Soule Park Golf Course

In 1962, William F. Bell, son of Billy Bell, the well-known architect and collaborator of George C. Thomas, completed a new golf course in the quaint valley town of Ojai, California, just a mile from Thomas and Bell’s Ojai Valley Inn course. The next few decades saw the all-too-common decline of the course: greens shrunk into ovals and playing corridors choked by planted trees.

Built across a fairly typical southern California landscape, the course plays off of and around a large hill where the clubhouse is situated, through a flattish central basin, and against the mountains that border the southern edge of the property. In that central basin runs not one, but two creeks – Thacher and San Antonio. They’re an integral part of the routing, with many of the holes playing over and along them. They converge around the site of the current first green, running out as a singular river along the front nine. In 2005, after the area received more than 15 inches of rain over a two-week span, the rivers flooded and ripped away the banks, washed away bridges, and destroyed greens. The golf course was totaled. 

Enter the team of Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, who built nearby Rustic Canyon. The pair were already working on repairs at Rustic Canyon due to the same storm and, still relatively unknown at the time, they were hungry for work. The redesign budget was small (just over $3 million), so the majority of work, outside of the necessary repairs to the infrastructure, was focused on bunkers and greens. While maintaining a lot of the original routing, Hanse and Wagner took inspiration from Thomas and Bell’s work in southern California, digging out jagged bunkers and sculpting exhilarating green contours, introducing a new level of fun and strategic golf.

Take Note…

More Flooding. The area experienced more significant flooding in the winter of 2022/2023, and as a result, the course took on additional damage. The bunker and left edge of the 12th green was washed away, the banks of the Thacher and San Antonio creeks widened even more, and a new tributary was essentially created just right of the fifth green. 

Local Help. Local contractor Tyson York, a former teaching pro at Soule Park, helped build the original golf course. His work on the sixth green impressed Hanse so much that he asked him to build the seventh green, as well. 

‍More Bunkers. Not everyone was a fan of the new golf course when it opened, with some of the older men’s club regulars complaining they couldn’t hit it over some of the new bunkers. As a result, a cross bunker on hole 1 was filled in, as was a centerline bunker on 13, and a layup bunker on hole 11 was cut in half.

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