Q&A: Jay Blasi on Redesigning Poppy Ridge and San Francisco Golf

This week, the San Francisco area public golf scene improved with the reintroduction of the Northern California Golf Association-owned Poppy Ridge in Livermore, California. The course has been closed while Jay Blasi renovated the 1996 Rees Jones design. Sitting on a severe property, Blasi was able to create a walkable 18-hole course filled with thrilling and fun shots. I caught up with Jay to talk about his work at Poppy Ridge. 

Andy Johnson: What makes the Poppy Ridge project unique in the sense of your client and the relationship with the client?

Jay Blasi: Poppy Ridge was created for the Northern California Golf Association. They have over 230,000 members and they also host dozens and dozens of championships. In working with the NCGA and talking about Poppy Ridge, we needed to try and craft a golf course that was going to be fun and playable for all of their 230,000 members, which range from some of the top amateurs in the world all the way to true beginners. We also needed to have a golf course that would be suitable and usable for hosting their championships. The golf course that was built in the 1990s out there was pretty much unwalkable, so they really couldn't use that golf course for their championships. So those were a couple of key factors.

AJ: What’s the advantage of a golf association owning a golf course?

JB: Well, I love public golf, and I grew up playing public golf. It's really important to me. I think one of the long-term question marks or struggles that golf might have is, who are going to be the ultimate caretakers of public golf? 

The NCGA, in particular, is very focused on offering affordable public golf to its members. When you've got a for-profit entity either owning or operating the golf course, then you know objective number one might be their own pocketbook, and then objective number two might be affordable golf for the masses or quality golf for the masses. So to me, whether it is a golf association or some other nonprofit with a similar kind of interest, those are great opportunities to be long-term caretakers for public golf.

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AJ: When you're building a golf course with such a wide range of intentions in mind – challenging for the best amateurs in the world, approachable for the beginner – what are some of the big thematic design principles you use?

‍JB: I think it would depend on the site. At Poppy Ridge, we were very blessed to have a really big site with lots of room. It’s a site with lots of elevation change, so it wasn't without its challenges, but we had space. In my opinion, one of the best ways to offer a golf course that can be fun, exciting, and playable for all yet still challenge the best is by having width. And so the site at Poppy Ridge afforded us the opportunity to have very, very wide fairways. Many of them are 60-100 yards wide in the landing areas. So width is a great factor if you have the land to do it. And then also just the true space. Poppy Ridge is a very open landscape, so we thought it was appropriate to have what I call “ribbon tees.” Pretty much every hole has about 150 yards of usable tee space, so the NCGA has ultimate flexibility in setup. Our forward tees are, I think, about 4,200 yards. For championship play, they can stretch it to 7,300-plus. So lots of flexibility that way.

AJ: What are the challenges of a big site and what are the rewards that a big site offers?

JB: Sites can come in different shapes and sizes, right? There is big in terms of acreage, and then there can be big in terms of elevation change. At Poppy Ridge, it wasn't a huge site. I think the 18-hole golf course that we built sits on somewhere between 160 and 200 acres, which isn't huge by today's standard, but it does have 200 feet of elevation change. The challenge there, when you want to have a walking golf course, is how do you navigate that terrain in a path that's going to be manageable for golfers? 

When I studied the old Poppy Ridge that was built in the 90s, you would play a hole, and then you'd have a really long green-to-tee walk. And that green-to-tee walk might have 40 feet of elevation change, so you'd climb up a hill, play a flat hole, and then go down 40 feet to play the next hole. Almost all of the earthwork that we did out there was softening these kinds of transition areas. We were able to reduce the walk by 2,000 yards and by 400 feet of elevation change. That was done just through creative earthwork and shaping exercises. You want to use the land in compelling ways. You don't want to always play straight up or down. You don't always want to play alongside. You want to interact with it in different ways. The canvas at Poppy Ridge was really beautiful. It was all about taking advantage of those natural features and being able to move dirt smartly in order to create smooth transitions that were manageable.

AJ: What are a couple of the core features of the property that you honed in on that you wanted to use and amplify?

JB: We knew we were going to keep the clubhouse in the same location. About 75% of the golf course sits in the property that resides north of the clubhouse. At the same latitude, if you will, as the clubhouse was a creek that bisected the property. 

There was another 40 acres or so in the southeast corner that we wanted to utilize. That corner had a really big valley and a ridgeline to it, so it was very compelling land. A little bit more on the severe side, but the challenge was, we know that we've got this northern section, we know we have the southeast corner, how are we going to get over to the southeast corner in a reasonable fashion without creating these really long drives between holes? And how do we do so where the elevation gain or drop was manageable?

We utilize two par 3s to make those transitions. The 14th hole gets you from the northern part of the property into that southeast corner. That's a medium to long par 3 that plays into a green site that's benched into a hill. When you finish the 14th hole, then you're just steps away from the 15th tee at a reasonable elevation to play the next hole. 

Then the 17th hole is a par 3, should be a wedge or a sand wedge that plays downhill significantly. So we used the spot of the property that had the most significant elevation change and we figured the best way to make that transition was to have a par 3 that basically played from the top of the hill down to the bottom.

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AJ: With sequencing the golf course, did you want to save that very dramatic southeast portion for the end?

JB: I did. There was debate about that because that southeast portion is fairly dramatic land. Almost all of the green-to-tee transitions are plus or minus 20 yards. They're very tight and easy. The walk from 15 green to 16 tee is about 150 yards. It’s our one long walk and you do walk up the hill. So there were question marks about, should you have that late in the round? People might be tired, would that be far better served to be earlier in the round? 

But when you laid out the different opportunities and constraints, we felt that ultimately the compelling nature of that land set up for a really exciting finish. 

The way it unfolded wasn't necessarily by design to begin with. If you were to set up a championship, Nos. 10-15 can play really hard relative to par. You could stretch them out so you've got a bunch of long par 4s and a long par 3. And then 16, 17, and 18 are all very dramatic risk-reward holes. No. 16 is a drivable par 4, 17 is this little short, dicey wedge shot par 3, and then 18 is a reachable par 5. We felt like that made for a really fun and compelling finish. We thought it would be great for championship play, particularly match play, where you could have all sorts of fireworks at the end.

AJ: The golf course sits high on a ridge, and in that part of the San Francisco area, there's an ever-present wind. How was that involved with your design, understanding it as a wind that plays in a prevailing direction most of the time? And how did you incorporate that with your thought of how the hole is laid out?

JB: That's a great point. It can be a windy site. There are windmills that can be seen in the distance and it will often blow 20-plus mph out there. The reality is we had to fit the golf holes onto the property first and foremost and then try to account for the wind. If we had a hole that was playing north-south where the wind would likely be a crosswind, we tried extra hard to make sure that there was plenty of width in the landing area. The other thing that I think is notable is that we made a conscious decision to have the green surfaces be very subtle, very gentle. There's no big, giant buried elephants out there. Hopefully there's enough interest in the greens that people find them compelling, and they also accommodate the wind very effectively.

AJ: What are a couple of your favorite greens and surrounds?

‍JB: Well, when I talked about the green surfaces being subtle, I tried to make the green surrounds very interesting. And so there are a number of holes that have sideboards or kicker slopes or deep fall off. We tried to do that in different ways. The sixth hole is a short to medium par 4 that plays from right to left. The green complex there sits high on a hill. It's almost like a volcano. The green itself is a punch bowl kind of inside the volcano. So there are sideboards and kickers all around that green, so that one's kind of exciting as a bowl.

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AJ: Was that hole modeled after anything? 

JB: In February of 2024, I got the chance to go to New Zealand and we play all these places that people have seen on magazine covers: Kauri Cliffs, Cape Kidnappers, Tara Iti, Te Arai and all these great places. Perhaps the star of the trip was this little country golf course called Waverley Golf Club. You put your $20 in the drop box, and you play. There's one greenskeeper, and the rest is maintained by the sheep. There are no formal bunkers, and the ground plane at Waverley Golf Club is the best ground plane of any golf course I've ever seen in the world. It's just this unbelievably rumpled land, and it's more dramatic one hole after another. I was out there with a buddy of mine and every hole we got to we were just like, “Wow, how is this here?” Nowadays when you travel, oftentimes you see pictures or all this information ahead of time. So there's no real wow factor built in. This was just a mind-blowing experience to get out there and not know what was around the next corner. Every single time we made a turn, it just got better and better. 

So the 12th hole there at Waverley Golf Club is known as Tom Thumb, and it's a par 4 where you play up and into this green that sits up high and has this punch bowl volcano-like setting. Ironically, when we were there, we met the club captain and we ended up sitting and drinking for a few hours after the round. He has a cousin in Sacramento, so he was visiting his cousin and he came during construction. I took him out to the spot where we were starting to build the sixth hole and I told him that we were going to do something like No. 12 at Waverley and he was blown away. He's like, “I can't wait to tell the guys back home that these fancy Americans are modeling a hole after our little golf course here.”

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The other green is just the inverse example, and that's the 16th hole, which we referenced earlier as a short, potentially drivable par 4 that sits way up high on a ridgeline. That green is a plateau and it's a peninsula. In front of the green as you play from the tee is a 15-foot grass face, a fairway grass face. Left of the green are deep bunkers. Behind the green is a deep fairway hollow. Those are two different examples of green complexes or the contours around greens that hopefully will be fun, interesting, and compelling, but in different ways.

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AJ: One of the other things that stood out to me about the golf course was how varied and different the par 3s were. How did you think about the set of par 3s that you were building?

JB: Ultimately we ended up with five par 3s. We have three on the front and two on the back. It just unfolded that way in terms of how it worked out with the land. It was not a set agenda, but it did seem to give us the best overall 18 holes. I'm sure you've heard every single architect talk about, “You want variety in terms of the length of the holes, the direction of the holes, so that you can interact with the sun and the wind differently.” In terms of the shots themselves, you’d not only want people to use different clubs, but you'd like them to be thinking differently on each one. We have like 150 yards of tees on almost all of these holes, so they can be short or stretched long. 

The third hole is our biggest green on the course at 10,000 square feet. There’s a front right section that would work really well for forward tees to have a dicey wedge shot that you need to be precise because there's a bunker in front and bunkers behind. If you play to the middle, it’s open in front, so it looks very benign, but there's a little plateau to the green, so that's probably the actual hardest hole location. Then the back left, it sits in a little bit of a bowl, so that works really well for longer tees. So even though you're hitting a longer club, it's maybe a little bit more receptive. That hole plays to the east with the mountains in the backdrop, and we created a ridgeline behind the green that tries to mimic those mountains.

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The fifth hole is our long par 3, so that can play 265 yards and into the wind. Because it's so long, we have a lot of short grass around the green in front, left, right, and long, so the 70 yards short of the green are all usable, viable, fairway to bounce the ball into the green. 

The eighth hole plays gently uphill to a wide green. The green shapes are very different. The sizes are very different. 

We touched upon the 14th hole earlier … And then the 17th is our little wedge drop shot par 3, kind of the do or die 17th hole. Hopefully somebody will make an ace in a match, or somebody might make a double there, too.

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AJ: In terms of projects, is there a different feel when you're done building public golf versus doing renovation work for private clubs or a new build for a private club? Because the world gets to see it, is there a level of satisfaction that's different?

JB: I don't know that the level of satisfaction is different, but I do think there are differences, right? If your task is to build a golf course, ultimately you have a client, whether that's a private club or an individual, or in this case, an organization. The reality is you're going to work for multiple years with those people and you're going to spend as much time with those people as you do your own family for those two or three years. So the satisfaction is that you're like a team, right? There are challenges that you overcome together, so getting to that finish line or getting to opening day is always really satisfying, largely based on the relationships that you form. 

The reality as a designer, I found out firsthand there's a huge difference between public and private. I did a project in Southern California at Santa Ana Country Club, a private club that I was really, really proud of. A very small site. We worked really hard. We had a tight schedule to get it all done.

We had an amazing team that shaped it and built it, and I put the work there up against a ton of stuff. Yet the reality is nobody really sees it and nobody really cares because it's a private club that most people aren't going to get to see. Whereas here at Poppy Ridge, there are 230,000 members with the NCGA, and anybody all around the world can come play at any time.

AJ:  So Poppy Ridge, I think it elevates San Francisco golf as a destination, a place that you could build a golf trip around. You're a San Francisco area resident. If you were advising someone on a golf trip to San Francisco, what would be the public courses that you would see in short order? 

JB: The Bay Area is great because we have a lot of different microclimates and settings, so if you're willing to do a little bit of driving, you can see a lot of interesting and cool stuff.

I would always start with Pasatiempo. I know it's semi-private, but there is public access to it. I think it's one of the great golf courses in the world and so if you're into architecture or just a golf lover, that should certainly be something that you go see.

Being biased, think Poppy Ridge is certainly one to come see and enjoy and experience. 

AJ: I agree. It has vaulted into the top echelon of public options in San Francisco. So unbiased commenter here.

JB: I've said this a couple of times. I feel like it's a postcard of what California wine country looks like. A big rolling landscape dotted with oaks, golden hillsides, so that would be kind of a true picture of Northern California golf. Again, very biased. Golden Gate Park is a little nine-hole par 3 in the city if you're looking to spend a night or two and experience the city.

Obviously down the street, it's famous, TPC Harding Park. I'm not a huge fan of the golf course itself, but it's famous. I think maybe up the street, it's a little severe, but Presidio maybe a little more interesting to play in the city.

And then if you're looking for a fun, quirky adventure heading up north of the bridge, Northwood is a very unique experience, as well. That's a nine-hole Mackenzie golf course up there in the Redwoods and a very different experience. 

And so if you came for three or four days, I would imagine the diversity of golf that you could see in terms of when these golf courses were built, the settings that they reside in, even the microclimates you might play one day, depending on what type of year you came. You could go play Poppy Ridge and it would be 85 degrees, and you go play Presidio and it might be 55 degrees. A lot of diversity.