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The post Above the Arctic Circle, a rising star is climbing GOLF’s World Top 100 list appeared first on Golf.

Viktor Hovland spends most of his year shuttling between airports, courtesy cars and practice tees, the regimented life of a modern Tour pro. Which is why it stood out when, a couple of summers back, he stuffed his bag into the trunk of a car in Oslo and set off with three pals on a 16-hour road trip to Lofoten Links. No appearance fee. No prize money. No sponsor obligations. Just a world-class player doing what the rest of us do for fun: logging miles with buddies to check out a buzzy, far-flung course.

Hovland is not your standard superstar. He favors ear-bleed death metal and mainlines podcasts on eclectic topics. And Lofoten Links is not your standard layout. It occupies an improbable perch above the Arctic Circle, where the sun barely shows its face winter but stays out pretty much all summer. In recent years, the course has become an “it” destination for daydreaming golf junkies around the globe, partly on the strength of bedazzling photos of rock-fringed greens lapped by waves in a mountain-meets-coast backdrop that seem computer-rendered. 

On the ground, the drama proves real. Lofoten gets off to a rousing start that includes one of the world’s most Instagrammable par-3s, its green jealously guarded by the Norwegian Sea.. The par-4s that bracket it are just as stirring. Each invites a bold line over water. Hoven Mountain overlooks the course, and several holes climb toward it, including uphill 5th and the stout par-4 14th.

As much as the setting feels otherworldly, the origins of the course are down-to-earth. In the early 1990s, British architect Jeremy Turner was invited by Tor Harald, a local farmer with a golf habit, to route a few holes across family land. After Harald’s death, the property passed to his son, Frode Hov, who kept up the passion project with Turner. A six-hole curiosity became nine, then more, until a full 18 emerged in 2015. The years since have brought further refinements. In GOLF’s latest World Top 100, Lofoten jumped 22 spots, rising to No. 66.

Additional energy behind Lofoten has been come courtesy of Cabot, the global developer whose portfolio of marquee properties spans from Canada to the Caribbean and beyond. Cabot’s investment promises upgraded lodging and infrastructure, aimed at fleshing out Lofoten as destination.

Getting there takes commitment, though the trip doesn’t have to be as hard as Hovland made it. Regional flights and ferries can shorten the journey considerably. The reward is the splendor of the setting, the complexities of the challenge, and memories that linger more than any score. If, however, you insist on keeping count, here’s something to shoot for. On his visit, Hovland matched the course record with a tidy 63.

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The post This NFL-themed golf course is getting major upgrade appeared first on Golf.

The post This NFL-themed golf course is getting major upgrade appeared first on Golf.

As the PGA Tour season winds down this week, the NFL’s 2025-26 campaign is getting ready to kick off. The staggered timing is no surprise. The Tour understands that it can’t win a ratings battle with professional football. Better that pro golf does not collide with the gridiron. From Ponte Vedra’s point of view, the two sports are best left in separate lanes. (With the notable exception, of course, of new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp, who came from the NFL.)

There is one place, though, where they overlap.

The Cowboys Golf Club, in Grapevine, Texas, just outside Dallas, is the country’s only NFL-themed golf course. As its name suggests, it is owned and operated by Dallas-based Arcis Golf and maintained as a kind of grassy shrine to America’s Team and its five Super Bowl titles. Its clubhouse is a museum of Cowboys memorabilia. The par-4 4th hole has the Cowboys blue star logo painted in the center of its fairway.

It’s also public access. Show up to play on any given day, and you might just bump into a former or current Cowboys player. On my one visit, some years ago, I wound up paired with former defensive lineman Tony Casillas, who — despite a bum shoulder and a funky grip resulting from fingers he had broken more times than he could count — bombed it 60 yards past me and putted the eyes out.

But I digress. 

The real point of this dispatch is a property update. The club, which opened in 2001, is undergoing a multimillion-dollar overhaul. The work includes course improvements but also fully reimagined practice areas, including a new range with Toptracer technology, turf repurposed from the Cowboys field and an 18-hole putting course with what the club describes as “beer garden vibes.” These upgrades and additions, which began in June, are nearing completion and the club is scheduled to fully reopen in mid-October.

***

3 Things I’m Thinking:

Cabot’s new Scotland course: I can’t prove this, but, in my experience, “preview play” was not always part of golf-course marketing. Courses simply opened with a ribbon cutting, without much in the way of “sneak peeks.” In more recent years, though, “preview play” is trending — a way to tease out information about a new course that’s close to complete while whetting the public appetite in advance of the official unveiling. Interest builds. Reservations book out. It’s a smart strategy. I mention it because early next month, I’m off to Scotland, where preview play began in August for Old Petty, the second 18-holer at Cabot Highlands — a Tom Doak design to complement Castle Stuart, the original Gil Hanse-Jim Wagner course. The preview window lasts through September if you’re interested in getting there yourself.

The world’s longest course, reimagined: For decades, the Pines Course at the International in Bolton, Mass. — an 8,400-yard Geoffrey Cornish design — was known as the longest golf course in the world (technically, it wasn’t; the Nullarbor Links, which stretches across the Australian Outback, is some 848 miles, but why quibble?). Now, the course has a new claim to fame, as the original Pines has been blown up and replaced by a fresh build by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. The layout now tips out at just over 7,000 yards, which seems like plenty. The Pines is a private club, but I’m sure we’ll be seeing and hearing more about it in the coming weeks, as the club is hosting a media outing next week.

14 more holes for Kohler: From Kohler, Wisc., a town built on a faucet-making fortune, this news has trickled out: Destination Kohler plans to build a new course, a 14-hole, walking-only layout, slated to open in 2027. We’ll keep you posted on preview play.

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The post Cabot announces preview play on its second 18-hole course in Scotland appeared first on Golf.

The post Cabot announces preview play on its second 18-hole course in Scotland appeared first on Golf.

It’s rarely too early to plan a golf trip. But sometimes it’s too late.

Tee sheets fill up. Booking windows close.

With that in mind, here’s a heads up for anyone considering a golf getaway to Scotland. It involves Cabot Highlands, in Inverness. Already home to Castle Stuart, a Gil Hanse-Mark Parsinen design that ranks 89th on GOLF’s roster of Top 100 Courses in the World, Cabot Highlands is pushing forward on a second 18-hole course, a Tom Doak called Old Petty. Named for an historic local church, with a routing that meanders past a tidal estuary, Old Petty is not slated to open until 2026. 

And yet.

You don’t have to wait that long.

On Friday, Cabot announced that it will offer a sneak peek of Old Petty this coming summer; preview play will be welcome from Aug. 1 to Sept. 30. Reservations are now available here.

The announcement marks the latest news in what has been a busy year for Cabot, the fast-growing golf development company whose reach stretches from Canada to the Caribbean and beyond. In September, three months after purchasing Golf du Médoc Resort, in France, and transforming it into Cabot Bordeaux to establish its first foothold in continental Europe, Cabot announced a robust investment in Lofoten Links, a coastal stunner in Norway, where summer rounds play out under the midnight sun. 

Which remind us: if you’re planning ahead, the days are long in the Scottish Highlands, too. On Aug. 1, the sun sets at 9:31 p.m.

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The post Wanna get away? The Cabot Collection keeps picking up steam appeared first on Golf.

The post Wanna get away? The Cabot Collection keeps picking up steam appeared first on Golf.

The 15th-century explorer John Cabot was born in Italy but sailed under the flag of England, commanding what were thought to be the first European voyages to North America since the Vikings. In other words, the guy got around and left an impact, much like the golf-development company that bears his name.

If you keep up with the game, you’ve probably heard of The Cabot Collection. You might even know its origin story, which dates to 2012 and the opening of Cabot Links, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Within four years, that flagship destination had welcomed a second course, Cabot Cliffs, which, like its sibling, became a Top 100 fixture. A brand expansion had begun.

And it hasn’t slowed. Cabot has since grown into an international juggernaut, with an imprint that stretches from Canada to the Caribbean, Scotland and beyond. This past year has been especially busy. In September, three months after purchasing Golf du Médoc Resort, in France, and transforming it into Cabot Bordeaux to establish its first foothold in continental Europe, Cabot announced a robust investment in Lofoten Links, a coastal stunner in Norway, where summer rounds play out under the midnight sun.

Those moves added to a fast-swelling portfolio that includes Cabot St. Lucia; Canada’s Cabot Revelstoke; Cabot Highlands in Scotland; and our 2024 GOLF November/December cover subject, Florida’s Cabot Citrus Farms, which debuts at No. 32 on our new list of the Top 100 You Can Play in the U.S. and just unveiled the Roost, the second 18-hole design at a property that also boasts two sporty short courses. It all amounts to motivation. Time to start planning explorations of our own.

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The post I trekked to Cabot’s mythical new golf course. Can it live up to the hype? appeared first on Golf.

CAP ESTATE, St. Lucia — On a hilltop high above a remote corner of St. Lucia, a teenager in a sweat-stained shirt slowly loads food onto a flatbed. A glimpse at the rusty platform reveals the boy has done well: There are vacuum-sealed packages of fresh fish, baskets of vegetables and a few cases of cold Piton beer.  

The contraption whirs to life, sending the goods on a slow descent into the arms of a small army of cooks waiting below. A steamy afternoon has given way to an idyllic Caribbean evening, and down at the bottom of the hill, a private beachside bungalow is prepping for a party.   

It’s sunset at a little sliver of paradise called the Naked Fisherman, which is a hell of a strange place to see the future of golf.

But some of that future is here — or a few miles from here, at a place named Cabot St. Lucia. And from the deck at the Naked Fisherman, Bill Coore tells me the moment he realized he’d discovered it.

It had happened just a day earlier, when Coore and his course-design partner, Ben Crenshaw, had found themselves on the 15th tee box at their latest Cabot design, Point Hardy Golf Club.

Crenshaw was admiring the expanse at 15, the first of four cliffside stunners, when he stopped short. He turned to Coore and asked for a photo to send to Julie, Crenshaw’s wife.

Coore didn’t bother trying to stifle a smile.

“In all these years, that’s never happened before,” he told me on the porch, the same smile plastered across his face.

“He must think it’s pretty good.”

CRENSHAW WASN’T ALONE.

I too found myself in St. Lucia in pursuit of something pretty good, and an oceanfront dinner was only the first glimpse of it.

There would be a dazzling array of acts to follow — bottles, excursions, meals, and, of course, beaches — before we would see the main event: a golf course set into a stretch of cliffside so beautiful it would redefine our perception of Caribbean golf…and maybe regular golf, too.

As the scent of grill smoke wafted into the air, the movers and shakers at the Naked Fisherman began to take their place. In one corner of the deck was Crenshaw, the two-time Masters champion and long-time course designer, clutching a Tito’s and soda stuffed with a fat lemon wedge. In another was Ben Cowan-Dewar, the golf developer behind Cabot, peeling away clothing after arriving on a late-afternoon flight from Toronto. In a third corner still, seated on an old wooden bench far from the noise, was Coore, the man who knew where all the bodies were buried.

Coore is Crenshaw’s creative partner and, if you believe the people who care about these things, one of the most brilliant course designers of the last several decades. A child of rural North Carolina, Coore grew up a modern golf success story, his passion for the game blooming from his working-class upbringing by virtue of access to local gems like Pinehurst No. 2.

Coore found his way into the golf business without any of the advantages owed to Crenshaw, apprenticing for fellow architect Pete Dye until he convinced Crenshaw to open their own design shop. Despite his celebrity, the famously genteel Crenshaw insisted the business go by Coore’s name first, and so Coore & Crenshaw was formed.

The years since have been fruitful, with Coore and Crenshaw’s fingerprints on hundreds of the world’s best courses. Today, the pair has six original designs ranked in GOLF’s Top 100 in the World and has restored or renovated more than a dozen others.

Word of a new Coore-Crenshaw design breeds childlike excitement in the cultish world of course design. Witness the visitors who posted to the internet Zapruder-style images of a much-hyped new Coore-Crenshaw course in Oregon. When the pair’s work on that project — the heavily anticipated “Sheep Ranch” course at Bandon Dunes — was formally announced, it came as no surprise. Most of the golf world had already seen it.

But nothing Coore and Crenshaw have ever done, not even Sheep Ranch, compares to the project that brought a pack of golf journalists to the Naked Fisherman. Not in size, scale, or most notably, hype. As Coore begins to tell me the story of Cabot St. Lucia, I can tell he knows it.

“We’ve had some truly extraordinary sites to work with. I mean, we’ve been so beyond fortunate,” Coore says. “But if we’re talking in the context of visual drama, this golf course, this site — it’s the most visually dramatic site we’ve ever worked with.”

Coore’s poker face is bad — so bad I’m beginning to believe it’s not a poker face at all. There’s an element of salesmanship to course design, where the jobs pay up front but careers are built on a steady stream of business. By the time he reaches me, Coore has given the pitch for Cabot St. Lucia so many times it’s burned into his eyelids.

But the longer he speaks, the more agitated he seems. Truth is, he says, he and Crenshaw are in a unique position: They can afford to be choosy. With Cabot St. Lucia’s jagged cliffs, stunning vistas and dreamy beaches, they didn’t need a salesman to generate interest — they needed only a photographer.

“Anybody who’s ever hit a golf ball in their life could design some of the holes out there,” he says. “I mean, seriously, it’s that beautiful.”

Coore orders a Piton from a server, and soon he’s gesturing with the bottle as he talks through the property. There’s the 2nd hole, a bending, inland par-4 that would have a home at any Coore/Crenshaw course in the world. The 7th, a short cliffside par-3 that Coore says reminds him of the same hole at Pebble Beach. The 8th, a forced carry over a cliff that exposes players to the astonishing oceanfront — where they will play eight holes — for the first time.

The condensation from the beer is dripping down the crook of Coore’s hand when he finally reaches the closing stretch, a staggering array of oceanside holes framed by a massive rock formation. It was these holes, Nos. 15, 16, 17 and 18, that first spurred the attention of the golf world when whispers of Cabot St. Lucia surfaced in 2020. And it is these holes that have brought the course all the way into the No. 76 slot in the world in GOLF’s latest Top 100 rankings, the highest debut of any new original design.  

As he talks about the 15th, Coore’s eyes begin to soften. He’s close to saying the thing — that Cabot St. Lucia isn’t Pretty Good, it’s better than that — but every time he starts, he falters.

I grow impatient.

“It feels like you’re scared to say how you really feel,” I say. “Why?”

Coore catches my gaze and his face stretches into a grin.

“Just wait,” he says. “You’ll see.”

THE GOLF WORLD HAS BEEN WAITING for some time now to see Cabot St. Lucia.

The course had been under construction for close to a year when it first appeared on the golf internet in the fall of 2020 — just long enough for the first glossy renderings to permeate an otherwise barren landing page. It was years from completion, even by the most aggressive estimates. Still, it didn’t take long for the images to spread like wildfire on social media, where Cabot St. Lucia quickly became the sport’s first true Covid baby.

The time was good for the emergence of a golf Xanadu. Millions of new players had flooded into the sport, but travel restrictions had kept many of them from venturing much beyond their backyards. Resorts across the industry were battling twin forces: tee sheets were bare but deposits were lined up for years. Cabot St. Lucia’s cliffs, palm trees and crystalline waters were the perfect outlet.

Back in Cap Estate, real life clashed with the Covid dream. Coore-Crenshaw had sent down a trusted crew of land-shapers to execute the vision, but Covid lockdowns and island weather had caused delays.

Courses

Just when it seemed those issues were fading, a new issue arose. The beaches buffeting the golf course had been tied to an ancient Amerindian burial ground, causing a stir among the locals. Cabot commissioned an archeological expert to survey the area, potentially dooming the project, but the findings were underwhelming.

The expert, renowned archeologist Reginald Murphy, found that the site was “essentially destroyed” after decades of local car traffic and human use on the beach. The site, or whatever still remained of it, was “99 percent eroded or washed away.” The project was back on.

“It’s a bittersweet situation,” Murphy wrote. “You’re hoping for a grand find, but also … great in the sense that it allowed development to proceed.”

But the challenges weren’t done there. Once work finally began again, Coore-Crenshaw’s employees realized most of the course’s grounds crew needed extra seasoning. Cabot St. Lucia would be only the third course on the island, meaning many of the workers responsible for bringing the place to life had never seen a golf course — let alone worked at one.

Cabot St. Lucia had once targeted a February 2021 opening, but by the end of 2020 the construction timeline had slowed considerably. The course didn’t start its final overseed until the beginning of 2023, and play won’t begin until next month.

“There are many times we’d walk out there and say, ‘Man, I don’t know if we’re going to pull this off,” Coore says now. “These guys that have worked here, I can’t tell you the fortitude and persistence they’ve had, because they’ve literally had to redo some of these things three, four or five times.”

That persistence has come hard-earned at times, particularly for those working their first golf job. As I walked the site alone one afternoon, Damon Di Giorgio, the course’s well-regarded superintendent, stopped me to ask an unusual favor.

“Did you write down anything nice about the course?” he asked.

I paused, confused.

“Anything at all?” he asked again.

I told him I thought the property looked beautiful, and that the nuance from their months of work was noticeable.

Di Giorgio smiled.

“I just want to be able to tell these guys something good,” he said. “I want them to know all the work is going towards something.”

A few fairways later, I came upon one of Di Giorgio’s lieutenants, Ed, wearing a warm smile and an outstretched hand.

Evidently, he’d already received the good word from Di Giorgio, and he wanted to share a message of his own.

“It feels good to be a part of something big.”

BILL COORE’S SPINE TINGLES as he walks up the 3rd fairway.

As he reaches the green, his face scrunches like he smells something foul. After a slow saunter to a greenside bunker, he turns to his longtime aid Trevor Dormer to deliver a message: something’s not right.

“We need to work that shape back up toward the green,” he says, pointing at a three-inch gap in the sod and sand that is not to his liking.

Coore and Dormer spend a few minutes poking away at the bunker, deep in thought, before Crenshaw arrives with a solution in mind. After a few more minutes of prodding, the group is finished, and the bunker looks … the same, except now all three men nod approvingly at it.

This, it seems, is the level of obsession that separates the good course designers from the great ones — a quality that Crenshaw explains simply.

“You try never to do the same thing twice,” he says. “Never, ever let them see you do the same thing twice.”

Innovation is a collaborative art for Coore and Crenshaw, who pour hours of effort into every stage of the build. The creators can’t help but infuse pieces of themselves into their work, a point that comes through in the greenside bunker. Crenshaw is a creative genius and a diplomat; Coore is a perfectionist and commander. Either man alone would be a gifted designer, but together they’re a powerful marriage of ambition and practicality.

Nowhere is this truer than at Cabot St. Lucia, where Coore says the pair “moved mountains, literally,” to coax their design from the Volcanic rock beneath the course. That work was painstaking, but as we walked the course together, it was nearly complete. The result?

It’s good, and not just Pretty Good. Really good.

There is an old analogy about golf courses as music, and that applies here. Many similar courses have been built like pop songs — their flash and polish belying a lack of substance. Cabot St. Lucia is not that. Indeed, Coore and Crenshaw’s shot at playing God has resulted in something heavenly, a symphony of beauty and whimsy that ends with a knee-buckling crescendo. The low notes are thought-provoking, while the high notes are awe-inspiring. In a part of the world known for hit-and-giggle resort golf, Cabot St. Lucia will make you weep.

Of course, good doesn’t mean perfect. There were hiccups to building on a remote island that proved inescapable, and some problems were never fully solved. For one thing, the course remains wholly unwalkable, an oddity for a Coore/Crenshaw design. For another, Cabot St. Lucia represents a departure from Coore and Crenshaw’s typically player-friendly approach. Some holes could perhaps be unfairly difficult on gusty days, with lengthy forced carries even from the forward tees. At least one hole — like the straight-uphill par-4 10th, which feels more apt for a billygoat than a golfer — still elicits groans from the designers.

“No. 10,” Crenshaw shudders when I ask which parts of the build kept him awake at night. “That was the hardest test on this whole property.”

The course’s developers, Cabot, have had it slightly easier. Founder Ben Cowan-Dewar has learned it is not hard to sell people on the view at Cabot St. Lucia, where a residential community will soon pop up. Buyers have flooded in from every direction, an all-star cast that includes Yankees’ first-baseman Anthony Rizzo.

“For a while, the conversion rate was literally 100 percent,” he says with a chuckle. “One hundred percent of the people who came here wanted to buy property.”

For now, access to the course will be limited to those who purchase a home, where listings range from $2 to $8 million — a departure from the traditional course-and-hotel model Cabot has successfully established in Nova Scotia, with similar plans in the works in Florida and Scotland.

Still, Cabot St. Lucia will have availability for public play, and eventually there are hopes to expand access even further, perhaps through another on-property resort. Those decisions, Cowan-Dewar says, will depend on how the course is received.

Hype has been no problem for Cabot St. Lucia, and neither has critical reception. But converting excitement into visitors could prove challenging, particularly for an island that receives only a small number of flights daily, and a golf course that is another two hours from the airport by car, almost the entirety of which is spent on winding island roads.

But perhaps the best indication of Cabot St. Lucia’s long-term success comes from the man responsible for the course’s existence. Cowan-Dewar, after all, was the one who bet golfers would flock to a remote chunk of the Canadian coast for tee times — a bet that produced one of the world’s most celebrated resorts, Cabot Cape Breton.

Cowan-Dewar is making a similar gamble at Cabot St. Lucia, but it’s clear he feels Coore and Crenshaw have helped him stack the deck.

“We’ve always believed to some extent, ‘If you build it, they will come,’” Cowan-Dewar says, summoning the old line from Field of Dreams.

“Here, I think they will.”

“SO I HEARD A LITTLE RUMOR…” I say to Ben Crenshaw from Point Hardy’s 15th tee.

The sun has begun to set on the horizon, illuminating the sky in a brilliant shade of pink. Crenshaw and I are alone, admiring the view from a small speck of green in the middle of a bright blue sea.

Out across the rocks is the fairway, and out beyond the fairway are three of the final four finishing holes, framed like a postcard. It was this vista that first whipped the golf world into a frenzy in late 2020. Now, the view has come to life, and Crenshaw can only stare.

“I heard that you took a photo right here,” I say. “Something to send back home.”

Crenshaw reaches into his pocket for his phone, then flips the screen toward me. It’s the photo his pal Bill took the previous day.

“Pretty remarkable, huh?” he says.

“Have you ever done that at another golf course?” I ask.

Crenshaw pauses, surveying the land around us. The late afternoon sunlight has electrified the cliffs and the ocean and the course in sepia-toned streaks. The world is quiet except for the sound of crashing waves and the gentle breeze.

He flashes a smile.

“No, I don’t believe I have.”

You can reach James Colgan by email at james.colgan@golf.com

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The post ‘Our model is Sand Hills’: Colorado golf about to get boost from Keiser family’s latest find appeared first on Golf.

The post ‘Our model is Sand Hills’: Colorado golf about to get boost from Keiser family’s latest find appeared first on Golf.

One sunny winter day in 2019, along a lonely road on the eastern plains of Colorado, the golf course developer Michael Keiser (the son, not the father of the same name) clambered from his car and climbed over a barbed wire fence onto a rollicking expanse of ranch land.

Keiser was familiar with the site from Google Maps. But this was his first brush with it in person. It was even more dramatic than it looked online.

The treeless terrain in the town of Roggen, roughly 35 minutes from the Denver airport, heaved with sand dunes, some rising as high as 85 feet, framed in the distance by the snow-capped Rockies. 

Keiser was impressed. He was also trespassing, which he concedes, “probably wasn’t the best idea.”

As he trudged along, taking in the landscape, a ranch hand flagged him down from a few hundred yards away.

“There was nothing else to do,” Keiser says. “I walked straight up to him and said, ‘Hi, do you play golf?’”

The man chuckled and allowed that he sometimes did, before escorting Keiser off the property and advising him not to show up unannounced again.

Keiser’s day had ended early with the easy work behind him. He’d identified great land for golf. The hard part, he says, was what came next: convincing the owner of that land, an 85-year-old cattle rancher and rodeo operator “that he should let me build a course in his backyard.”

Four years later, after countless conversations and negotiations, that part has been handled, too. All that remains is to get on with the job of building Rodeo Dunes, the latest project for Keiser and his brother, Chris, the sibling co-developers of Sand Valley, in Wisconsin, and the sons of Bandon Dunes founder, Mike Keiser.

Like every destination in the Keiser family portfolio, which also includes Cabot Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia, Rodeo Dunes will place golf front and center. The difference is that golf is all that there will be, at least at the outset.

The Keisers have acquired 2,000 acres of dunesy land, with room enough, Michael says, for six courses, and water rights to support that many, too. At this stage, routings have been finalized for two courses, one by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. The other is the first solo design by longtime Coore/Crenshaw associate Jim Craig.

Craig’s course is expected to be completed first, with construction starting this summer and an opening slated for 2025. The Coore/Crenshaw course will follow, with a short course and a putting course pegged to open shortly after that.

In the early going, amenities will consist of little more than a shipping container or a single-wide trailer by the first tee. Any amenities, if added later, will abide by the Keiser family’s low-impact philosophy.

“Our model is Sand Hills,” Keiser says, referring to the famed private club in Nebraska that many see as a benchmark of modern-minimalist golf. “Except we want to be public, and with more than one course. Everything will be pretty spartan. The goal is to create raw, pure golf, with everything else stripped away.”

That light-handed approach, Keiser says, not only fit a landscape that requires minimal shaping. It also fit the interests of the octogenarian rancher and rodeo operator Mike Cervi, who lives on his property, where his sons also have homes, and was bent on preserving its unspoiled open spaces.

“He has zero desire to see his land turned into track housing or strip malls,” Keiser says. “He wants to keep it as a working ranch. A lot of our discussions were about how a low-impact and sustainable set of courses would help ensure that that remains the case for as long as possible.”

In recent years, Denver has ranked among the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States. But Keiser says that booming demographics did not drive the decision to build in Colorado. He says the move was dictated solely by the site, which he describes as “the best I’ve ever seen.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever get another crack at something like this in my career,” Keiser says. “This is it.”

After acquiring the land, Keiser, an armchair architect himself, roughed out a routing and showed it to his friend, Jim Craig, asking for his informal input. 

“I wasn’t looking to hire him, and he wasn’t looking for a job,” Keiser says. “I was just curious to hear his thoughts.”

Travel

Craig made a few suggestions, which led to some revisions, which gave way to other nips and tucks. Before long, Craig was making regular trips from his home in Texas to walk the site and dream up more ideas, which he layered over the evolving blueprint.

“It was one of those deals where you could start almost anywhere and go anywhere from there,” Craig says. “The land is good all over.”

As part of his revisions, Craig steered the routing deeper into the most dramatic dunes, while working in and out of the rumpled folds to ramp up intrigue and variety. 

“I just tried to go everywhere that was interesting,” Craig says.

It got to the point where so little of Keiser’s original draft remained that Keiser asked Craig if he would take the job. After all, the work was his.

“I’m honored and excited,” Craig says. “I think we’re going to take people on a really fun walk.”

Golf is played year-round in the Denver area, and Keiser says that will be the case at Rodeo Dunes, though he expects that prime season for destination travelers will run roughly from April through November. There are hotels in nearby towns along Interstate 76, which runs between Denver and Roggen.

Rodeo Dunes is offering a limited number of Founder memberships. You can find more information here.

The post ‘Our model is Sand Hills’: Colorado golf about to get boost from Keiser family’s latest find appeared first on Golf.

The post With Tom Doak design in works, Scotland’s Cabot Highlands gathering steam appeared first on Golf.

The post With Tom Doak design in works, Scotland’s Cabot Highlands gathering steam appeared first on Golf.

On a calm cloudy morning last fall, course designer Tom Doak was stationed on one of the high points of a new course he is building next to Castle Stuart, the four-time Scottish Open site in the windy and wonderful Scottish Highlands. From what will be the approximate location of the 2nd tee — the course isn’t scheduled to open until 2025 — Doak looked down a grassy slope toward the Castle Stuart, a stately and recently restored tower house that has stood sentinel on the banks of the Moray Firth since the 1620s.

“We could have a par-3 with the green over to the right in front of the clump of trees,” Doak said, motioning toward a swath of pasture to the right of the castle. “But it’s into the wind and lots of times it’s going to be just a beast of a par-3, and we sure don’t want to start with a really hard par-5 into the wind and a really hard par-3. So we’re thinking about where the flag is back there — we’re about 260 from there — it could be a short par-4 instead. People who are scared of hitting too close to the castle grounds can bail away to the right.”

When building golf courses on Scotland’s ancient sod, it’s difficult not to bump against history — if not incorporate that history into the design itself. Doak knows this well, because he knows Scotland well, his first visit coming back in his post-grad days in the early 1980s when fresh out of Cornell he spent a stint caddying at the Old Course and studying the golfing treasures of Great Britain and Ireland, an education that would serve as the underpinning for his approach to course design.

The yet-to-be-named Castle Stuart sister course won’t be Doak’s first Scotland credit — that distinction belongs to his work at the Renaissance Club, about 200 miles south, in North Berwick — but it does represent another first. Last June, Castle Stuart was acquired by Cabot, the hard-charging Canada-based golf-resort development company whose international portfolio now includes properties or properties-in-progress in Nova Scotia; Saint Lucia; British Columbia; Central Florida; and, yes, Inverness, Scotland. Doak’s course is Cabot’s first original design in a part of the world where — given the deep reserve of mouthwatering golf already on offer — it can be difficult to turn heads.      

“That’s where you’ve got to have a good sense of what the character of Scottish links really is,” Doak said. “The good thing about trying to do this in Scotland instead of in Florida is, if you’re ever not sure, you drive right over there, or drive up north, and go have a look at a few other courses.”

Royal Dornoch. Nairn. Brora. Tain. Golspie. They’re all within a 75-minute drive of Castle Stuart. So too is the delightfully quirky design at Fortrose and Rosemarkie, which dates to the 1790s and sits on a wind-whipped peninsula that juts into the Moray Firth just across the way from Castle Stuart. These rumpled, exposed links don’t ask for a different style of golf than is played stateside — they flat-out demand it.    

“I still think that we as designers have a hard time visualizing people hitting the ball along the ground the way they do over here and really designing an approach for landing the ball 20 or 30 yards short of the green and feeding off something to get it in there,” Doak continued. “We all talk about it like we do that, but I don’t see many modern courses where you would want to hit those shots. The more we can get that here, the more it will feel like a real Scottish golf course.”

Cabot Highlands, as the property is now called, has much going for it, perhaps first and foremost its location. For American golfers, a Scottish Highlands golf expedition might sound like an exotic trip that requires multiple flight transfers and a five-hour bus ride on rolling, sheep-strewn roads. Truth is, if you fly direct to London, Inverness is only another 90-minute hop from there. And when you touch down in the Land of Nessie, your journey is all but done, with Cabot Highlands just a 5-minute drive from the airport. Indeed, when it comes to top-shelf resort golf, few destinations offer a shorter tarmac-to-tee commute.  

When the Doak course takes flight, Cabot Highlands’ owners believe their property will become a bonafide gateway not just to the Highlands golf scene but also to the Highlands many other activities. Golf and hiking. Golf and fly fishing. Golf and Nessie hunting. Golf and exploring Inverness. (If you do make it into town, book a table at Rocpool, a chic brasserie in the city center that serves up beef carpaccio that melts on your tongue and seafood so fresh it tastes like it just leapt out of the River Ness.)   

Lodging at Cabot Highlands is scarce, but the resort has plans to expand its accommodations. There are three neatly appointed guest houses — Golf Lodge, the Farmhouse and the Castle Cottage — each of which can house up to eight residents. On a recent visit, I bunked in the charming Golf Lodge, which has floor-to-ceiling windows in the main living space that look out on to the 15th fairway of Castle Stuart and, beyond that, the frigid waters of the firth. You can enjoy your morning latte on the patio as you look out at the Gil Hanse and Mark Parsinen test that awaits you.   

Castle Stuart, which ranks 77th on GOLF’s Top 100 Courses in the World list, opened in 2009, the brainchild of the late Parsinen, an American developer who also built Kingsbarns, just down the road from St. Andrews. Like Kingsbarns, Castle Stuart is not a “classic” links but more of the nouveau variety, by which we mean it doesn’t feel like it was built 200 years ago, because, well, it wasn’t. Take the imposing wall of gorse lining the left of the 1st fairway — that’s not native to the site, it was planted there. The fairways are forgiving off the tee, and the greens generous in size, but there’s still endless variety and need for strategic thinking.

The first three holes play hard against the firth, as do 10 and 11. But the rest of the course sits on higher ground, with the holes tacking back and forth so you can never get comfortable with the wind. The par-3 4th plays back inland with the course’s namesake serving as a handsome backdrop behind the green. My favorite hole is the firth-lined par-4 10th, where the tee sits high above the fairway, offering one of the most arresting vistas on the course — and also one of the nerviest tee shots. There’s plenty of room to land your drive but overcook it and your Srixon might well go swimming with the salmon.

One of the property’s other most memorable lookouts comes not on the course but in the clubhouse locker room, where bathers can take in the majesty of Castle Stuart from strategically placed windows in the showers.

What will Doak’s course do for Cabot Highlands? Presumably what Pacific Dunes (also a Doak design) did for Bandon Dunes, or Cabot Cliffs did for Cabot Cape Breton — i.e., quickly turn the destination from a nice-to-visit into a must-visit. Doak still has much work to do on his assignment but his overarching mission is simple: don’t try to do too much.  

“People come to Scotland to play a variety of golf courses, and they’re all seaside and the links factor into a lot of them, but the featuring is very different from one of them to the next,” he said. Of his Cabot project, he added: “I don’t think we have to be overly concerned at the beginning that we’re trying to make it really different than [the existing course], as long as it feels like it fits in Scotland. Whether it’s a little more like this or a little less like this, I don’t think will make any difference.”

To Cabot Highlands, though — and Highlands golf at large — the course is likely to make a big difference.

Green fees at Castle Stuart range from $255-$330. Stay-and-play packages start at $440/night per guest. Reservations can be made here.

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The post Cabot Citrus Farms reveals plans for unconventional 21-hole design appeared first on Golf.

The post Cabot Citrus Farms reveals plans for unconventional 21-hole design appeared first on Golf.

Cabot, the golf development company founded by Canadian businessman Ben Cowan-Dewar and Bandon Dunes developer Mike Keiser, has unveiled its most unorthodox design yet: a 21-hole course featuring 14 par-3s, six par-4s, and one par-5. 

Set to open toward the end of the year at Cabot Citrus Farms in Central West Florida, roughly midway between Tampa and Orlando, The 21, as the course is called, will combine a 10-hole executive layout with an 11-hole par-3 design. The executive course, The Ten, will wrap around the par-3 course, The Ace, creating a unique venue for golfers of all abilities.

Word of the unconventional design represents the latest news from Cabot. Since its birth, in 2011, with Cabot Links, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Cabot has become one of the foremost names in the industry, with a fast-expanding global portfolio. The company is currently designing and building more than 110 holes in four countries. In addition to Citrus Farms, the next 18 months will see new Cabot courses open in St. Lucia, Western Canada and the Scottish Highlands.

Citrus Farms sits on a 1,200-acre site that was formerly home to World Woods Golf Club, a 45-hole destination that long ranked among the finest public facilities in Florida. After acquiring World Woods early last year, Cabot renamed the property and set about reimagining its two 18-hole courses, Pine Barrens and Rolling Oaks, which have been renamed Cabot Barrens and Cabot Oaks. Kyle Franz is redesigning Cabot Barrens, and Franz and Mike Nuzzo are co-designing Cabot Oaks. GOLF Magazine’s architecture editor Ran Morrissett will work as an advisor to both Franz and Nuzzo.

The 21 will be an entirely new course, designed by Mike Nuzzo, a former aerospace engineer who turned to architecture at the age of 31 and is best known in golf circles for his work at Wolf Point Ranch, an acclaimed private club in Texas.

In sketching his concept for The 21, Nuzzo drew on elements from his favorite holes — Royal Troon’s postage-stamp green; the sweeping 5th fairway at Merion; the green complex on the 9th hole at Cypress Point. But he says he mostly let the terrain dictate the routing and design. The course will be designed to play firm and fast, a departure from the typical Florida design.

Variety is Nuzzo’s biggest goal. To that end, holes will range in length from 85 yards to 560 yards and allow for multiple angles of attack. The Ten will have four sets of tees, maxing out at 3,000 yards. The Ace will be illuminated at night. Golfers will have the option of playing just The Ten or The Ace, or to combine them into a 21-hole, par-71 loop that tips out at 4,160 yards.

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