By Harvey Silverman, Contributor, Golf Business | Silverback Golf Marketing
The pursuit of growing the game of golf has been a steadfast and unwavering goal of golf’s stakeholders. In a broader context, it’s about fostering a surge in the number of golfers engaging in an expanding number of rounds, thereby generating a more robust financial landscape.
In a cynic’s view, it took a worldwide, deadly pandemic to make this happen.
However, growing the game on a micro level is more personal and more diverse in how individuals are attracted to the many varieties of opportunities golf provides.
The Youth on Course organization is an example of a successful effort to introduce more people to golf – in their case, juniors. It has nearly 200,000 members playing at over 2,000 partner courses. To date, in 2024, over 185,000 rounds have been played by young golfers aged 18 and under, and over three million rounds played since the program’s inception by YOC members paying just $5 per round.
Emerging from the Youth on Course program is William Carlson, a senior at Cardinal Newman High School in Santa Rosa, CA. Carlson combined his love for golf with an artistic talent to begin drawing aerial-viewed reproductions of famous golf holes, inspired at 12 years old by the book on golf course architecture given to him by his parents. He became fully immersed in both playing the game and studying golf course architecture, even meeting course designer Gil Hanse, who was updating a local private club.
Carlson’s favorite course to play as a Youth on Course member? Northwood Golf Club, owned by NGCOA board member Gaylord Schaap. And as golf fate would have it, Carlson’s favorite and most-studied golf course architect is the eminent Alister MacKenzie, Northwood’s designer.
Opened in 1928, a massive clubhouse fire in the 1950s consumed MacKenzie’s original drawings. Carlson assumed the task of recreating a master’s work, searching the world for any information, drawings, images, and recollections of Northwood’s history. The most significant pieces were an overhead diagram of the course in its early days from a magazine article and a scorecard with the original yardages from the 1950s. With those, Carlson rendered his interpretation of the original design. The rendering is currently hanging in the Northwood clubhouse and is seen below.
Carlson also discovered evidence of 35-40 original MacKenzie bunkers, of which only about ten exist today. Previous owners had neglected Northwood before the Schaap family’s purchase in 1970, including letting most of the bunkers fill with grass.
Carlson conceived a plan to restore one of MacKenzie’s iconic bunkers, one that would dramatically change the 6th hole. Here’s how it looked in the 1930s, the bunker in the lower left corner:
Here is the bunker as it’s been played for decades:
And here is how it looks now, fully restored:
“We decided to do the bunker on the 6th hole because it kind of brings back that MacKenzie character of deception,” Carlson explained. “Most people on that hole are going to end up on the left side of the fairway because of that big tree that hangs to the right of the tee box, and from that left side, that bunker is raised up on this hill, so it sort of looks like it’s right in front of the green even though it’s 40 yards in front of it.”
Work began during Masters week and was completed on May 8, National Golf Day. A classic MacKenzie bunker was reborn. In fact, during the excavation, some of the original sand was unearthed to be bottled and sold in the golf shop.
Carlson has another talent – producing professional-grade videos about historic courses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqrWmM2J41g
Carlson plans to study landscape architecture when he heads off to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the fall. He’ll likely have aged out of Youth on Course. But I expect he’ll soon make his mark on other golf courses, maybe rising to become the next great course architect. In the meantime, golfers at Northwood will enjoy a restored feature, crowned “Willie’s Bunker.” In Carlson’s singular way, he’s grown the game another notch.