Yet another genre-bending shining star that doesn’t fit neatly into a category, Northern California’s Poppy Ridge is a winner no matter how it’s labeled. Located 45 miles east of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, and one of two courses owned and operated by the Northern California Golf Association, Poppy Ridge opened in 1996 as a Rees Jones-designed 27-hole spread. After nearly 30 years, infrastructure had reached the end of its useful life. Rather than simply update irrigation, drainage and turfgrass, the NCGA tasked architect and Bay Area resident Jay Blasi with an extreme makeover. Blasi delivered.
Opened May 31, Blasi crafted a standalone championship 18, a par-72 measuring 7,010 yards and used part of the remaining acreage for the par-34 Ridge nine, a gentler test of 2,781 yards. The championship layout has been reimagined with an entirely new routing, with much shorter green-to-tee walks. “If you had a death wish, you could have pulled it off, but the old version was quite unwalkable,” said Blasi with a grin. “One of the main guiding lights as we went through the process was to try to make the course walkable.”
Blasi succeeded on the walkability front, positioning the next tee in proximity to the previous green throughout the round, which reduced the walk by almost 2,000 yards. Yet, he accomplished so much more on the design front. In the California postcard setting with golden hillsides dotted with oak trees, amid 200 feet of elevation change, Blasi basically built a new golf course on the site of the old one. He carved out wide, contoured fairways to accommodate the windy nature of the site and draped them in Santa Ana Bermuda, a warm-weather grass that requires less water and allows for more bounce and roll. Golfers are grateful for the width although given how the bunkers intrude and how the greens are angled, finding the appropriate portion of the fairway is a must.
