Forty (miles) North of Dallas

If it already feels as though you’ve seen and heard a lot about the Fields Ranch East course at PGA Frisco, get used to it. This Gil Hanse design, built by Heritage Links and overseen by Roger Meier, senior director of golf maintenance Operations for the PGA of America, will host the Senior PGA Championship later this month — the first of some 26 events over the next 12 years, including six major championships.

Soon, all these big-time tournaments and thousands of daily-fee rounds will obscure the development process north of Dallas, one that took place almost entirely during the COVID-19 era, atop what Meier calls “some of the worst soils in America.” What’s more, the design brief Hanse issued to his Caveman Construction unit, alongside Heritage Links, was to create a series of outlying features that, upon completion, would look as though they’d already been there for 60 years.

Best to take a close look at them now, before actual holdovers from this former ranching property merge seamlessly with all their canny man-made micro-landscapes.

If you’ve heard anything about PGA Frisco, it’s probably that the East course was perfectly playable nearly two years ago. To assert that Meier and his team — managing superintendent Bryce Yates, East course superintendent Nick Zickefoose, and counterpart Kyle Bunney on the Beau Welling-designed Fields Ranch West layout — were eager to cut the ribbon on May 2. That would be an understatement. 

“I’ve actually had my eye on this project since 2015, when I was still at Valhalla,” Meier says, noting that he served there in Louisville, Kentucky, as golf course superintendent until 2019, when he became an official employee of the PGA Frisco operation. “We’ve all had an eye on this project, right on up to my boss at the time, Jimmy Terry, the senior director of golf properties.

“When we broke ground in the summer of 2019 and once COVID hit, things got real. We had to make some tough decisions. We have a great partner with Omni Hotels and Resorts. They made the decision to keep the golf (development) going and delay the vertical structures. That’s why we were able to put a few pegs in the ground — on the East course, very quietly — in the fall of 2021.

“All the credit goes to golf course maintenance team. These guys did an incredible job growing in and conditioning the golf courses,” Meier continues. “They weren’t distracted by the potential delay in opening the facility and it was important for them to deliver on the original construction timeline. They worked tirelessly so ownership could have the discretion to open the golf courses if they desired, despite the vertical delays.

“The scale and scope here are still hard to grasp: At the time, I’m pretty sure this was the largest golf construction project in the country. I think Heritage alone had 150 individuals here on their team. Everyone in the golf business knows what an impressive group they are, but I was really struck by the depth. On a project this size, that really showed. Strong foremen overseeing a lot of talented individuals showing tremendous levels of detail and care. The architects do what they do. Caveman and their vision? Unbelievable. But ultimately, it’s down to the guys who go and finish the greens, who add all the drainage, sand cap and ultimately do all the finish and detail work. And the bunkers — well, they were such an important factor here with the revetted style Gil chose to use.”

Blake Smith served as Heritage Links project manager on the East course. Heritage has worked with Hanse and Caveman on multiple occasions through the years: At Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, prior to the 2022 PGA Championship at Doral’s Blue Monster, on the original construction of Mossy Oak Golf Club in Mississippi, to name a few. Smith is PMing construction of an 18-hole private club project from Hanse Golf Design right now, outside Nashville, Tennessee.

Few are more familiar with Hanse’s approach. Yet previous experience building Hanse bunkers only took the Heritage Links crews so far.

“With Gil’s team, they set the tone,” says Jon O’Donnell, president of Heritage Links, a division of Lexicon, Inc. “At Frisco, they wanted a theme where the course features needed to look as if they had been there for 60 years, whether it be a refined bunker or a natural or native bunker or what have you. We’ve actually got some bunkers out there that are supposed to look like they’ve been abandoned. Regardless, they were all carefully planned out for revetting.”

What does that mean? Smith explains: “For each bunker, Gil’s team would observe the morning and afternoon shadow, then mark a horizon or shelf line for where that revetted line needed to be. The revetting in a Gil Hanse bunker varies from two to seven layers of sod. That’s how they create the sharp edge that casts the shadow they like, though we can enhance them with more narrow revetting to skinny up the view or sight line. What all this creates is a rugged finish that nevertheless casts beautiful contrast shadows, morning and night.”

Rugged features may look old and weathered; they may appear as if they’ve been there longer than perhaps they have. But “rugged” doesn’t automatically result in bunker tie-ins that look “natural,” Smith explains. That requires chunking.

“That’s the word they used at PGA Frisco,” he says. “Basically, it means taking select chunks of native grasses from areas that will be disturbed later and integrating them with the unfinished edge to enhance the bunkers, to tie them in aesthetically. For example, hole No. 10: We did some serious chunking there. We brought some grasses over from an area that became 9 and 18. That sort of chunking guides the eventual look, and it’s a natural look almost by definition. In my experience the only other architects who chunk like this, or something like it, are Coore & Crenshaw. The majority of architects we work with don’t chunk.”

Meier got used to it, but at first, he was a bit taken aback by the seat-of-the-pants nature of these design processes — their hatching, mainly by Hanse and his team, and their implementation by Heritage Links.

“The Hanse guys will pull an audible. Gil is the first one to admit that,” Meier says. “But it’s one thing to hear about that style of work and another thing to see it happening. They all work organically from what they see, in the field — from what’s there. It’s got to be difficult for a contractor to build what’s been designed in the field. But to me it seemed quite seamless, the way Gil and Heritage and Caveman all worked together. I guess because they’ve worked on so many projects together.”

Smith was quick to point out that while the ideas come mainly from Hanse and his team, they absorb ideas from all quarters, with pretty uniform generosity and humility, then roll with them — at speed. For example, to create an engineered slope left of No. 8 on the East course, an old oxbow that had been there for decades was lost. PGA chief championships officer Kerry Haig mourned its passing on a subsequent site visit. Hanse and Caveman got to work.

“Kerry suggested that maybe we could create something to look natural there,” Smith recalls. “I have to give credit to Gil and his team, because they recreated a natural wash down to the wetland that is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen on a golf course. We helped realize that feature, but our involvement is typically more the physical aspect, making sure the drainage is going to work. If they’ve created this natural habitat, we’re controlling the flow of water, how it gets seeded, etc. But it’s a close working relationship between us and the Cavemen.”

In 2021, when Hanse said, “It’s not every day that we get the chance to create a golf course that we know will host multiple major championship and potentially a Ryder Cup,” he was also talking about what stands to be the fanciest, most ambitious municipal facility in America. Meier points out that the city of Frisco, located 40 miles north of Dallas, owns both courses here; the PGA of America holds a long-term contract as the course operator and tournament host.

The first of two PGA Championships arrive in 2027 and 2034. A pair of KPMG Women’s PGA Championships are scheduled for 2025 and 2031. And while The PGA has yet to announce a Ryder Cup for north Texas (first available slot: 2041), one can etch that commitment in stone. There has even been speculation the PGA Tour’s AT&T Byron Nelson will move to Frisco once its five-year contract with the TPC Craig Ranch expires in 2025.

At the same time, the East course serves as the centerpiece of a 46-hole, 600-acre, $550 million mixed-use property that also serves as the PGA of America’s home base. (The organization recently moved its national headquarters here from Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.) The Frisco facility will also feature a massive practice area, a 75,000-square-foot putting course, a 10-hole short course, and a 500-room Omni-branded resort. An adjacent 2,500 acres are slated for further development under a master plan from Hunt Realty.

On a property this big and diverse, grass choices on the golf course itself — Northbridge Bermuda on the East fairways, tees and immediate rough areas, TifEagle ultradwarf on the greens — tend to pale beside those varieties deployed or merely encouraged to grow just off those fairways. In these massive outlying areas golfers may find playable, low-grow blue stem with buffalograss at the bottom, along with some oat grasses. The teams preserved as much of the existing prairies as possible but also did their due diligence in re-establishing them to fit the native landscape. 

Beyond that? The varieties are as numerous as the grassland and wetland environments preserved and created.

“We have 150 acres of native grassland on the East course alone, 250 acres on the entire property,” Meier says. “The wetlands? Wow. It’s really something to see what’s there today — from what had been a hole in the ground. They look tremendous but the one to the right of No. 12 is pretty fantastic, while allowing us to drain a tricky portion of this site.”

Over and over, O’Donnell and his project manager, Smith, emphasize that Heritage Links was obliged to work hard to strictly and carefully control water flow on a site like this one: “One of our greatest challenges was, you have a main flow point, a channel of flow from McKinney all the way to Lake Louisville, right through the middle of the golf course,” Smith explains. “So, there’s a high volume of water potential at all times. In order to build on this property, in this floodplain, we had to create ways to control the water.

“Part of that was engineering the wetlands along Panther Creek — and how to make it look natural, for a golf course. No. 12 is a great example: The wetland created there allowed us to drain and hold water, but we enhanced the wetland by importing more native-type trees. We found beavers in that area really like cypress. But Roger, Gil and their teams also worked up a custom seed blend to vegetate that area all down the right of 12. Gil wanted pockets of water at all times, almost a Carolinas feel. That’s what we had in mind with our finished construction, so it could maintain those low pockets and enhance what ended up being myriad plant species — without just having cattails wall to wall.”

Meier hopes that someday — maybe when you see them tee it up at the Senior PGA later this month, or maybe years from now at the Ryder Cup — golf fans and his professional colleagues will remember that all this was created atop what he and Smith agree was some of the mostly wickedly uncooperative soil on the continent. Ultimately, the decision was made to sand cap all the play corridors and import the growing medium required to grow high-quality, championship-level turf. But that didn’t solve any of the problems with shaping, or draining, or executing such complicated riparian projects undertaken on this particular site, including that work along Panther Creek.

“To give you an idea,” Smith says, “we’ve all heard of Louisiana gumbo. This stuff is a close cousin of that: Dark expansive clays, which is the dark side of having a lot of organic matter in the soil. After all, this had been a ranch for years and years. But the expansive clay works in a very strange way. You can imagine it like a breathing organism: The clay subgrade here can expand up to six inches, then contract up to six inches! That’s why it was so important to construct a golf course where we can control the water flow and moisture conditions in top layers, so you don’t have cracks.”

One of Heritage Links’ solutions was the installation of more than 50 miles of so-called seepage drainage under the sand-capped areas. Meier said this allows the fairways to manage 2 inches of rain and accommodate play a couple hours later. Meier adds that this was a decision rooted in the practicalities of hosting spring championships, a notoriously wet season in north Texas: “Our Senior PGA is slated every May. We’re going to host two PGA Championships in May, along with two women’s championships in June. These are historically the wettest months in Dallas. It was a big commitment from ownership, but we had to get the grass choices and drainage properties right.”

The other aspect, O’Donnell says, “goes back to building something to withstand any fluctuation in the water levels — and speed of flow through the channels. The design intent was to create and maintain these natural oxbows. But where does the water go? Basically, we had to keep many features like the banks along Panther Creek up and out of the floodplain. We did that by excavating then incorporating large rip-rap — structural rock below the subgrade with geotechnical bags and grid — to create a structure below the actual golf course shaping, in order to support the finished grade.”

Beauty may be skin deep, but the finished product at PGA Frisco proves that care, precision, attention to detail, technical innovation and pride go deeper.

Phillip Hall is a Vancouver, British Columbia-based golf writer.