Gamble Sands, the top-100 golf resort located in Brewster, Washington, recently unveiled the name of its new 18-hole, David McLay Kidd-designed course. Scarecrow will open for public and resort guest play on Aug. 1, 2025.
Located near the apple and cherry orchards of the Gebbers’ family farm (owners of Gamble Sands) and overlooking the Columbia River Valley, McLay Kidd and associate Nick Schaan have transformed a twisted saddle of rolling terrain and river-view ridgeline into the second 18-hole golf course. Golfers will find the course as a contrasting experience to Gamble’s original and award-winning Sands course. Scarecrow will play to a par of 71 and stretch to 6,900 yards.
With the property’s original McLay Kidd-designed Sands course firmly entrenched as a top-100 golf course in the United States, one may ask, “How do you make the new course different, while also making it a relative to the first course?”
McLay Kidd and Schaan had the same question. The answer started (and ended) with the land itself.
“This part of the site has higher, peakier spots that were more akin to classic sand-dune, sandhills-type blowouts and we exposed some of those, we preserved some of those,” Schaan said. “The piece of land [for the new course] is just smaller. If you draw a circle around the first course, it sits on 350-500 acres depending on how you draw it. This new course sits on about 300 acres, and so it’s a lot more compact, things are a bit closer together. But the fairways are still wide — in some cases, they are even wider [than the original Sands course]. The whole golf course kind of climbs over this knob, through a saddle, up another knob, through a valley — you see a lot more of the river, hole after hole after hole. And you see a lot more golf that you’re not playing across the site.”
Besides the land, another key difference between Scarecrow and Sands is the size of the greens.
“The greens are smaller,” added Schaan. “Once we got out onto the site and were walking around and looking at the tightness and steepness of the contours versus the first course’s greens, the greens needed to be made smaller to fit into the spaces that made good green sites. There’s still tons of turf around the actual cup-able areas because all the steeper contours that you can’t count as ‘green’ you can still use to roll a ball around. It’s different but the playability is the same [as the Sands course].”
Big expansive views are a hallmark trait of Gamble Sands; so too are the large sand bunkers on the original course. McLay Kidd and Schaan took a different approach with the bunkering on Scarecrow.
“Gamble Sands has this big, open-expanse sandy character to it — it’s so massive that if we replicated that again in the same fashion, that alone would make the golf courses look similar,” Schaan said. “But doing that again in the same fashion becomes cumbersome, so the sand areas are broken into chunks and smaller pieces and compositions of clusters instead of these massive sand areas.”
THE SOCIAL ASPECT
It’s been a while since we worked on the West Coast in Oregon in 2010-2011. We've been excited to get back out West in 2024, working on a Master Plan for The Peninsula Golf & Country Club in San Mateo, California. The San Francisco-based Club is the lone Donald Ross course “West… pic.twitter.com/2MaQDLECua
— Tyler Rae (@TylerRaeDesign) November 15, 2024
ROLL CRIMSON RESERVE
The University of Alabama has opened Crimson Reserve, its $47 million golf facility in Tuscaloosa.
Dedicated on Sept. 6, the complex sits less than 1 mile from the heart of campus and includes a nine-hole, 3,600-yard golf course, a 410-yard driving range, short game areas, and indoor and outdoor practice spaces.
The Love Golf Design team of Davis Love III, Mark Love and Scot Sherman designed the Crimson Reserve golf facilities with consulting help from former University of Alabama golfers Justin Thomas and Trey Mullinax. Davis Love himself is a North Carolina Tar Heel, but his connection to the University of Alabama traces to his son Dru, who played collegiate golf for the Crimson Tide a little more than a decade ago. Darren May, director of golf at Michael Jordan’s Grove XXIII course in Florida was another who advised on the project.
“Darren assisted us with building features that help teach players how good the best golfers in the world really are,” Sherman told golfcoursearchitecture.net. “The facility will make use of data, such as strokes gained approach, to test these guys. We built features that train and test golfers in all situations, with all clubs, from all yardages, and in all kinds of conditions. And players will be able to immediately compare themselves with the best in the world.”
With limited space for a championship spread, the Love team maximized the elasticity in the new nine-hole layout. “This course can be played in multiple ways,” said Sherman. “It can also be played twice to produce an 18-hole experience. Players target the white flag on the first round and the crimson flag on the second. We have also built in flexibility so the holes can play from different lengths, with each of them able to be a par 3, 4 or 5. The third hole also has two greens, which we call ‘Little 3’ and ‘Big 3.’
Sherman noted that the design was repeatedly altered during the build process to provide the best, most varied possible test for these elite college golfers.
“Davis, Mark and I aimed to design a course that fits the land above all else,” he said. “As we were going through the clearing process, walking the land and studying the natural features, we rerouted several holes completely on the fly. We build our golf courses in the field. Aesthetically, we wanted the course to feel timeless with a variety of looks throughout, while unified by a flat bottom bunker style, surrounding pines and oaks, and tremendous amounts of southern native grasses. The playing experience can be described as providing the maximum variety of shots, contours, views and flexibility.”
Full grow-in is now taking place, via the establishment of Tahoma31 bermuda throughout the course, except for the greens, which are TifEagle Bermuda. Crimson Reserve will have a grand opening sometime in 2025.
MOONLIGHTING AT DELRAY DUNES
Architect Scot Sherman, who helms many of the projects for Davis Love III’s Love Golf Design, also moonlights with his own projects. One of them, Delray Dunes Golf & Country Club in Boynton Beach, Florida, has reopened following a Sherman-led renovation. The low-key private club is notable as Pete Dye’s first Florida design. Sherman, who got his start in the business working for the Dyes, intended to restore as much of the original Dye as possible to this 55-year-old layout.
“We call this a sympathetic restoration since we’re not sure how else to refer to the work we are doing,” said Sherman early in 2024. “Some of what Pete built originally can be recreated, but some things cannot due to changes made to the layout over 50 years. So, along with much input from members, study of the old course photos, and recounting some conversations with Mr. Dye, we formulated a plan. The course will be a combination of these original features, some restored green contours and inspiration from Pete’s other designs built in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Make no mistake, Pete is the architect of this course!”
Sherman, who has consulted with Delray Dunes since 2019, teamed with MacCurrach Golf Construction on the project, which also included a new irrigation system, restoration of sandy shell areas and bulkhead upgrades in a Dye style. Sherman also led an infusion of dune plantings to emulate the look of the nearby beaches and a reworking of the practice areas.
“My history at Delray Dunes has become more of a love story,” Sherman told golfcoursearchitecture.net. “A love for Pete, Alice, and their ideas. A love for this club. And a love for the staff and members there. The Dyes have inspired my work for a long time, and I feel sure they would be pleased about this version of their course.”
