Veteran golf course architect Paul Albanese is walking the grounds at his upcoming Sage Run Golf Club in Hannahville, Mich. It’s a cool, rainy late August morning in the Upper Peninsula, so the 50-ish Ivy Leaguer is decked out in work boots, khakis and a light jacket. Part of the Island Resort & Casino, Sage Run will officially open for play next June and is located four miles from the hotel and its nine-year-old, highly acclaimed Sweetgrass Golf Club that Albanese also designed. “These are two of my babies,” he says. “But they’re entirely different golf experiences. I liken them to a red wine and a white wine.” As he should. Because so much time has passed between the design process of each course, the technology Albanese used for each job has drastically changed. How so?
How does GPS help you get a better design?
PA: Design is all about tweaking an iteration and making changes. In the old days when we had to stake things out with tape measures and wheels, it would take a long time to make a change and see how it looked on paper -- in comparison to what you just staked in the field. With GPS now, I literally can tap my phone and say 'this is where I'm at, this is where I think the 8th tee should be' and I can text it to my associate in the office who makes the change in real time and texts me back an image of what the hole would look like. It's instantaneous feedback using GPS, and the time saved in not only initially staking out the course but being able to make changes and adjustments using GPS versus stakes is an incredible advantage to creating a better golf course. Staking out 18 holes by hand would take two-to-three days, and in some cases longer if it was wooded and we had to get the stakes through woods. By comparison, we were able to stake out the upcoming Sage Run in half a day.
Do you factor in the sun?
Software lets us analyze whether holes will have the sun in your face or not. It maps out from from space where the sun will be at any time of the year and day. My associates and I map the points and say here's where we want the 9th hole, and then map out the sun path that shows us where it will be in relation to that tee shot for every day of the year. So we can tell early spring if golfers might have the sun in their eyes on the final hole, for example. We’re able to analyze exactly what golf architects have been trying to do for years, and we used to do it in a more general way. A general rule of thumb some 20 years ago or even 10 years ago was don't tee off into the east and don't finish into the west.
But using technology, we're now able to tweak that and know what is east exactly. Can it be 20 degrees north of east, if the hole is 23 degrees south of east? There's all this different tweaking we can do, to know if a golfer's gonna be heading into the sun or not, and whether it would actually preclude you from making a good golf hole there. And in fact, that's what we did at Sage Run here. We originally and cautiously had a hole finishing to the west. But after doing sun analysis, we realized that although it was west, it was slightly southwest, and that for the majority of the summer the sun was going to be southeast. So golfers won’t be hitting into the sun like we assumed they would. That actually turns out to be our final hole now, and is a much better hole. Without that technology, we may have not finished and designed this course the way we did, which I think is a superior way to do it.
