Sand Hills Golf Club - Nebraska, U.S.A.
Sand Hills Golf Club
lies amidst the vast sand hills of central Nebraska
near the village of Mullen-golf's ultimate
fulfillment of the credo "build it and they will
come." Sand Hills has been lauded as a masterpiece
of the highest order, and is ranked by Golf week as
the No.1 course opened in the United States since
1960. The course was developed as a private club by
Omaha-based Dick Youngscap and his partners on a
thousand acres of boundless inland dunes left by
receding glaciers. Youngscap hired Ben Crenshaw and
Bill Coore, the leading practitioners of old
school, lay-of-the land golf course architecture, to
design the course. They were presented with the
dilemma of such an astonishing site that it offered
literally hundreds of different options for laying
out holes among the dunes. Through countless hours
of inspecting the property, they gradually arrived
at an ideal routing in which they "found" 18 superb
and unique holes lying in the sandhills blanketed
with blood-orange and brown native grasses.
Virtually no earth was moved in laying out the
course, completed in 1994, but Coore and Crenshaw in
their typical fashion paid meticulous attention to
the contours of the greens, allowing for shots to
run onto the putting surfaces, and created enormous,
raggedy-edged bunkers that look like they are part
of the landscape.
Wild Horse Golf Club - Nebraska, U.S.A.
Wild Horse Golf
Club, opened in 1997, is located in Gothenburg,
a whistle-stop village on the Union Pacific
railroad. The course was built after a group of
Gothenburg residents raised $1.6 million through
a share offering to state residents. The
inspiration for the project came from Sand Hills
Golf Club, the majestic course routed through
the massive sandhills of central Nebraska. Dave
Axland and Dan Proctor, two of the contractors
who were instrumental in shaping the
Sand Hills course, were hired to layout a prairie
links with a similar minimalist sensibility at Wild
Horse. The result is an enchanting course that
follows the low expanse of the landscape, with
blowouts of sand creating large, irregular bunkers
fringed with blond prairie grass. While Sand Hills
is a private course, Wild Horse is open to the
public, with a welcoming clubhouse perched on the
open prairie at the southeastern edge of Nebraska's
Sand Hills region.
Sand Hills Golf Club and Wild
Horse Golf Club, U.S.A.