This cult-favorite California golf course is closing indefinitely. Here’s why

For more than a generation, Sea Ranch Golf Links was an outlier among California courses: a coastal layout with ocean views from nearly every hole, green fees that maxed out at muni prices and a tee sheet so empty that reservations were rarely required.

How a course of that kind remained uncrowded was largely a function of its location, on the northern reaches of the Sonoma Coast, a three-hour drive from San Francisco along winding Highway 1.

Now, though, a property that was never jammed sits empty and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. The news broke this weekend. Due to what management described in a written statement as “unsustainable” financial losses, the course has closed indefinitely.

“We did our best to see if we could make it work, but we have realized that we can’t,” Kristina Jetton, general manager of the course and nearby Sea Ranch Lodge, told GOLF.com. 

To understand the course and its struggles, it helps to know a bit about its history. Built in phases — the first nine was completed in 1974, and the second nine in 1995 — Sea Ranch shares its name with the residential community of which it is a part, a pioneering project that itself was born in the 1960s as an outgrowth of the nascent environmental movement. In its aesthetics and its stated ethos, the community reflected the idealism of the era. It was meant, in the language of its lead planners, to “work in harmony with nature.” Instead of subdivisions, the Sea Ranch blueprint called for loose clusters of unpainted, wood-framed homes, many of them designed by noted modern architects, all of them intended to blend into their surrounds. The golf course was conceived in a similar vein. Robert Muir Graves, who designed all 18 holes, went about his work in minimalist fashion, setting a routing lightly on the land. Not that he had any other option. Even by stringent California standards, building codes at Sea Ranch are famously strict.

For decades, the course soldiered on in a state of suspended animation, with barebones maintenance and amenities against a backdrop of astounding beauty. Its conditioning and culture lent it the feel of a small-town, seaside course in Scotland, scruffy and unassuming. 

No one claimed it was a cash cow. Unlike most courses in residential communities, Sea Ranch Golf Links received no financial support in the form of homeowners’ association fees. Its revenue came from green fees, which peaked at $80 dollars on weekends, and annual dues from a modest membership, whose ranks, at last count, numbered 37.

Love golf travel? Check out our all-new podcast Destination GOLF. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: APPLE | SPOTIFY | IHEART | AMAZON

In recent years, even as the course continued to slumber, the community of Sea Ranch experienced a boom, propelled by Covid, as tech workers and others with high-paying remote jobs sought fresh-air refuge along the Sonoma Coast. Last month, the median sale price of a home in Sea Ranch was $1.8 million, up some 80 percent since this time last year, according to Redfin, the real-estate brokerage firm.

Also in recent years, both the lodge and the course at Sea Ranch were acquired by an investment group that includes Patrick and John Collinson, the billionaire co-founders of the payment-services company, Stripe. (The exact date of the sale was not immediately available through public records and Sea Ranch declined to confirm the names of the owners, but that fact was reported in The Wall Street Journal, among other sources). Soon after taking over, new ownership renovated the Sea Ranch clubhouse, upgraded the driving range and ramped up maintenance. During a temporary closure two winters ago, it also restructured its membership, increasing annual dues from $3,500 to $5,000.

But that did not come close to balancing the books. According to Jetton, the general manager, the course was losing “hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.” 

To local golfers, who have long made up the bulk of play at Sea Ranch, the closure, this past Sunday, was sad but not shocking. A month before the announcement was made public on the course’s website, Sea Ranch homeowners received a letter advising them of the impending shutdown.

Glenn Yee, a longtime Sea Ranch homeowner who has been playing the course for more than 30 years, said he used that month-long grace period to squeeze in a swan song round with his adult daughter, who learned the game at Sea Ranch and went on to play Division I collegiate golf. 

“I have so many great memories of the course,” Yee said. “I’m really going to miss it.”

For all his countless rounds at Sea Ranch, he added, “I never once made a tee time. You could just walk up and play.” The same quietude that helped make the course so charming also played a role in its demise. 

What will happen next is to be determined. 

Under an agreement with the county, Jetton said, ownership would have the right to develop lots on the property, but only if it kept the golf course up and running. That same agreement would forbid the course from being transformed into private club. It would have to remain accessible to the public.

Ownership, Jetton said, would be open to selling the course and has already had conversations with interested parties. But no offers have been made. In the short term, she said, maintenance crews will continue to mow tees, greens and fairways. In the long run, though, if nothing else were done, the course would revert to commons, or public green space, which, Jetton said, would still require expenditures in the way of watering and other upkeep.

In the meantime, at least one Sea Ranch homeowner has refused to let the course fade into oblivion without a fight. Since receiving word of the closure, Matt Vukicevich, who has had a place at Sea Ranch since 1989, has mustered a community campaign to save the course by helping find a buyer. If that fails, Vukicevich said he plans to raise the possibility of other methods of reviving and sustaining the course at a Sea Ranch board meeting next month.

“The course had been around for more than 50 years, so for pretty much every Sea Ranch homeowner, it has always been part of the community,” Vukicevich said. “Some people have probably taken it for granted.”

Now that it has closed, he said, there is keen awareness of what’s been lost.

That’s a long way of saying that the story of Sea Ranch Golf Links isn’t over yet. And even if it ends, it will remain alive in pictures. In the wake of the closure, Arun Patel, a photographer and longtime Sea Ranch homeowner, posted a hole-by-hole tribute to the course on his Instagram account. For the next week, he has offered to make and send a free print to anyone who wants a visual keepsake.