Editor’s notebook: Filling a market need

The Sioux Falls, South Dakota, private golf scene has yet to grow with the population. Only two private courses reside within the city limits. Both facilities are full-service country clubs experiencing heavy demand. The youngest of the two clubs opened in the 1960s.

Danny Amundson mentions the demographics multiple times while trudging through dirt and sand and around former cattle fences on a 210-acre site in early March. Amundson, a Sioux Falls native, is the managing partner of Mapletøn Golf Club, a private golf-centered club scheduled to open in 2025. When Mapletøn debuts, it will become just the seventh private facility in South Dakota, a 900,000-resident state with 120 golf facilities.

“There’s a need,” Amundson says.

Construction on the Scott Hoffman design commenced Oct. 30, 2023. The Landscapes Unlimited crew had the ninth, 10th and 18th green complexes — the putting surfaces closest to the future clubhouse and entranceway — preliminary shaped by the end of winter. The property features dips, a creek, an old silo from its previous life as a farm, sandy subsurface in random spots, and views of a neighboring hillside and Interstate 229. Downtown Sioux Falls and Sioux Falls Regional Airport are less than 15 minutes from Mapletøn.

“This club is meant to be a city club,” Amundson says. “There’s big business right at the footsteps of the club. When we were trying to find a location, we were obviously trying to find a location for beautiful, scenic land, but also a location close to Sioux Falls.”

Discussions involving Amundson and Landscapes Golf Management President Tom Everett about the viability of adding another private club in Sioux Falls started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Everett was close friends with Amundson’s father, Mark Amundson, a South Dakota golf legend who died in a 2014 car accident. Mark was a key figure in the early 2000s development of highly regarded Sutton Bay. Landscapes Golf Management has operated the City of Sioux Falls’s three municipal courses since 2018.

Landscapes Golf Management will manage Mapletøn, which is using Lost Rail Golf Club, a Hoffman-designed course outside Omaha, Nebraska, as an operating model. Opened in 2022, Lost Rail generated instant buzz in a growing Midwest market.

Bentgrass will cover Mapletøn’s greens, approaches, fairways and tees. Prairie-like aesthetics in the form of native areas on peripheries should create a memorable sense of place. Solid playing conditions from the start — Landscapes Golf Management had not announced a superintendent when this issue went to press in mid-June — are vital to helping Mapletøn achieve its business goals.

“We’ll have a pretty good measure on success by 2026, 2027, because by the time this place opens next summer, people will have been waiting for it for a long time,” Amundson says. “First impressions and people coming out here and playing their first five rounds … we’re going to know really quick what type of job we did building the golf course. We know this is going to be a first-class golf course.”

Guy Cipriano is Golf Course Industry’s publisher + editor-in-chief.