Here is my Eclectic 18 for 2025, all courses I played for the first time:

Eclectic 18 - 2025

Sheep Ranch 1 - 520 yards par 5

Royal Dornoch 2 - 180 yards par 3

Old Macdonald 3 - 345 yards par 4

Pacific Dunes 4 - 450 yards par 4

Bandon Trails 5 - 130 yards par 3

Pacific Dunes 6 - 295 yards par 4

Streamsong Blue 7 - 190 yards par 3

Bandon Dunes 8 - 350 yards par 4

Pacific Dunes 9 - upper green - 380 yards par 4

Pacific Dunes 10 - 160 yards par 3

St Andrews New 11 - 330 yards par 4

Bandon Dunes 12 - 155 yards par 3

North Berwick 13 - 340 yards par 4

Royal Dornoch 14 - 445 yards par 4

Yeamans Hall Club 15 - 450 yards par 4

Old Macdonald 16 - 435 yards par 4

Bandon Trails 17 - 180 yards par 3

Streamsong Blue 18 - 450 yards par 4

Morning! I apologize if this is already out there somewhere... but I am a new FEGC member just digging into all the content. As I am reading about various architects and also just the fundamentals of design, I would love to see a grouping of architects by similar styles and then highlight the key elements they predominantly use in their course design.

Golfweek reports that TPC Craig Ranch, host of the PGA Tour's CJ Cup Byron Nelson, has reopened after a renovation by Lanny Wadkins. Kudos to Tim Schmitt, the author of the article, for getting this startling sound bite from Wadkins about the brief he received from Invited, the course's owner: "Invited basically said they didn't want 30-under winning the thing anymore. And I told them, don't worry."

You're not supposed to say that kind of thing out loud, Lanny!

In any case, I do appreciate Wadkins's and Invited's honesty in admitting that they had little interest in making TPC Craig Ranch better.

Bounty Club, a new private retreat near Nashville, Tennessee, posted some footage of its nearly complete King Collins Dormer design. The course is looking good! KCD's stylistic signatures are in evidence — huge, undulating greens, along with even bigger and more intricate bunkers — but in slightly toned-down form. Since this is probably the most golf-ready land KCD has ever worked on, I wouldn't be surprised if the firm consciously decided to take a more restrained approach.

The Bounty Club project was announced back in early 2023, and the course is expected to open next year. The developers are 8AM Golf, owner of Golf Magazine and other well-known golf properties, and Justin Timberlake, avid golfer and seemingly-past-his-prime pop star. Naturally, Golf Magazine has provided regular coverage of the construction process.

Awesome podcast.

I am starting a thread on it and the courses we would add to the list.

I'll start with Lofoten Links. I've never been, and I'm not sure if it counts (it was 9 holes before 2010 but only extended to 18 in 2025). But I think if I'm going outside the US and Australia-New Zealand, it would probably be the top course to mention.

The other would be Mach Dunes for showing how one can do environmentally sensitive work in GB&I. If Coul Links gets built, its because of the trail Mach Dunes blazed. I think it's technically 2009, but close enough.

While I have greatly enjoyed your All Grass is Local series, TFE's latest showing how Bandon has had to move into poa putting surfaces to keep up with golfer expectations was super interesting. Then in the newsletter today, you discuss the decline of student attendance in the turf program. I can't help but think how these two things are connected.

Golfer expectations in the private and public sector have never been higher. I am a public golfer. I primarly play at a very busy and popular spot that 95% of people find great value in. But 5% are disappointed, angry, and very loud that the conditions are not same as the private clubs in the area, or the club they spend 2X-3X more at. I also play 50% of my golf at private clubs. And whether they are top 100 or not, I would have to talk to a lot of members before I find one who doesn't start a conversation with "this is awful" or "they are way better down at club ABC", not realizing if they want something, they just need to pay for it as a membership. They rather just blame the superintendent and managmet. There 5% are primarly what the GM and Superintendent hear from. I think this is a micorcosm of most clubs. Loud, vocal minorities who drive change. Whehter that be to the course, or in the management team.

In the past two years, I have watched two of my closest friends be releived of their duties due to "poor course conditions" and as someone who knows turf, turf was certainly not the issue. I belive the issues at Bandon, while golfer driven become a non-issue (firings of turf staff) due to the strong ownership structure and culture aroud Dream Golf. I would think in most cases, these turf conditions would have resulted in a superitedent losing their jobs......which is wrong.

As of this moment, our regional assosciations job board has the following listed:

Assistant Superintendents positions - 14

Superintendent - 4

These are big numbers for us, and many of the jobs have been listed for months. We have 1 school offering turf in our region and they are producing roughly 20 students from their 2 year program and 30 from their 6 week short course program a year. But when you see the person who hired you get fired, you find somehting else to do as you do not see Golf Course Maintenance as a career.

I thought your Bandon video and todays newsletter encapsulates our industry right now. But not everone has the Keiser family to back you. I likely have not fleshed this out well, but I think my point is in here.

Talk about a Friday news dump.

At 8:21 p.m. on December 12, the Wall Street Journal published a major report about U.S. President Donald Trump's apparent efforts to wrest control of East Potomac Golf Links from the National Links Trust.

In 2020, the NLT signed a 50-year lease to operate and improve the three municipal golf facilities in Washington, D.C. The nonprofit group partnered with architect Tom Doak to explore the possibility of restoring certain elements of Walter Travis's original design at East Potomac. Also, as I noted last month, the NLT recently started the first phase of its ambitious, Gil Hanse-led renovation of Rock Creek Park Golf Course.

A few months ago, however, rumors began circulating that higher-ups at the Department of the Interior — including secretary Doug Burgum and solicitor general William Doffermyre — were encouraging President Trump to take a more active role in the management of the courses. Official news trickled out slowly. First, the Independent revealed that the President was "weighing" a potential "refurbishment and rebranding" of East Potomac Golf Links. Then, in early November, the Washington Post reported that White House was transporting excess dirt from the East Wing renovation project to East Potomac.

Now, the Wall Street Journal is telling the full story. Here’s what you need to know:

• In a meeting with President Trump and a handful of advisers on August 1, interior secretary Doug Burgum first pitched the idea of turning East Potomac into a "professional-level course" named "Washington National Golf Club." Trump has since expressed interest in hiring Tom Fazio to carry out the work.
• In an interview with the WSJ in the oval office on Friday, President Trump did not rule out playing a direct role in renovating D.C.'s municipal courses. "If we do them, he said, "we'll do them beautifully."
• Trump added that if his administration were to take over management of the courses, D.C. residents would still, in the WSJ's words, "pay a lower rate than other golfers." It's not clear which "other golfers" are being referred to here, or how the administration could make such a guarantee, given the apparent ambition of Burgum's East Potomac proposal.
• The conflict between the Trump administration and the NLT is beginning to revolve around details of the nonprofit's lease with the National Park Service. According to the WSJ, administration officials have claimed that the NLT "is in breach of its lease because it hasn't made enough progress on the renovations." In a statement posted on social media, the NLT said, "We respectfully disagree with the characterization that we are in default of our lease. In the five years since signing the lease, National Links Trust has worked hand in hand with the National Park Service through the extensive permitting and compliance processes required for these comprehensive renovation projects."
• The WSJ claims that the Trump administration told the NLT that if East Potomac Golf Links did not accept the dirt from the East Wing demolition, the group would risk defaulting on its lease. The NLT acquiesced, but in recent weeks, the administration has moved toward a finding of default anyway. "The Interior Department informed the group that it had violated a lease provision," the WSJ reports. "Interior then issued a formal default notice, a move that could lead to the termination of the group's lease, according to the people. Trump told the Journal that if the nonprofit doesn't address the alleged violations of its lease by the end of the month, then the courses will revert to the Trump administration's control."
• The WSJ article notes several times that East Potomac Golf Links occupies a valuable stretch of Washington real estate.

I'm not sure where to start with all of this. Feel free to discuss below.

Note: there were technical issues with the first version of this post, which we put up on Friday night. We decided to repost here and will attempt to regenerate the comments.

I am heading off to Air Force officer training school in the next month to become a Chaplain (where my lack of interest in fighting will now be legally binding as a uniformed non-combatant under the Geneva conventions) and as a member of the hottest club in town it's got me wondering about all these golf courses on military bases - are there any great US military base golf courses I should be on the lookout to play now that I have access? Any scruffy flight line courses with good bones I can support? What can the FEGC community tell me about what I've gotten myself into (golf-wise of course)?

Hello All,

I am pleased to let everyone know that we are going to be recording a big batch of Yolk with Doak episodes with Tom next week.

We will be doing a listener Q&A portion of the recordings so please fire away!

Tom Doak checked in from Punta Brava Golf Club in Baja California, where he is making his final construction visit. "The goal is to grass it before Christmas!" he wrote. "I took tons of photos yesterday — the place is spectacular — but photos can't really do justice to the scale of the mountain and the rocks offshore.... So, no more photos here. Honestly, I don't think you are ready for them."

Incidentally, longtime Renaissance Golf Design associate Brian Schneider appears to be at Punta Brava, too.

Clayton, DeVries & Pont have been hired to consult at Appleby Golf Club, an 1883 moorland course designed by Willie Fernie in Cumbria, England.

Architect Thad Layton posted a very cool time-lapse reel of himself painting the fifth hole at English heathland gem West Sussex Golf Club. This is a talent/skill that baffles me. It's like magic.

Speaking of Layton, he recently wrapped up a bunker restoration at Lakewood Country Club outside of Boulder, Colorado.

Pinehurst Resort posted some photos of Coore & Crenshaw's in-progress design at Pinehurst No. 11, next door to Tom Doak's No. 10 course. The property — which contains remnants of an old sand mine as well as a few abandoned hole corridors from the Pit Golf Links — looks gnarly, knobbly, and unpredictable.

Will this be the most unconventional-looking course Coore & Crenshaw have designed since... I don't know, Talking Stick? We'll see.

One constant, however, is C&C's architectural philosophy. "We don't plan to move a lot of material," Ben Crenshaw said in an interview posted by the resort. "We very much like to let the holes and the land speak for themselves, and do little things."

Yesterday, as FEGC member Pearce Barringer noted in his own forum post, TGL announced that architect Gil Hanse had joined the screen-golf league's roster of hole designers. Accompanying the announcement was an awkward, faintly surreal video of a bemused Hanse making a WWE-like entrance into an empty SoFi Center. I'd love to hear the instructions the director of this piece of content gave him before hitting record.

TGL also unveiled one of Hanse's designs, a 590-yard par 5 called "Stone & Steeple." The hole features a few recognizable Hanse motifs: a threatening boundary wall, a lone bunker guarding the second-shot layup zone, and a rambling "Sahara" bunker, strewn with turf islands, cutting across the fairway. The neighboring graveyard even has precedent in Hanse's body of work: in his renovation of Waverley Country Club in Portland, Oregon, he moved the second green about 50 yards back so that it abutted a 19th-century cemetery.

The most striking aspect of Hanse's design is the double diagonal formed by the two sections of fairway on either side of the Sahara bunker. The basic idea, I gather, is that the farther players hit their drives without carrying the bunker, the more to the right they will end up, and the worse their angle into the green will be. On the other hand, if they want to make the long carry over the bunker on the left side and earn a shorter second shot from a better angle, they will need to bring the wall into play.

Classic strategic-school stuff, in other words. I think I'd enjoy playing this hole, if it were real. And you know what? It basically looks real. And that might be a problem.

So far, the reception of "Stone & Steeple" on social media has been chilly. There seems to be an emerging consensus among TGL viewers that the virtual-hole designs, unconstrained as they are by physical and economic realities, should be crazier, more video game-like, more purely inventive. As my colleague Joseph LaMagna put it on X, "TGL's biggest whiff is designing realistic holes. It makes zero sense to play holes like [Hanse's] in the one arena that's free from practical constraints."

That's probably right. The realism of Hanse's hole registers as a bit unimaginative.

But I have a hard time getting worked up about it because — confession time — I don't really care about TGL. I could barely make it through a single match in the first season. And this is not to say that the product is bad or that the people who enjoy it are rubes. It's just not for me. A huge part of what I love about golf is the relationship between the player, the course, and nature. When you strip away nature — the outdoors, the elements, the land — I lose most of my interest.

But what I'd like to hear Hanse address at some point is why he was interested in TGL. In a press release from the league, he said, "Starting with a relatively blank slate for TGL has been liberating. Designing holes for TGL has given us an opportunity to step out of our comfort zone and step into other aspects of golf course design in the virtual world."

As an architect who typically likes to derive inspiration from physical terrain, why was he compelled by the prospect of a "blank slate"? And in what sense did he stretch beyond his "comfort zone" here?

These are not passive-aggressive questions. I'd genuinely like to hear his answers.

Interested to see what Gil brings to the screen golf. I've only played two of Gil's courses, Sewanee and Mossy Oak, but like everyone, I've seen my fair share on TV and social media. Gil usually brings restraint and simplicity to his courses, with an emphasis on green complexes and their surroundings. Not exactly something you can implement in TGL.

Side note, is this a sign of things to come for a working partnership with the PGA Tour? I'd love to see Gil get his hands on a course or two. I know TGL and the Tour are separate, but in partnership with one another. One can dream.

https://www.pgatour.com/article/news/tgl/2025/12/2/tgl-announces-gil-hanse-course-designer-season-two-new-holes-architechture

I love sand based turf as much as everyone and understand the agronomy benefits. Who doesn't love blowouts and open/isolated spaces. That being said I kind of wish there would be a few new parkland style courses. Ones not suffocated by trees and housing, not restorations doing a bunch of removal, and not perimeter tree lined places where the trees don't really come into play. Would be interesting to see one of todays top teams have to route the land and trees without bulldozing the lot.

Maybe there are such places that have been built and I'm just not aware of them. (I know Sedge was kind of done this way but is still sand with no trees in play)

I'm jazzed that I'm getting to play Landmand in Homer, NE in July. Have any of you folks played this season? What are your impressions?

I found the Egg article from 2023 and I THINK I recall it coming up on the pod, but I would love to hear anyone's thoughts...especially after it's had a season to grow in a bit.