Tom Lehman at the Prairie Club: This video was shot in the Spring of 2008 on the day before construction began. I look forward to getting back to Valentine, NE to see how the course has grown in and see if the course plays as well as I thought it would.

Ballyneal: This is the first of three videos that feature Tom Doak’s prairie masterpiece (Front Nine, Back Nine) that I ran on the site. I had the pleasure to be part of this project and it was one of the more enjoyable of my career.

Cypress Point- Back Nine: One of the more magical places on earth is only enhanced by Mackenzie’s amazing course (Front Nine, here).

Common Ground: From the rarefied private playground of the masters of the universe, to the a public course on mundane land. Common Ground is an affordable course that is filled with strategy and architectural subtleties. (For a discussion of holes three and four, see here).

The Old Course: While I did not have the best weather on my trip around the Old Course, I tried to capture the communal nature of the course and what fun it to simply be out on the links.

The Prairie Club has released two videos recently. The one above is of Tom Lehman talking about the design of the Dunes course and specifically the sixth hole. Having spent a great deal of time on this hole including shaping the green, I can’t wait to get back out there and see and play it next summer. I have said many times that working with Tom and Chris Brands was an enjoyable and educational experience. I am very proud of the product we produced and I hope that they will get the credit and additional work they deserve.

Video of the Pines course after the jump.

This video features Graham Marsh talking about what a pleasure it was to work in such ideal land for golf. I have heard that the Prairie Club team has been hard at work making this course even better than when I last saw it in the fall of ‘08. The course has a different feel to it thanks to some pine trees and its location near the canyon rim.

I hope the video of the HORSE course is soon to follow (Geoff Shackelford’s video of it can be found here)

An interview with Tom Lehman from the day before construction can be found here.

An interview with fellow shaper Kyle Franz can be found here.

A BUNKER AT THE PRAIRIE CLUB

I have worked with Kyle Franz on a number of projects, most recently at the Prairie Club for Tom Lehman and Chris Brands. Kyle is an immensely talented person, who is almost singularly obsessed with golf course architecture. He has worked on some of the best courses built in the past ten years including Pacific Dunes, Stone Eagle, and Barnbougle Dunes, as well as Kyle Phillips’s renovation of the Cal Club in San Francisco.

Out in Valentine, one of his greatest contributions was introducing the idea of using fence posts to shore up parts of both the natural, blow out bunkers and bunkers that we created. In the video, he refers to them as Snowdonian bunkers after the region in Wales that is home to Porthmadog Golf Club. While traveling in the UK, Kyle visited this obscure course and saw a bunker where a few pieces of wood had been used to prevent a bunker from eroding, triggering the idea of using them here in the U.S. (HD video after jump).

When Kyle expressed this idea to Tom and Chris, they readily got behind it. It was a way to distinguish their course from Sand Hills and Ballyneal. As you can see in the video, Tom was integral to developing the process of creating these bunkers, as well as the look. Kyle and I were a little shocked to see Tom wailing away on these fence posts, trying to break them so that they were a more manageable size, especially considering he was playing in a tournament in four days.

We used the Snowdonian Bunkers (this was our working name in the field, but who knows what other people will call them) sparingly. They are located in a few key spots on the golf course and add another layer of texture to the course. I think they turned out pretty well and am interested to see how they weatherd the winter.

Tom’s enthusiasm for anything related to golf, from green design to siting of the clubhouse, is evident in the fianl product at the Prairie Club. He and Chris decided to route the golf course in a way that was very different from how Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw used the landscape at Sand Hills and Tom Doak did at Ballyneal. The course attacks the dunes and the result is a dramatic course that is still very playable due the course’s width.- WS