Of all the undulating greens Tom Doak has built in his career, he thinks the set built at Ballyneal Golf Club might be the most severe. Listen to him describe the process of how he and his Renaissance Golf Design crew went about creating them in the sandy landscape of northeastern Colorado.
Special thanks to Ballyneal Golf and Hunt Club and Mike McCartin (Renaissance Golf Design shaper) for providing photos from construction and grow in.
Additional photo credit to Augusta National Golf Club, Photo by: Ryan Schreiber
Footage by Andy Johnson and Cameron Hurdus
Produced by Matt Rouches
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So I mean The Greens at Bal are some of the most severe I’ve ever built and and some of my favorites they’re wild but they you know they’re built out of the natural terrain and the natural terrain there is pretty Wild several of them are kind of they’re wild but it kind of sits in a bowl in a way and the thing I like about them so much is that you can use the slopes around the greens to get the ball close you’re not just firing it at the pin all the
Time you know you’re firing it left of the green and let it feed in you’re using the the Short Grass Behind the Green to stop a ball and let it come back sometimes you know so they just the green ties into the terrain and the kind of approach shot you’re
Hitting much more than a typical golf course you’re you’re never just like it’s a little green and it’s just perched up and you just got to landed on a dime right there you know 16 maybe a little like that but most of them most
Of them have got a lot more going on and there’s some big movement that you can use to help you know when we were building that uh Bruce heer ran the job for me he and Brian Schneider and Kai goldby were all living in a house together Ken Brian did the majority of
The greens there and then Eric Iverson came in helped out a little bit a couple other guys helped out building shaping a green here or there but um you know Brian was still young and you know he mowed a bunch of the best greens in the world he mowed Greens in Augusta and
Sand Hills and some other places so you know he knew what he was doing was wild but it you know wasn’t like unreasonable or impossible mean team and you know those guys just kind of fed off each other all summer and you know once once I liked the direction it was going it
Was like okay we’re going to these are going to be pretty Different on a lot of the courses I built kind of from then till recently you know I’ve been an editor of greens as much as a designer of green you know there’s a lot of them that I’ll let those guys make the first pass on something without telling them too much
About what I want them to do just general stuff about you know it’s a long par for so people are coming in here with a long club and you know try to make it harder to come in from the right than the left and just let them run with
That for a day or two but you know not change the world you know that the idea is yeah I’ll spend a half a day or a day trying to rough something in and see what Tom thinks of that and then we’ll will go from there and you know the best
Ones I barely do anything to them you know the 12th grade of belly meal is one of my favorite ones that has my name on it but that’s really Brian’s and then the seventh is one that I could not figure out what I was doing for the longest time and finally just one
Afternoon after staring at it long enough it’s like I know how this will work we’ll just we’ll just take take Short Grass up the slope on the left and over and then you can use that as a back stop and to feed the ball around so it was just all
We had to do was dig the bunker on the right and use that use that little bit of fill to like make the Contours in the green and hold it hold it up and Brian was working over on number four I think and I you know I said come over here and
Dig a bunker for me and you know like 2 hours later we had a bunker and a green that’s about all we had to do
2 Comments
The par 3 course greens were even more wild. 😀😀😀👍👍
2025 event? 🤞