Design Notebook: Dave Zinkand Tries Reversible Golf

Greetings and welcome back to Design Notebook, where we value the tradition of the West Coast Swing but at the same time must point out that early February is the exact worst time of year to stage a tournament at Pebble Beach. Frankly, it’s a miracle that more Pro-Ams haven’t been cut short over the years.

In today’s installment of DN, we have details on a soon-to-be-built reversible course in Ohio and thoughts on the continuing drive toward expensive infrastructure in golf course renovations.

Dave Zinkand Turns It Around

By Garrett Morrison

Reversible golf has gradually gained traction in the U.S. over the past several years. First came The Loop at Forest Dunes, a 2016 Tom Doak design featuring 18 greens and two 18-hole routings, the Red and the Black. A year later, Dan Hixson’s semi-reversible Craddock and Hankins courses opened at Silvies Valley Ranch in eastern Oregon. In 2018, as part of a $30-million reimagining of the municipal Bobby Jones complex in Atlanta, Bob Cupp built a nine-hole layout that alternates between “Magnolia” and “Azalea” loops. Last month saw the debut of Crossroads, a reversible nine designed by King-Collins for the private community of Palmetto Bluff in South Carolina. Finally, this summer, Dave Zinkand will create his own entry into this emerging canon at Medina Country Club in Northeast Ohio.

“Reversibility is just such a fun way to introduce more variety,” Zinkand told me last week, “and as you know, variety is king. It’s always struck me, now that alternative golf has become more accepted, when you get the opportunity to consider [a reversible concept], it’s got to at least be one of the possibilities, right?”

Zinkand’s nine-hole, par-31 reversible design at Medina (pronounced “Meh-DYE-nuh,” just like Chicago’s Medinah CC) is part of an ambitious, multi-year overhaul of the facility undertaken by new owner Bill Cosgrove. The CEO of Union Home Mortgage, Cosgrove purchased the struggling 27-hole club in 2022 and has since refurbished the clubhouse, partnered with the Jim Wise Golf Academy to open a 13,000-square-foot performance center, and hired Zinkand to reconstruct the driving range and short-game area. Zinkand has drawn up preliminary plans for a renovation of Medina’s “Championship” 18, but first he will build his reversible course on a portion of the footprint of the club’s old “Lilac” nine.

“The scale of the terrain just allowed for it,” Zinkand said, “and that was really the big factor. Some properties lend themselves and some don’t.”

The topography is in the Goldilocks zone for reversibility: eventful enough to produce 18 different, interesting holes, but not so dramatic that some holes would be functional in one direction but not in the other. “You can have abrupt terrain,” Zinkand explained, “but then the scale would have to be such that the lows and the highs allow for turning the holes around in a way that doesn’t create an excessive number of blind shots. I’m not averse to blind holes, but there’s obviously a point at which that really encumbers what you’re trying to accomplish with that kind of golf.”

In a novel twist on the reversible concept, Zinkand’s plan calls for side-by-side double greens to facilitate the start and finish of each course. The “white course” begins and ends on the right-hand double green while using a middle pin for hole 8 on the left-hand double green. The “purple course” plays to the left-hand double green twice—on holes 1 and 8—and the right-hand double green only once, on hole 9. (Confused? Spend a minute looking at the map below. It will make sense.) This is a clever, maintenance-friendly solution for what could have been a chaotic section of the property.

Dave Zinkand's plan for The Reversible at Medina Country Club

Dave Zinkand is a name that more golf architecture enthusiasts—and green committee members—should know. Like Tom Doak and Gil Hanse before him, Zinkand attended Cornell University and won the Frederick Dreer Award to study golf courses in Great Britain and Ireland. He then went to work for Coore & Crenshaw, contributing to new builds like Bandon Trails, Bandon Preserve, We-Ko-Pa Saguaro, and Shanqin Bay. Since hanging out his own shingle a little over a decade ago, Zinkand has overseen renovations at Desert Forest Golf Club in Scottsdale and The Sharon Golf Club near Cleveland. In addition to his work at Medina, he is currently building a short course for Chechessee Creek Club in South Carolina.

Of the many talented architects from the Bill Coore and Tom Doak design trees looking to make their names at the moment, Zinkand might be the most underrated. His elegant, naturalistic shaping reflects Coore’s influence and offers a compelling alternative to the more ostentatious feature work that younger architects have recently brought into the zeitgeist. I hope he gets more—and higher-profile—jobs soon.

The Courage to Do Less

By Garrett Morrison

If you haven’t already, I recommend reading Brad Klein’s article from the latest Green Section Record, “Managing the Rising Cost of Golf Course Renovations.” It outlines a problem that we’ve discussed frequently in Design Notebook but that, in the midst of the media’s celebration of the golf course industry’s post-Covid recovery, has not received much attention in mainstream publications. In short: it’s costing too much to build golf courses.

“Big jobs used to be $4 million,” said John McDonald II, president and CEO of the course construction firm McDonald & Sons Inc., based out of Jessup, Maryland. “Now they’re in the $10 million to $20 million range.”

Klein goes on to recommend a few strategies for controlling renovation costs, such as hiring a less prominent (yet still capable) architect, focusing on ROI, and employing a project manager for complex jobs. But for me, the most resonant part of the article is Klein’s discussion of “infrastructural excess” with Brian Schneider, a longtime Tom Doak associate and the co-designer of Old Barnwell.

[Schneider:] “I have great respect for superintendents and appreciate the excessive demands and expectations placed upon them. It is fair of them to want every available tool at their disposal. However, I often find myself trying to talk them—or the golfers at their course—out of spending for things they might want but don’t need, especially if that extra infrastructure might compromise their original architect.” For example, rebuilding greens to improve drainage has obvious practical benefits, but perhaps not at the risk of losing something special about the design.

“Even if they can afford it now,” said Schneider, “there’s always the possibility of another recession looming, so courses need to think about whether these upgrades are going to require extra long-term maintenance, or whether they’d rather save the money for a rainy day.”

He is not averse to salvaging old bunker sand, doing away with bunker liners, or just tweaking the surface of old greens rather than rebuilding them for the sake of marginal improvements in speed or turf performance. In at least one case, he walked away from a potential job at a prominent Mid-Atlantic club that insisted on rebuilding its Golden Age putting surfaces to get the latest and greatest infrastructure when Schneider thought the work unnecessary.

My big takeaway from this: in today’s market, it takes guts to spend less on a golf course renovation. If you—as an architect, superintendent, or green committee chair—stick your neck out and say, “No, we don’t need those bunker liners,” or, “Let’s just spruce up our old greens instead of rebuilding to USGA spec,” you may end up on the chopping block if the bunkers wash out during the next rainstorm or the greens struggle through an unexpected heat wave. Shelling out for infrastructural bells and whistles provides cover. Even if conditions go sideways, you can at least say you did (which is to say, spent) all you could.

Ultimately, though, excesses in golf construction will come home to roost. Membership dues and green fees will keep going up, and when money gets tight again, many courses will find themselves overextended. Those with the courage to choose thrift now may, by the end of the decade, look pretty smart.

Chocolate Drops

By Garrett Morrison

Fry/Straka in Ireland. Dana Fry and Jason Straka will soon join the small, fortunate club of architects who have built seaside golf in Ireland. This month, the U.S.-based firm Fry/Straka will break ground on Curracloe Links, part of Ravenport Resort, about two hours south of Dublin. The publicity materials for the project seem eager to mention that Curracloe Beach was where Steven Speilberg filmed the D-Day scenes for Saving Private Ryan. Anyway, the golf course is scheduled to open in 2026, and Fry/Straka’s plan shows wide fairways and a pair of slightly odd-looking walks across a road.

Fry/Straka's plan for Curracloe Links

A Green Hills resto? Todd Eckenrode is nearly done with a historically informed renovation of the 11th hole at Green Hills Country Club near San Francisco. This 1929 Alister MacKenzie design, originally known as Union League Golf and Country Club, has long been a tantalizing restoration opportunity, but poor architectural stewardship has left some parts of the course impossible to restore completely. Fingers crossed that Eckenrode gets to see through his master plan for all 18 holes.

Tully’s dream. The remaining non-native trees between the ninth and 10th holes at the Meadow Club have finally come down. Next up, I hope: the stand of conifers between Nos. 6 and 13.

Vintage Pebble. When the PGA Tour’s social media managers shared these clips of a 1963 Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf match between Jack Nicklaus and Sam Snead at Pebble Beach, I’m sure they didn’t intend to make a statement about how much better the course looked and played with wider fairways, larger greens, and lower Stimp readings. But man, that’s how I took it.

Aerial of the Week

By Cameron Hurdus

If there’s one tool that has transformed the lives of golf architecture nerds in the past couple of decades, it’s Google Earth. Given the recent improvements in image quality and the ability to track through all the previous overheads, it’s pretty easy to lose hours on the app without noticing.

Referring to Google Earth is an important part of my and Matt Rouches’s process for creating Course Profile assets. Last year, while doing research for the Cape Arundel profile, I stumbled upon this shot from April(!) 2016, which shows Walter Travis’s stunning design coated in snow.

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We knew the drainage cuts and vertical features played an important role in the strategic design and functionality of the course, but with a tight blanket of snow and a low spring sun casting shadows across the property, the extent of Travis’s work becomes much more apparent.

A Course We Photographed Last Year

Austin Golf Club (Spicewood, Texas)—designed by Coore & Crenshaw, opened in 2001

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Quotable

“For those who believe man came from the sea and wants some day to return to it, there is no better place than the 18th hole at Pebble Beach. For 530 full yards there is nothing but sea to the left of the tee, fairway and green. If the pounding surf erodes the nerve of the player, it also erodes the 18th hole, and there is the fearsome feeling that the whole scene—fairway, trees, green, caddie and golfer—is about to be swallowed by the Pacific Ocean. Until that happens, a man can do one of two things at the end of his golfing day at Pebble: he can finish his round with a glorious flourish and get his par or birdie, or he can mark an X on the scorecard, plop into an inner tube and float sullenly off in the direction of Hawaii. Thus Pebble Beach’s 18th is dramatic, beautiful and stimulating; in sum, a peerless finishing hole.” –Dan Jenkins