Sandy Golf Links

Favorite Hole

No. 6, par 3, 333 yards

The short par 4 is a specialty of the Melbourne Sandbelt. Notable examples include the third and 10th holes at Royal Melbourne West, the first at Royal Melbourne East, the third at Kingston Heath, the 15th at Victoria, the 10th at Yarra Yarra, the 14th at Commonwealth, the fourth and 13th at Woodlands, and the sixth at Peninsula Kingswood North. The most recent addition to this venerable list is the OCM-designed sixth at Sandy Golf Links.

Like most of the Sandbelt’s great short par 4s, No. 6 at Sandy presents a simple yet tricky strategic dilemma. A 125-yard-long waste area snakes up the left side of the hole. There is plenty of room to avoid it, but if you bail out to the left side of the fairway off the tee, your approach will need to be precise: you will have to carry a portion of the front-left bunker, and many of the green’s contours will work away from you. The shot from close to the waste area is less intimidating and easier to execute, especially for low-trajectory players. So it’s your choice: extra risk on the drive or extra difficulty on the approach.

For longer hitters, the hole plays like a mirror image of the 15th at Victoria, which we have featured in past content. The more aggressive you are from the tee, the tighter your landing zone becomes, with sand on the right and a dense thicket of tea trees on the left.

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Overall Thoughts

Learning about golf architecture is a mixed blessing. It’s fun and intellectually stimulating, but it tends to sour your opinions of the course you play most often. I speak from experience. I first read about the “strategic school of golf course design” when I was about 11, and I found the concept fascinating. But I soon discovered that the local courses I had access to, while above average in many respects, did not adhere to the principles of strategic design. They were not designed or maintained in a way that promoted alternative routes of play or risk-reward decision-making. This was frustrating, in a first-world-problem kind of way.

Kids in Melbourne, Australia, don't have the same issue, especially now that they have access to OCM's redesign of Sandy Golf Links. 

Sandy embodies many of the core traits of classic Sandbelt golf. Most importantly, its turf encourages the golf ball to bounce and roll. Royal Melbourne’s agronomy team, which maintains the course, prioritizes firmness over uniformity of color. This brings OCM’s strategic architecture to life: because the ball releases after it lands, the player must give ample consideration to angles of attack. Simply hitting drives as far as possible and approaches as high as possible isn’t enough on most days. Position matters. This is a useful lesson for the young golfer.

Many of Sandy's holes have easily legible strategic geometries: if there’s a hazard guarding one side of the fairway, there will usually be another hazard guarding the other side of the green. The fourth hole is a typical example. It features two prominent hazards — a stretch of exposed sand right of the fairway and a flashed bunker eating into the front-left portion of the green. From the elevated tee, the options are clear. Either challenge the first hazard or reckon with the second one on your next shot.*

(*Shorter hitters may want to avoid going too far right; otherwise, they may find themselves blocked out by the trees overhanging the inside of the dogleg.)

What makes OCM's design at Sandy more than a merely competent exercise in Strategic Golf Architecture 101, however, is its use of topography and contour to intensify risk-reward dynamics. Let's go back to the fourth hole. The fairway tilts subtly from right to left, so the ball will tend to run away from the prime position on the right side. This means that only the most accurate and daring drives will gain the advantageous angle. In addition, the green has sharp run-offs along its back and right edges. These will punish imprecisely played approaches from the safer left side of the fairway. In contrast, a slight rise propping up the back-left corner of the green may save balls played from the right.

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Because of the tight logic and sneaky sophistication of OCM’s design, Sandy is a great place to learn about golf architecture. It's exactly the kind of course I wish I had grown up playing.

1 Egg

(How we rate courses)

Sandy Golf Links provides a genuine Sandbelt golf experience that anyone can enjoy. The land is relatively unexceptional, but its proximity to the hallowed properties of Royal Melbourne and Victoria carries a certain magic. This little course represents a great deal of what makes golf in Melbourne special.

Course Tour

Front Nine

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Back Nine

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