With assist from previous photographs, William Carlson created a map of Northwood Golf Membership’s authentic design.
Courtesy Jake Carlson
Each subject attracts precocious skills. Golf-course structure isn’t any completely different. In the event you’re passingly acquainted with the career, you recognize a few of the large names of the trendy period. Tom Doak. Gil Hanse. Invoice Coore. David McLay Kidd.
Right here’s one on your watch record: William Carlson, the Doogie Howser of golf design.
Carlson is 17 and about to graduate from Cardinal Newman Excessive Faculty, in Santa Rosa, Calif., the place he lettered for 4 years on the golf group. He loves the sport, however his fondness for it goes hand-in-hand with a fascination for the grounds on which it’s performed.
“I’ve all the time favored the thought of making one thing that folks get to expertise after which react to,” Carlson says. “Seeing these reactions is a robust factor.”
Lately, Carlson has entered design competitions and utilized for internships at golf structure companies. A outstanding store responded with a suggestion that Carlson couldn’t settle for because it required a transfer to Florida; he was 15 on the time.
Nor has Carlson’s work been confined to paper. At Santa Rosa Nation Membership, the place his household belongs, his advised tweaks to the dog-leg left par-4 thirteenth gap (tee field shifted; bushes eliminated) have been adopted. After which there may be the venture he wrapped up simply this month at Northwood Golf Membership, a beloved nine-hole, Golden Age design, tucked into the redwoods of Sonoma County, the place Carlson spearheaded a focused enchancment.
That’s proper. The teenager prodigy helped contact up a MacKenzie.
“He got here to us with a really nicely thought-out thought, and we trusted him with it,” says course supervisor Gaylord Schaap, whose household has run Northwood for greater than 50 years. “It was just about, Okay, child, now present us what you’ve acquired.”
Within the glittery portfolio of Alister MacKenzie, which incorporates Augusta Nationwide and Cypress Level, public-access Northwood is much from the highest-profile course. However it’s a darling of design aficionados. Carlson has recognized of it for greater than half his life.
He first performed it together with his grandparents, in 2015, when he wasn’t but attuned to the charms of the structure or the historical past behind it. Lower him some slack. He was nonetheless in grade college.
Moreover, he acquired the image quickly sufficient.
Better readability arrived for him in 2020, when lockdowns hit and golf grew to become for Carlson what it was for a lot of: a uncommon outlet for recent air and train. Northwood was roughly half-hour from his home, and, as a junior golfer, he might play it for $5.
The extra he looped it, the extra he liked it. In 2023, he poured that zeal right into a analysis venture.
“I made a decision I might be taught the whole lot I might in regards to the course,” Carlson says.
There was loads to digest. Inbuilt 1928 and opened for play the next 12 months, Northwood sits throughout the Russian River from the Bohemian Grove, a greater than 150-year-old artists’ encampment that marries the free-spiritedness of Woodstock with the blue bloodlines of a tweedy non-public membership. The concept for a nine-hole course on this sylvan setting was initially proposed by Bohemian Grove member and Pebble Seaside co-designer, Jack Neville, who inspired MacKenzie to hold out the work.
In its early years, Northwood went via a turnstile of homeowners whereas weathering fallout from the Nice Despair. Over the a long time, its MacKenzie glow grew dim.
Courtesy Picture
By the point Carlson first noticed it, the Schaap household had accomplished a lot to revive Northwood. However nobody might have rightly argued that the course had returned absolutely to its roots.
Carlson resolved to do some digging.
“I needed to see what it seemed like at first,” he says.
His job was sophisticated by the truth that MacKenzie’s authentic drawings of the course had been consumed by a fireplace a long time earlier than. Carlson leaned as an alternative on previous postcards of the property, which the Schaaps offered, together with aerial photographs and different imagery that he unearthed within the county archives.
The items of a puzzle had been coming collectively. Carlson simply wanted to offer them last form.
From a really early age, Carlson had displayed an inventive streak. He loved creating board video games and drawing imaginary landscapes, a passion he took up proper across the time he discovered to carry a crayon. Now, he used these skills to supply a map of Northwood, which he introduced to the Schaaps, who in flip displayed it within the Northwood clubhouse, the place it grew to become a dialog piece amongst golfers and employees alike.
For Carlson, although, discuss was not sufficient.
“I’d been desirous to do some form of design venture of my very own,” he says.
By way of his analysis, he’d found that Northwood had as soon as sported round 40 sand bunkers. Solely 9 remained. The remaining had been deserted, their imprint gone or overgrown.
Rebuilding all of them was not an choice. A venture of that scope was past Carlson’s bandwidth and Northwood’s finances. It will additionally bathroom down operations at a busy public course. However a single bunker. That was practical. In collaboration with Trevor Schaap, Northwood’s superintendent (and Gaylord’s son), Carlson set his sights on the par-4 sixth gap, which was lacking its authentic fairway bunker, a slyly located hazard, 40 yards in need of the placing floor, that appeared to sit down immediately in entrance of the inexperienced.
“We selected it as a result of it’s central to the course and would carry numerous technique to a beforehand simple par-4,” Carlson says. “It will additionally carry again a few of MacKenzie’s signature deception.”
Courtesy William Carlson
They submitted a proposal and the Northwood board signed off.
Work on the venture started in April. Carlson was concerned in a number of phases, portray the bunker’s amoeba-like define and getting his palms soiled with preliminary excavation. Schaap and his group dealt with the majority development, with Carlson pitching in on the ultimate particulars. On Could 8, the unique bunker was again in play.
For Northwood, the venture was the proper start line, a pleasant method to take a look at the waters with out getting in too deep. Strategic problem was all nicely and good, however not if it slowed down play.
“We didn’t need it to backfire on us,” Gaylord Schaap says. “We’re a nine-hole course with two-and-quarter hour rounds. We couldn’t afford to make them two-hour-and-forty-five minute rounds.”
To date, that hasn’t occurred. The early suggestions, Schaap says, has been buoyant, suggesting that the sixth gap would possibly grow to be a prelude to additional bunker work. Carlson would possible be concerned with something that occurs.
Within the meantime, although, he’s acquired loads on his plate. Yearly since 2021, Carlson has submitted for the Ray Haddock Lido Prize, which is awarded by the Alister MacKenzie Society in reminiscence of the architect, whose rise to prominence was propelled by his personal victory in a design competitors greater than a century in the past. Carlson has but to win, however this 12 months’s outcomes are anticipated any day.
No matter transpires on that entrance, Carlson is aware of what’s subsequent. This fall, he begins faculty at California Polytechnic State College, in San Luis Obispo, the place he plans to main in panorama structure. The longer term lies earlier than him, a reachable par-5 stuffed with promise. And the draw of the Golden Age however, there’s no trying again.
