When the CGA opened CommonGround in 2009, those forward tees looked so appealing to anyone who had played the old Mira Vista from the reds. The new reds, at 5,463 yards, weighed in at least 300 yards shorter.
But then, ahem. Laurie Steenrod, chair of the CGA’s course rating committee, took her single-digit handicap out for her first round at the new course. “Sometimes I’m a pretty good golfer,” she remarks. “And as I was playing from those reds, I’m thinking, ‘This is not easy.’ ” Visitors excited about course architect Tom Doak’s reputation for forward-friendly designs wondered what happened here. And USGA representatives in town for the U.S. Mid-Amateur in 2019 reinforced what the CGA already had begun hearing.
“One of those staff members was a now-retired regional agronomist who did a lot of site visits to many courses and clubs,” recalls CGA executive director Ed Mate. “He was very impressed with the course, and after playing he said to me, ‘I have two words…forward tees.’ ”
When the USGA speaks, its Colorado representative listens. And so began a series of conversations that led to the opening two years ago of nine new purple tees to combine with nine existing reds for a configuration of 4,795 yards.
“It took a few years,” says Mate. “But I’m very pleased with the result.”
The process that led to the purple tees provides a blueprint any golf course or club can follow with minimal investments of time and money. Here it is.
Preliminary discussions between Mate, CommonGround director of agronomy Mitch Savage and purple tee proponent Joe McCleary, the CGA’s chief business officer and resident agronomist, got the putt rolling. Then, inviting Steenrod to join them, they arranged a walk with Renaissance Golf architect Eric Iverson, who led the original design team building CommonGround.
Iverson jumped at the opportunity to improve his “baby” without disfiguring the design.
“We worry about the visual from everywhere, all the time,” he says. “We’re always fretting over having things that look unnatural in the landscape, and tees are the most unnatural thing on a golf course if you think about it… The farther the tees sit forward on the hole, the more work they take to soften the appearance. Sometimes you’re trying to hide them, other times you’re trying to tie them in with just a subtle contour, so it doesn’t look flat.
“All of us involved with CommonGround put a lot of work into making it look good. And the last thing you want is just dump trucks of dirt out there where somebody built a little helicopter pad and put a couple flags.”
So here’s blueprint bullet point No. 1: Consider siting of the tees, rather than simply plopping them a prescribed number of yards ahead.
Iverson’s deep and surprising insights began at the very first tee, where he suggested shortening the 378-yard par-4 by positioning a tee 52 yards forward on the right, removing a forced carry over a fairway bunker while still keeping the bunker in view.
“That impressed me,” Steenrod recalls. “You and I might think, just move it forward close to the cart path.”
As they went around the course, Iverson saw the perfect spot to shorten the daunting par-5 third hole from 493 yards to 440 and where to jump the troublesome carry on the par-4 fifth. He fretted most over the 371-yard, uphill 15th, which he calls a “par-4 ½,” eventually deciding on a nearly invisible spot atop a bunker that shortened the hole by nearly 100 yards. “We tried to massage one in there, without making it look like a tee until you’re on it,” he says.
Steenrod, who has seen tees from everywhere in her role rating golf courses, marveled. “Just to watch him work…to have his ideas on where we could best put a set of forward tees and what considerations were going on in his mind. This is an excellent way to do a good job of planning another tees: Bring a member of the original architectural crew and have them take a look.”
Blueprint bullet point No. 2: Seek out expert advice.
“I think a lot of clubs and courses are reluctant to look for a little help, when that’s such an easy thing to do,” says Iverson, a member at Denver’s Pinehurst Country Club. “Just say, hey, would you come play golf with us and a few representatives of the various user groups that would like an opinion on these tees. And it doesn’t have to be a professional architect. They could call Mitch, they could call Ed, and I can’t think of a place where if they called me I wouldn’t just go out for a few hours in the afternoon and give them some ideas.”
Blueprint bullet point No. 3: Keep the project in-house.
Says Iverson, “It’s like a lot of things in golf these days – you can idealize something you want to do, price it out piece by piece, and come up with a budget that looks, sounds and is ridiculously expensive. Or you can just say, these are the resources we have, how can we make this work? And that’s the way CommonGround was built.”
“We built our forward tees in-house, no contractor hired, using machinery we already had in our maintenance fleet and soil we had stockpiled on site,” says Savage. “The disturbance area for the construction of our tees was only a couple hundred square feet in most cases. Other than labor costs associated with our staff members, there really was no significant dollar value attached to the construction of the tees.”
Savage says according to the Golf Course Builders Association of America, a new tee using a contractor averages $5.52 per square foot. At that, most golf courses could install a whole set of 18 tees for ballpark $20,000.
Blueprint bullet point No. 4: Drum up enthusiasm for the project.
“It can absolutely be done very inexpensively in-house, if you have the benefit of a superintendent and crew that enjoy that type of work and are willing to go the extra mile, because it is labor,” Iverson says.
Ultimately, nine new tees were installed, purple ones because, McCleary says, “I really like purple,” to make a configuration of 4,795 yards. The ladies’ club chose to use just five of those for a rated “combo” club tee of 5,057 yards. So at CommonGround the short hitter now has three choices.
Blueprint bullet point No. 5: Make the new forward tees significantly shorter than the old ones to create opportunities for combinations.
“If you think there’s a gulf between the men’s club champion and the average senior male golfers, think of the gulf between the ladies’ club champion and the average senior,” says Iverson. “That gulf is every bit as wide. And why wouldn’t the ladies make use of two sets of tees as opposed to one?”
Not only women are playing the purples: Of 75 posted rounds there last golf season, 17 were posted by men. It’s possible the traditional thinking of “reds are the women’s tee” doesn’t apply!
Bluepoint bullet point No. 6: Keep gender out of the tee designations.
Says Iverson: “I have noticed that places that have numbered tees -- 1 cones, 2 cones, 3 cones, 4 cones, for example, referencing pine cones in our case -- seem to do better in erasing the gender biases. My place has them and the older fellas happily play the 3s or 4s or combo thereof.”
CommonGround isn’t alone. Whether prompted by the USGA, the women’s club or a local squeaky wheel, more and more championship courses in Colorado are adding a significantly shorter set of tees intended to have appeal for women, seniors and juniors.
“There certainly is a trend for shorter yardage options, starting with the number 4,” says Steenrod, who leads crews out to rate the new tees. “Sometimes we can make adjustments in the office to a course rating based on a more forward tee without sending the whole 14-person crew out there to re-rate the course in an all-day experience for them.”
One of Colorado’s squeaky wheels has been 90-year-old Nan Ryan, a former elite amateur and instructor whose ever-shortening game led her to ask Estes Park to apply some of the USGA’s Best Tees research to create an option shorter than the existing 5,207 yards.
“I looked at the scorecard and picked out the holes that I had the most trouble reaching in regulation, then came up with this combo tee and went to the pro,” she recalls. “Now they actually have it on the scorecard, 4,341 yards.”
Her mission now is evangelizing the glories of moving up.
Ryan makes a point these days of pointing out undue length when she goes into the golf shop. At one course, she asked the pro, “So what do most of the women shoot out here on 18 holes?” He replied, “Oh, they only play nine holes because it’s too long.” “Does that tell you anything?” she wondered. At another course that was under repair, she told the staff how much women were enjoying playing the shortened tees and suggested leaving them. “They said no, because the people that mow the fairways would have to move the markers all the time and they don’t want to have to do that.”
Which leads us to our summary blueprint bullet point: It’s easy to say no to more forward tees, but, as the CGA showed with CommonGround, it’s not much harder to say yes!