more restrained presence of sand. The fourteenth, for example, has a completely bunkerless green, protected by contour alone. “The first two courses at Sand Valley have sandy wastes surrounding nearly every hole,” says Doak. “At Sedge, we were trying to do something on a more intimate scale, and there was a lot of native sedge and other plants worth saving. But some of it can present difficulties in finding your ball, so we bunkered the course fairly liberally as a buffer between the target areas and the native plants. Eric Iverson spent a lot of time working on the margins of the course and trying to incorporate the native stuff as much as we could without it becoming too difficult.”
Sedge Valley opened for public play in July, and some early observers feel it could quickly become the most popular at the resort. Those with an interest in golf design will surely be enthralled by it, but it will be fascinating to see how the wider US golfing public responds to a layout that is a par 68 (we think – we’ve not seen a scorecard yet and wouldn’t it be great if the resort didn’t bother listing par?) and close to 6,000 yards. Those figures haven’t stopped Colt’s Swinley Forest from becoming one of the most-loved layouts in the UK.
“We are very curious to see how the American audience receives the course,” says Doak. “In the UK, that doesn’t matter much, because most casual golf is played in matches, and nobody really cares about the score. Americans tend to post a score, and we think we’re going to have a course where it’s a real challenge for good players to break par, but where breaking 80 or 90 is a bit easier, because you have more shots in hand. And I’ve always thought that would be the ideal for both groups.
“It’s possible some low-handicap golfers will look down on the course because it isn’t longer, and dismiss a good score as misleading, because the course is short. But it’s also possible that a lot of people will enjoy the chance to better their usual score!”
This article first appeared in the July 2024 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.