Glen Mills Golf Club

Glen Mills, PA

For all the heavy-handed architectural details, the course deserves its due – it is expertly maintained and provides no shortage of challenge, variety and thrills.
Full Review of Glen Mills Golf Club »

Tetherow Golf Club

Bend, OR

The experience of Tetherow is contradictory and enigmatic; both the accolades and criticism the course has received to date are well-deserved.
Full Review of Tetherow Golf Club »

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This month in architecture: What defines EPIC GOLF?

The Epic School of Golf Course Design

An Introduction

The 16th at Ballybunion

As with pretty much every aspect of the game, there’s no one right way to design a golf course; in fact the variety experienced by playing a number of courses is a huge part of what makes the sport so enjoyable for every golfer. But over the course of my +/- 20-year infatuation with golf—more so in the last eight of those years than in the previous 12—I’ve developed a fairly well-defined lens through which I view every course I play, and by which I judge the success of the design.

In his seminal work Grounds for Golf, Geoff Shackelford discusses six schools of design: the Natural, the Penal, the Strategic, the Heroic, the Freeway, and the Framing. The goal of this website is to assert and celebrate the existence of a seventh design school: the Epic.

I hope that the following distinctions, each of which will be fleshed out fully in the coming months, will help the reader get a handle on the characteristics of this school:

Pacing Versus Routing

A golf course is a landscape that is experienced chronologically. This sounds obvious.

But it’s remarkable how many course architects afocus on individual holes, without taking into account how they combine to create the experience of the round. Read More »

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Old Tom Morris

old_tom_morris The first thing that pops to mind about Old Tom Morris for most of us is one of those cheesy Titleist ads with John Cleese.

But Old Tom was also one of the first men who could truly be called a “golf course architect.”