45 Photo: Jaeger Kovich Head Golf Club, 10 miles down the road, features some spectacular dunes. They don’t cover the entire property, however, so the existing farmland was converted to sandscape. Laurel Links shared a similar soil type to Friar’s Head: a finely textured grey clay and silt substrate that offers a linksy aesthetic but doesn’t drain like true sand. The true sand lay four to five feet below the surface, which Kovich personally mined on his bulldozer. Keeping playability as the focus, the softer pure sand – or a blend of sand and the silky surface soil – was kept in areas farthest from play. Additional sand, combined with screenings, was brought in to create a more solid surface nearer to the fairway so that wayward balls would plug less frequently (playability remained a focus, with sand as with fescue). “They have all the right ingredients,” says Kovich, who has handled similar sandscaping projects for Gil Hanse at Streamsong Black and Pinehurst No. 4. “They’re just mixed up the wrong way.” The right ingredients now mixed in the right way, Kovich began shaping. He created a variety of shapes, from small pockets or more sizable landforms, created by chunking, that emulate a blown-out bunker. A few islands of fescue were left, to divert f lows of water around the landscape during wet periods. The project has included tying holes into their new surroundings, with both aesthetic and strategic purposes. On the fourth, for example, Kovich replaced a series of small bunkers with one large blowout bunker, which transitions nicely into the new waste area to its right. The work on the thirteenth involved removing trees along the inside of this dogleg left so that players would be more inclined to challenge the waste area. A constructed dune ridge behind the par-three twelfth green protects players on the thirteenth tee from overzealous tee shots. The current trends in golf course architecture, at least those ref lected The par-four eleventh hole at Laurel Links on Long Island is now framed by a sandscape
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