Naming a golf course? It can be harder than building one

As the summer of 2024 wound down in eastern Washington, Tory Wulf, a project manager at Gamble Sands, had cause for excitement and concern. In the decade since it opened, Gamble Sands had gained a reputation as a stay-and-play must largely on the strength of a single, eponymous course. Now, though, after several years of fits and starts, a second 18-holer was nearing completion, designed, like its sibling, by David McLay Kidd.

In the long, warm days of July and August, the turf had taken root and the contours of the layout had come into relief. Wulf felt confident that he was working on a winner, even as he worried over one uncertainty. He didn’t have a clue what the new course would be called.

“From the start, I knew we had good land and a good designer, so I figured building the course was going to be the easy part,” Wulf says. “The harder part was coming up with a name.”

For a game that bills itself as ancient, nomenclature questions are relatively new. It seems safe to assume, at any rate, that 15th-century Scottish shepherds spent little time debating how to brand the routings they roughed out of the dunes. But that was then. Naming issues arose soon enough.

In 1821, to cite a notable early example, plans were drafted for a course in St. Andrews that referred to the layout as Pilmoor Links. The label didn’t stick. Locals took to calling the course St. Andrews Links, and continued in that practice until 1895, when another course was built in town. The arrival of this new course, aka, the New Course, turned the old course into the Old Course, an historic transformation, overnight.

The name game isn’t quite as simple anymore.

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Nowadays, courses are born into a sprawling marketplace and all the machinery of commerce that surrounds it. Handwringing over language is par for the process. Image-making matters. It relates to money-making. Golf courses are a business. Naming them is, too.

Many industry consultants offer their assistance in this realm. Because the service tends to be bundled into other branding and communication work, it’s difficult to pinpoint how much it costs. But a veteran course operator who requested anonymity said that deep-pocketed developers routinely wind up paying tens of thousands of dollars for a moniker that fits.

A cynic might regard this as a racket. How tricky is it, really, to christen a golf course? Just pair a bird of prey with a geologic feature (Eagle Lake, Osprey Ridge) or tack on National to a proper name or noun (Trout National, Carolina National) and the job is done. Actually, the most common golf course names, according to the National Golf Foundation, are Rolling Hills and Riverside.

But you get the gist of the jaded view.

The more generous take is that golf-course naming, though far from neuroscience, requires some thought. In addition to creative demands, there are legal considerations. One industry veteran told Golf.com that he abandoned plans to name a course Kitsune-a fox spirit of Japanese folklore-when he discovered that it was already taken by a Korean clothing line. Woe is the course operator who inadvertently copies a litigious competitor in possession of a trademarked name.

As vice president of Communication Links, a respected golf-focused, Scottsdale-based firm, Jerry Rose has been in the branding business long enough to know that naming challenges vary from case to case.

Sometimes, when prospective clients reach out to Rose and his colleagues, they already have a name in mind, usually for personal reasons. One such project was 21 Club, a private club-in-the-making in South Carolina, where one of the co-founders had a special attachment to the number in the name: 21 was the birthday of his father and his three daughters. On top of that, one of the two planned courses on the property had been configured into 21 holes with alternate routings.

“How can you argue with an origin story like that?” Rose says.

In other instances, deeper research is involved. A consultant might spend days reading up on local history and culture, or hours on site in search of inspiration from a defining feature — a view, a valley, a rock outcrop. You never know when the muse might speak. In the early 2000s, after walking a property with a developer in North Scottsdale and coming up empty, Rose and his team hit pay dirt in the pages of an old Architectural Digest, in which the previous owner of the land described a parcel that was thought to have served as a prehistorical astral observatory. 

“If you listen closely,” the quote read, “you can hear the whisper in the rocks.”

And with that, Whisper Rock — the high-end desert redoubt and popular Tour pro hangout — came to be.

Back in eastern Washington, where summer had given way to early autumn, Tory Wulf and Co. had yet to finalize their thinking. But they’d narrowed down their choices.

“We had three parameters,” he says. “The name had to be simple, just one or two words. It had to have a connection to the land. And it had to be something that would allow us to create a good logo.”

One option they’d considered was a spin on the first course. Gamble Sands is owned by a longtime farming family whose homesteading patriarch, Dan Gamble, moved west from Nova Scotia in the 1800s. The land where he settled happened to be sandy. Enough said. 

Gamble might have worked in a name again — Gamble Cliffs? Gamble Bluffs? — but the family determined that was not the way to go. The new course should have an identity all its own.

Brainstorming sessions produced a crop of candidates. Old Cob. The Deer Farm. Twisted Saddle. The first was a nod to corn the family raised, the second a reference to a bygone local reindeer breeder, the third a description of the routing itself, which zigged and zagged along a ridge. 

None of them quite cut it.

“In the end, they just didn’t ring right or the explanation behind them was too much,” Wulf says.

As much as he valued group input, Wulf envied operations where a single voice had an authoritative say. That might make for an easier decision. Surely, no one argued much with Michael Jordan when he chose to dub his Florida club Grove XXIII.

Travel

Not that you have to be a Hall of Fame hooper to slam dunk the name. In the late 1990s, as Bandon Dunes was being built on the Oregon coast, there was little agonizing over what it would be called, according to Josh Lesnik of the golf management company KemperSports, who helped shape the resort in its planning stages and early life. The course ran through the dunes a few miles north of downtown Bandon. The name, like the layout, matched the locale.

Serendipity can also play a role. At Streamsong, which opened in Florida in 2013, the first two courses were dreamed up simultaneously on adjoining parcels by different designers, Tom Doak and Bill Coore. To distinguish their routings in the drafting stages, Doak drew in blue pen, Coore in red.  Hence, the course names: Blue and Red, a theme that recurred four years later, when the resort cut the ribbon on its Black course. More recently, Streamsong strayed from the pattern when it opened a short course whose name, The Chain, links to the property’s mining past. But now comes news that yet another full-size layout is in the works. Streamsong Yellow? Green? Purple? Puce? Smart money says that its name will be a hue.

After all, what’s true in golf, applies to golf-course branding: it’s often better not to overthink it. Consider the experience of Tom Pashley, president of Pinehurst Resort, which unveiled its 10th course this past April. When it first announced the project, Pinehurst took pains not to call it No. 10. But no one was surprised when the final word came down.

“I always joke that we hire expensive consultants and then decide to name the next course sequentially,” Pashley says.

There’s a school of thought which holds that golf courses are like kids: They grow into whatever name you give them. (Stripped of context, Pine Valley doesn’t stand out as a name; it’s the course that gives the words cachet, not the other way around).

Tory Wulf was inclined to agree. Time was also running short. Though the grand opening of the new course wasn’t slated until August 2025, a sneak-peek for the media was set for mid-October. The press needed a moniker to put in print. Beyond that was the matter of merchandising. You couldn’t stock a pro shop with branded scorecards, shirts, hats and more if you didn’t have a name from which to work.

With the clock ticking down, the Gamble Sands collective resurfaced an option it had kicked around before, a one-word, logo-friendly name with a clear agricultural association.

How about Scarecrow?

“We got all the predictable criticisms,” Wulf says. “It’s too Halloween. It’s too Wizard of Oz. That’s just how it goes.”

All the commentary could drive a person crazy. Jerry Rose, in Scottsdale, had learned to rise above it.

“Developers put a lot of stock in getting the name right,” he says. “But I’ve come to believe that the name is totally secondary to the experience. If a place is incredible, it doesn’t really matter what you call it.”

Tory Wulf concurred. What’s more, he was convinced that Scarecrow would be killer. That perspective gave him comfort, as did another conclusion he had come to.

“You can try all you want, but no matter what name you come up with, you’re never going to please everyone all the time.”