Golf Course Architecture - Issue 61, July 2020

22 TEE BOX THE B IG P I CTURE The new Sheep Ranch course has opened for play at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon, USA. Tom Doak and Jim Urbina laid out 13 greens on the site – on a mile-long stretch of coastline north of the resort’s existing courses – in 2001, while they were working on the resort’s second course, Pacific Dunes. It became something of an insider’s secret, with few golfers experiencing it, until the resort hired Coore & Crenshaw to develop an 18-hole routing. The design duo worked from the coastline inwards, with nine greens directly on cliff edges and clusters of teeing areas – such as for the second and eighteenth, and fifth and fifteenth – created in order to connect the routing. The result is the resort’s fifth 18-hole course, a par 72 layout that extends to 6,636 yards, which welcomed its first golfers in June 2020. The foreground of the photograph shows the seventh hole, a 147-yard par three that also features on the cover of this issue of Golf Course Architecture . Its infinity-style green is wide open at the front but narrows towards the back, one example of where running the ball along the ground might be a sensible option on this windswept site.