Design Notebook: Will a 5% Rollback Change Golf Architecture?

For today’s installment of Design Notebook, we asked several golf course architects to weigh in on how a 5% rollback of the golf ball would affect their craft. We also have a note on a thought-provoking segment from a recent Yolk with Doak podcast and some photos from a cool Seth Raynor design near the Twin Cities.

What 5% means for golf course design

As Mike Stachura reported last Friday for Golf Digest, golf’s governing bodies will announce this week that they plan to institute a universal rollback of the golf ball. The new standards for testing whether balls conform to the rules, expected to go into effect in 2030, will result in an approximate 5% reduction in carry distance.

What would the impact of such a change be on the practice of golf architecture?

According to Tom Doak, not much. When Andy Johnson asked him on our podcast this past March whether a 5% rollback would alter his approach to design, Doak said it wouldn’t. He explained that he has always tried to build courses that accommodate and challenge a wide variety of skill sets. “I’ve always tried to avoid putting all the hazards at a certain distance,” he said.

Doak noted, however, that a more aggressive rule would have an impact on golf architecture: “I thought they were probably going to talk about a 10% rollback, which would be enough to not build some of the crazy back tees that we’ve been building. Some people talked about a 15% rollback. That would bring Rory McIlroy back to where Jack Nicklaus was 40 years ago. That might have serious implications for course strategy at that point…. But I don’t think a 5 or 6% change makes a real difference in terms of how people attack the golf course.”

So is the soon-to-be-proposed rollback overly conservative? I asked a few of our favorite thinkers in the golf architecture profession to discuss whether a 5% reduction in ball flight would have an impact on the way they design or renovate courses. Their answers are below. -Garrett Morrison

Brian Schneider: Nope.

While I don’t think a rollback will affect the way I go about my work, I am excited by the prospect that great courses designed and built before the distance explosion will again provide a more balanced and compelling challenge.

Dan Hixson: I think it would have only a small effect on remodels, primarily on locations of tees and fairway bunkers. On new projects, depending on the owner’s desires for the course, it might make you rethink the overall yardages.

The biggest question I have is, Will the 5% on the ball get absorbed through the other equipment or training technologies in the next half generation or so?

Andy Staples: My first reaction is it will probably affect what I plan for the higher swing speeds and better players the most. Some of the longer carry distances will most likely be less. I sure feel this reduction would get us closer to creating similar strategies for all skill levels.

I do think it would have a much larger impact on the overall property. A seemingly small percentage reduction like 5% means 5% less water use and 5% less maintained acreage. This means all the costs around golf course development could start to trend downward.

I would think shot dispersion would be less, meaning the separation of holes will not need to be as great, which means safety surrounding the golf holes would improve. This is a major benefit for all the courses on smaller properties.

A percentage-based rollback would suggest that any adjustments in our design could ultimately favor the lesser players. The higher the swing speed, the larger the adjustments. If this is truly the case, I wouldn’t see much change at all for the average players.

I just don’t see any negatives to reducing our footprint. There surely will be resistance, but in the long run, I trust it will be best for the game. I really has to be done.

Mike Cocking: 5% is a pretty minor reduction, really. I saw someone refer to it online as more like a rock-back than a roll-back, which is probably true.

In reality there are so many other variables that have a greater effect on how far the ball travels. Temperature, wind, rain, and altitude can have as much as a 10 or even 20% effect, as a rough guess, at the elite game, and then with amateurs, mis-hits and inconsistent swings might widen that out further. If we were all playing in a static environment (Scottsdale *smiley-face emoji*), then maybe it’s more noticeable.

I don’t really see 5% making much difference on most of our design work, either—if anything at all.

I guess the area where you might think it could have an effect is when trying to determine a carry distance. And perhaps on a tour course, if you were trying to position a bunker right on the edge of the long hitters’ drives, you might think about whether it should be 300 yards or 330 yards. But unless it’s a diagonal line like 18 at Pebble, where everyone faces the same decision no matter how far you hit the ball, can a bunker ever really be positioned to influence both Jordan Spieth and Gordon Sargent?

Our general philosophy is to position hazards where they best fit the land and at a range of distances to try and influence as wide a range of golfers as possible, be they professional or amateur. So for us the 5% doesn’t really matter so much.

Jeff Mingay: To my mind, golf architecture is about slope and contour, and arranging bunkers and other hazards to affect different golfers in different ways, in different conditions. I can’t imagine how a 5% reduction in ball flight would affect how I think about golf architecture at all.

Blake Conant: Ultimately, a 5% rollback is fairly insignificant both in terms of design and playability. Much of it can be absorbed by players moving up a tee or moving the markers further up on certain holes. I do see less need to build the silly ‘pro’ tee on every hole, but this is essentially a baby step. I don’t foresee my design process demonstrably changing and I don’t see the routing process, the strategy we want to employ, or the way we build greens changing, either.

Brett Hochstein: The effects of this rollback to my design approach are probably about as marginal as what is proposed. It’s something to consider—perhaps I have to think about a slightly lower-trajectory shot for a few more mid-handicappers. When I think about it that way, though, it’s probably just getting more players to hit the types of shots I’m already trying to design for anyway—ones that require thought as to how they might be shaped or where the ball has to land and release. In that sense, I’m not really changing anything. It’s just that there might be more players having to play shots in the creative ways that I imagine them doing. And that’s a good thing.

Ian Andrew: For me the distance issue has mostly been about safety. The Pro V1 was a game changer. Setbacks requirements increased about 50% in less than 10 years. The longer the ball traveled, the further off-line it got. We had also entered into a time where the court system starting placing the onus on the courses, regardless of age, to remediate the problem of stray golf balls. I found the safety-related changes went from very rare to commonplace with urban golf. I work on a large number of urban golf courses. What became increasingly clear was inner-city courses were at risk. Private clubs can afford to address the problems. But as technology pushed forward, I watched clients run out of options. Inner-city municipal courses were already under financial pressure, and you could see the potential for closures over a safety issue that required an investment. I talked to the USGA about 10 years ago about this. I gave up on it ever happening a year ago. The changes can’t come quick enough for inner-city golf.

Will it change the way I design? Things moved so fast that I began to use some triangulation with fairway bunkering. I personally prefer carry angles, but they were being overwhelmed by technology. With triangulation, once the first bunker becomes too short, the third one is much more in play. The middle bunker plays a new role. Not every course or every hole can accommodate this thinking, but it was a way to combat ever-changing distances in design. Now I can go back to carry angles and half the bunkering knowing the carry distance will be more stable.

Creative conviction

During my Thanksgiving travels, I tossed on one of the latest editions of the Yolk with Doak to hear Andy and Tom talk shop. Shortly into the episode, Doak gave an answer to a listener question that really struck me.

The question was about The Anatomy of a Golf Course, a book Tom wrote in 1992. The listener wanted to know whether he would make any changes to the book in light of what he has learned over the past 30 years. His answer:

“No. Just like my own golf courses, I don’t want to go back and rewrite books and edit them. I don’t think my philosophy has changed very much. I’m a better architect [now] because I’ve got more practice building things—that’s the part where we keep getting better. But the ideas are still the ideas. They’ve kind of always been the ideas.”

This sort of question is often posed to public figures. Most of the time, the responses involve things that the older, wiser person wishes they could teach their younger self. Doak’s response didn’t do that. He insisted that, while he has gotten better at executing his ideas, his basic philosophy on golf architecture has remained stable. It wasn’t the answer I was expecting, and I could see how one might even find it brash, but it was refreshing to hear Doak affirm that he has held true to his long-held beliefs.

Conviction is a shared trait among many great artists. The best musicians, filmmakers, painters, and golf architects go through different phases of their career in which they find different sources of inspiration or shake up their style, but through it all, they typically adhere to a core perspective or ideology. That, I think, is why the greatest artists can succeed in a variety of ways. So Tom Doak’s attitude may be brash, but it also conveys the kind of confidence that has always gone hand-in-hand with outstanding creativity. -Will Knights

A course we photographed recently

Midland Hills Country Club (Roseville, Minnesota)—designed by Seth Raynor in 1921, restored by Jim Urbina in 2021

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Quotable

“The desirability of a still further limitation of the flight of the golf ball is purely a question of what is going to give lasting pleasure to the greatest number. I remember many years ago in the days of the gutty getting hold of two of the first Haskell balls that came to Scotland. With the aid of the Haskell I was able to outdrive opponents who formerly outdrove me. This gave me a temporary delight, but it only lasted up to the time that they were able to obtain the rubber cored balls. Similarly, today many are trying to obtain a temporary advantage by buying the latest far-flying ball on the market. It is often suggested that we have already got to the limit of the flight of a golf ball. I do not believe it, as there is no limit to science.” -Alister MacKenzie, 1933