If you’ve always dreamed of building and owning a golf course, here’s a way to finally make it happen: earn a fortune in another field, then pour a portion of those proceeds into your passion project.
That approach worked nicely for Dick Youngscap, Herb Kohler and Mike Keiser, who gave the world Sand Hills, Whistling Straits and Bandon Dunes, respectively.
But maybe those developers don’t strike you as relatable role models.
On the off chance you belong to a lower income bracket, a more inspiring example might be Mike Koprowski.
Koprowski, who is 40 and married with two children, is a jack of many trades and a longtime golf junkie. But he’s not a one-percenter, and until a few years back, he’d never worked in golf.
And yet he made it happen. In a mid-life pivot, he bought a swath of land at a manageable price, put a shovel in the ground and pulled off a feat more commonly reserved for multi-millionaires.
“People with no money don’t typically launch golf developments, so I guess you could say this is a bit of a different story,” Koprowski said the other day by phone from the Sandhills of South Carolina. He was sitting on a tractor at Broomsedge Golf Club, the soon-to-open course that he co-owns and co-designed. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself to confirm that it’s real.”
Koprowski’s fantasy-made-true arose from childhood daydreams in South Florida, where he learned the game early from his father, a former captain of the Notre Dame men’s golf team. Young Mike got pretty good. He competed in high school. But what really captivated him was course design, an interest sparked by a round he played at the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. Amazed by Pete Dye’s work, he picked up a copy of “Bury Me in a Pot Bunker,” Dye’s memoir of his life in golf architecture.
“I just thought, ‘How cool is that?’” Koprowski says. “It seemed like something I’d really like to do.”
Instead, he went to college, like his dad, at Notre Dame, though not to join the golf team. He mothballed his sticks, enrolled in ROTC and studied history and political science. There was no golf after graduation, either, as Koprowski enlisted in the Air Force for a four-year stint that included a tour of duty as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan. His game grew rusty. But he sharpened other skills. In what comes off now as foreshadowing, Koprowski says, “I got pretty good at reading topographical maps.”
Back in the U.S., post-military service, Koprowski compiled a sparkling CV, earning Masters degrees from both Duke and Harvard, in international relations and education, respectively, before moving on to posts in public school and housing policy in Tennessee, Texas and Washington D.C. By then, he’d picked up golf again, and his interest in design had never left him. He even went so far as to build a short par-3 outside his Nashville home, a front-yard project that a glossy golf magazine pictured in its pages. Otherwise, though, the only holes Koprowski crafted were in his head.
“On every road trip, I was the guy staring off into the wilderness at a ridgeline to see where the green would go,” he says. “What I couldn’t see was how I could ever make that a career.”
Change came about in the way one of Hemingway’s characters went broke: gradually, then suddenly. A confluence of factors figured in the shift. In 2018, living in D.C. but fed up with Beltway politics, Koprowski was ready for something different. His wife was on the cusp of starting law school. His father, meanwhile, had retired to Pinehurst.
“The idea that we could move and be closer to family made all kinds of sense for a lot of reasons,” Koprowski says. “And the fact that it was a move to Pinehurst meant you didn’t have to twist my arm at all.”
At the time, the architect Kyle Franz, having recently restored Pine Needles and Mid-Pines, was about to do the same at yet another local Donald Ross design. Southern Pines Golf Club was going under the knife. That this was happening in his new backyard struck Koprowski as a sign.
“I decided it was now or never,” he says.
He emailed Franz out of the blue, asking if he could come work for free. As in other trades, such requests are not unheard of in golf architecture circles. Indeed, decades before, as an eager 19-year-old, Franz had sent a similar message to Tom Doak as Pacific Dunes was getting underway in Oregon, and Doak had found a place for him on the project.
“In a sense, Mike kind of reminded me of myself when I was younger,” Franz says. “But it was also clear he had a bit of different background. I checked out his LinkedIn. Duke. Harvard. Those policy jobs. And I thought, well, dang, this is a pretty darn smart guy.’”
Within days of their initial correspondence, Koprowski was out at Southern Pines, getting his hands dirty. At Franz’s insistence, he was also earning an hourly wage. Early on, it was weekends only, as Koprowski was still working remotely at his policy job. But now that he’d set off in a fresh direction, there was no looking back.
He had a lot to learn. Having pondered the topic for much of his life, Koprowski had a decent grasp on the principles of good design. What he didn’t have a handle on was the mechanics. “That’s what I needed to learn,” Koprowski says. “How do you execute it on the ground.”
Southern Pines was a crash course, a soup-to-nuts education on everything from soil sampling to shaping. Koprowski proved to be a quick study.
“He did a little bit of a lot of things out there,” Franz says. “And with all his other training, he knew Google Earth backwards and forwards. He was skilled at reading maps and summarizing ideas into proposals. He was an asset all around.”
Southern Pines gave way to work on other Franz projects — Cabot Citrus Farms in Florida; Eastward Ho in Massachusetts — opportunity enough for Koprowski to leave behind his old job. He was now employed full-time in the course design business, living his dream, with one fanciful ambition unfulfilled.
For as long as he remembered, Koprowski had been drawn to the story of George Crump, the Philadelphia hotelier and golf fanatic who, in the early 1900s, purchased property in New Jersey and put in motion what would become Pine Valley — a project so quixotic that some referred to it as “Crump’s Folly.”
“I was always fascinated by that — the idea of being the owner and builder of a golf course,” Koprowski says. “What a fun and ridiculous thing to do.”
Silly, maybe. But it called for serious commitment. And nothing could happen without land. That was the bad news. The good news was that the same sandy soil that made the Pinehurst area an ideal canvas stretched through other parts of the Carolinas. Setting his sights on the Sandhills east of Columbia, S.C., where great golf, he felt, was relatively scarce and real estate was more within his reach, Koprowski looked at dozens of parcels before finding one that fit the bill: 197 acres with the right amount of movement, on the market for the right price.
Interest rates were low. Koprowski’s confidence in the site was high. His optimism was buoyed further when Franz saw the land and shared in his excitement. In short order, Koprowski secured a loan, scraped together funds for a small down payment and picked up the property for $630,000.
“My plan was to find a way to cover the monthly payments until we got things figured out,” he says. “And if we didn’t, then I could just turn around and sell.”
The catch, of course, was clear. Now that he had the land, he had no money left to do anything with it. He needed proof of concept to put before investors. Even before he’d finalized the purchase, Koprowski had sketched a potential routing. That was something. But he needed to do more. With modest angel backing, Koprowski got his permits and cleared some trees. Construction costs, though, were far beyond his means. Caught at an impasse, Koprowski decided that hopping on a dozer was the best way to break through.
“Part of me thought that if I started shaping some greens, maybe I could persuade some investors to join in,” he says.
He was right. The first big backer to come aboard was Cody Sundberg, an accomplished amateur golfer from Illinois with a background in finance and real estate. Others followed. That was two years ago. Broomsedge Golf Club will be ready for play this month. A quick progression. Not that there weren’t bumps along the way.
“I recall July days sitting in excavator with broken air-conditioning, doing some rough shaping, while we had about $82 in the bank no investors insight,” Koprowski says. Close friends warned him he was going to lose his shirt. “There were some dark moments when I didn’t think it would work,” he says.
