By the time he arrived as a freshman at Yale University in the fall of 1993, Colin Sheehan already was captivated by the game of golf. A scratch player, he competed on the same high school golf team as future PGA Tour professional J.J. Henry. Sheehan also connected with the sport as a caddie, having spent several summers as a teenager looping at the Country Club of Fairfield in Connecticut. The $18 he earned for each bag carried for 18 holes was nice. So were the chances he had to interact with interesting and successful adults as he expanded his knowledge of the sport. Even better was the opportunity to play the seaside Seth Raynor course on Mondays. Not surprisingly, those rounds, whether for work or play, also kindled an interest in course design.
His time at Yale drew Sheehan more deeply into the sport. As a player who was a part of squads that captured Ivy League championships in 1996 and 1997. And as a keen aficionado of architecture, for the Yale course on which he played and practiced was a Golden Age gem that had been fashioned by Raynor and his mentor, Charles Blair Macdonald.
Then came a 1996 trip to the British Isles with the Yale golf team, during which Sheehan played mostly alternate-shot rounds on many of the best links and heathland layouts in England and Scotland. It was not the first time he had traveled to the Old World with his sticks. Nor was it the only occasion that his coach, a sandy-blond Scot named Dave Paterson, had endeavored to enhance the golf education of his charges by taking them to top-100 courses. But something about this journey really reached Sheehan, instilling what he describes as a “drive to pursue a life in golf.”
That is exactly what he ended up doing. And what a golf life it has been.
... perhaps the most remarkable part of his time in the game is how Sheehan has enabled so many people to enjoy the ride with him.
After graduating from Yale in 1997 with a B.A. degree in history and political science, the now 48-year-old Sheehan spent several years at The Golfer, rising from editorial intern to managing editor at that sumptuous-lifestyle magazine. Much to his delight, he often found himself writing about course architecture.
In 2006, Sheehan also authored a history of the U.S. Amateur. And it was around that time when he secured an apprenticeship on the Castle Stuart project in the Scottish Highlands, working with architect Gil Hanse and developer Mark Parsinen.
Eventually, Sheehan made his way back to Yale, succeeding Paterson as head coach of the men’s golf team in June 2008. Sheehan held that job for the next 15 years, leading the Bulldogs to three Ivy League championships and winning NCAA Division I Northeast Coach of the Year four times and Ivy League Coach of the Year twice.
Busy as he often was in that position, he nonetheless found time to help start the Outpost Club, which formally came on line in the winter of 2010. Modeled after a traditional British Isles golf society, it was designed to appeal to high-IQ golfers who enjoyed playing “architecturally interesting” layouts – and do so at a brisk pace. Today, the association boasts 850 members and puts on 75 events each year at venues as far-flung as New Zealand and Nova Scotia as well as Scotland and South Africa.
At the same time, Sheehan began to get involved with golf development. Among his first efforts in that realm was finding the land outside Cobbtown, Georgia, on which tech entrepreneur Mike Walrath built his much acclaimed Ohoopee Match Club. Not long after that, Sheehan began advising Zac Blair on his soon-to-be-opened Tree Farm, near Aiken, South Carolina.
Now, Sheehan is moving into golf development full-time, having stepped down as Yale’s coach as of the end of June.
“My hope is to do multiple versions of those projects: destination private clubs on rural, sandy-soil sites,” he said.
“I’ll still be based in New Haven where my wife, Amy – who played lacrosse at Yale and graduated the year after I did – and I are raising our three daughters, Lucy, Annabel and Caroline. And I will continue to be involved in the Outpost Club. But I will also be devoting a lot of my time to finding and then developing great sites for golf.”
Lanky and dark-haired, Sheehan is so boyish in appearance that he could easily be mistaken for one of the golfers whom he used to coach. But inside, he is very much an old soul who favors high-crown tour visors when he plays, fancies links-style courses and advocates heartily for youth caddie programs. And he cannot help but smile as he thinks back to his initial search nearly three decades ago to find a place for himself in the game and considers where he is today.
“I’ve had a pretty good life in golf,” he said.
Actually, he has had several of them. But perhaps the most remarkable part of his time in the game is how Sheehan has enabled so many people to enjoy the ride with him.
“More than anything else, Colin loves the experiential aspect of golf,” said his former Yale classmate, Will Smith, who along with Sheehan and Quentin Lutz was one of the three founders of the Outpost Club. “He sees courses and clubs as places for people to enjoy the game together. He loves being on a golf course with people and showing them a good time, which is why he loved coaching at Yale so much, and why he has really enjoyed the Outpost Club. It also speaks to why he is getting that much deeper into golf development.
“Colin’s passion is both apparent and infectious. You will always have a great time on a golf course with Colin, and at the end of your day, you will feel better off for having been out there with him.”
“For me, he was an invaluable guide into the sport, starting when we were students at Yale and he snuck me onto the course for free by telling the starter I was a recruiting prospect even though I was just picking up the game,” said Smith, adding that he prayed as he stepped onto the first tee that he did not top his drive. “And I know that there could not have been a better person to direct my own passion for golf.”
Sheehan found that his fervor for golf started to take hold when he was 10 years old.
“Geoff Cornish had designed a nine-hole, par-3 course near Long Island Sound,” he said of the Carl Dickman layout in Fairfield, Connecticut. “It was like a little course in an English village and the ultimate on-ramp for a kid my age.
“My father would take me down there,” added Sheehan, the oldest of two children to an entrepreneurial father who was in the corporate gift business and middle-school teacher mom who occasionally contributed to The New York Times. “I was his excuse to play golf, and I loved doing that with him. The goal was to become good enough to play Smith Richardson, an 18-hole course located in another part of town. And in a few years, I was able to do that.”
It was around that time that he heard about caddieing at Country Club of Fairfield.
“It was not only a way to make money in the summer but also to play that course on Mondays,” Sheehan said. “There were no lightweight stand bags back then and not much of a tipping culture at what was a very Yankee club. But I loved being there. In time, I began working in the bag room, too, as well as the pro shop. By that point, it had effectively become my home golf course.”
It was his place of employment during his four years at Fairfield High School, and also what led him to Yale.
“One Friday afternoon, in the fall of my senior year, I was working the after-school shift at the Country Club of Fairfield,” he said. “It was raining, and the golf professional said I could take off. So, I grabbed my clubs and hustled out to the first tee. And it was there that I met Dave Paterson. He was a member after having worked at the club as its head pro before moving to Yale in 1975. We ended up playing together, and by the fifth hole, he started asking me about college. Yale was certainly not on my radar, but after visiting the campus that winter, I decided that I really wanted to go there.”
Looking back, Sheehan still cannot believe the good fortune that led him to that school.
“I did not have a particularly remarkable career as a player there,” he said. “But I loved the team, I loved Coach and I loved the opportunities I had to travel. And to play that incredible Macdonald-Raynor golf course all the time was great.
“I fell in love with the recruiting process as well, even though I eventually helped to recruit my way out of the starting lineup.”
After graduating, Sheehan backpacked through Europe for 10 weeks.
“I had taken a lot of art history courses at Yale and wanted to see a lot of the works I had been studying in person,” he said.
Back in the States, however, he was unemployed and once again living at home with his parents. To make ends meet, Sheehan started driving local residents in their cars to area airports and also New York City. His customer for one of those trips happened to be the editor of The Golfer, and they talked about the sport for most of the ride. That conversation led to an interview, and then to Sheehan going to work for the magazine.
“I started traveling the world of golf for work,” he said. “I became what my friends and I called a ‘poverty jet setter.’ I wasn’t making any money, but I was going on a lot of fun trips. And the more I saw in golf, the deeper I wanted to get into the game, especially as it related to course design.”
After The Golfer, Sheehan made his way to Castle Stuart, where he lived for nearly half a year. Then came the offer in mid-2008 to be the men’s coach at Yale.
“It was quite a year,” Sheehan said. “I turned 33. Tiger and Rocco had that epic battle at the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines, Amy gave birth to our first child, and I found my way back to Yale.”
Fifteen years later, he is beginning another adventure in the game.
His life in golf seems only to get better.
Photos courtesy Colin Sheehan
TOP photo: Colin Sheehan with one of his former players, Joe Willis, on the 5th tee of the Yale Golf Course