A Bold New Vision For College Golf

Each May, the best amateur golfers in the world compete at the NCAA DI Golf Championships. A new golf course has been designed to identify the best men and women college golfers, and the best college golf teams. This is the story of a longterm plan to create an Augusta National for college golf, a permanent home that will create legends, drama and records. The new North Course at Omni La Costa is the work of golf course architect Gil Hanse. It’s been designed to test the best college golfers. This is the story of a bold vision for college golf. It begins with Texas University Golf Coach John Fields.

Clippd
https://www.instagram.com/clippdgolf/
https://x.com/ClippdGolf
https://www.clippd.com/

Scoreboard
https://www.instagram.com/clippdscoreboard/
https://x.com/Clippdscore
https://scoreboard.clippd.com/nationals/mens/ncaa-division-1-nationals-omni-la-costa

[Music] and no coach would like to just hand over an advantage to any program so we wanted to eliminate that advantage and make sure that we had a Level Playing ground for our coaches and to grow Collegiate golf by virtue of that to have a neutral site I think is really meaningful if you look at like baseball or softball in our world they’re at neutral sites you know the College World Series the Women’s College World Series are at neutral sites and it it makes for an exciting venue I think Mike holder was kind of the Zar of Collegiate golf I I consider him still the Zar of Collegiate golf he he was the Head Golf coach at Oklahoma State won multiple national championships with his teams he has a wonderful golf course and still water Oklahoma and they’ve hosted three national championships there he would love to host it in perpetuity but no other coach in America there’s 300 division one teams would like to see Oklahoma State dominate The World by hosting the national championship so the idea was also for it to be a for the new golf course to be a neutral site so that nobody had an advantage what that does is that helps us build our brand it gives us an opportunity to grow we can have iconic shots we can have uh Records that we can develop and all those things would be present if we were at a permanent site it was just having some place that we could kind of call home for lack of a better term for everybody um and I think that’s what coach Field’s Vision was and I think many of us feel the same way that that’s how it should be number one we wanted to to be a championship venue that gives us the opportunity to Define down the best men’s and women’s Collegiate golfer that year so we want the golf course to identify who that person is additionally we want the golf course to identify the men’s national champion team and we wanted to identify the women’s National Championship team and hopefully that is the best team that year and so you start with that it is challenging because a lot of times they’re it’s mostly about having enough teas to set for the women that match up with what they’re doing for the men you know if the men are hitting eight irons nine irons wedges in the holes we should be doing the same but a lot of times there aren’t a of te’s to do that and so you end up with with a hybrid or four or five iron hitting into a green complex that’s either small or very firm or both and it just it doesn’t do our game Justice on the women’s side the other thing was and it really gets back to Best Practices if you’re constantly moving from sight to site then you have to trust that whatever University is going to host it and whatever group is going to try to help them that they’re going to be vested for 2 or three years and then we move on to another site and so we’re kind of Nomads and and if we’re going to be at the same site you have best practices and you can build infrastructure that would certainly in in in golf today the gold standard or at least one of them is the Masters and it’s because it’s Augustin National on an annual basis when you talk about the Masters everybody knows the 12o and and the good and the not good that can happen there so when people become familiar with the site uh I think it resonates because they are familiar because they know it because they can go oh yeah I remember what happened there two years ago or oh my school was in the finals and we just played that whole great or whatever it might be so I think that that I if we can get to a permanent site I really think that that is one of the things that will make it special it began really in 2016 we were um in Eugene Oregon at Eugene Country Club for the National Championship uh we finished runner up there to the University of Oregon lost to them in the finals I didn’t know John very well at all until um we the championship in Eugene because we made it to the finals they made it the finals so you kind of have that connection after that event we went down to the Golf Channel Studios in Orlando and the individuals there at Golf Channel told me that viewership was up 120% over the year before because we were on the west coast and we had the East Coast time slot meaning that we were in Prime Time on the east coast and a lot of people tuned in it was compelling and and it was exciting and of course we lost we came up on the short end of the stick uh Oregon won but that left an indelible mark on me the Golf Channel needs a West Coast time slot to make it work on their end for for Prime Time viewing you know if if you have it at at uh if you’re finishing up at 10 p.m. on the East Coast that’s just not as appealing as if you’re finishing up at 7 p.m on the East Coast some people would love to move it around but the problem with moving it around is you can’t grow because every time you move it some other City some other university has to start from scratch and they may have it for one two or three years but then it’s gone every time you change venues it requires work to introduce people to okay over here is this over there is that for television you know those guys work incredibly hard to put a quality product on air and the the wiring the amount of cable they have to lay um the the setting of stands and broadcast booths and whatnot and when you go back to a place you know where all that’s going to be you know where things are going to go and I think that’s probably logistically I think that’s probably the biggest thing the entire um structure of our build and dream is that it is a neutral site and so nobody else wanted to do it we asked UCLA USC pepperd um we asked asked uh University of California San Diego nobody wanted to do it and so my athletic director Chris Del kante decided that if we were going to actually make this happen we needed to host it anybody that knows anything about college golf on either side knows when John Fields says he’s going to do something it’s going to get done there’s no uh talk and and no walk he is all about the walk and he he has walked this through himself uh from the start fast forward to 2018 I was walking with a young man named Jeff Shackleford who is kind of a golf icon here in in the United States walking around La North or La Country Club in the Walker cup looking at the golf course that Gil Hance had just done in prep for last year’s United States open so I’m walking with Scotty Sheffer and Doug gim and I mentioned to Jeff that it would be great to have a national championship in perpetuity on the west coast because it would help build Collegiate Golf and he said well yeah but where would you do it and I said well one of our alumni donors um philanthropist at the University of Texas is a gentleman named Bob Rowling and he owns Omni Lacosta and he said well Omni Lacosta was really good at one time but it’s dated now and I said well how about if we had Gil Hance do it and he thought well if you had Gil Hance do it and Jeff had helped on the build at La North with Gil Hance he said if we had Gil Hance do it then we could have a winner and so I contacted um Bob Rowling and the Omni team and asked if we could come up and present my idea coach field is great he’s a he’s a great friend and um you know we just we’ve been around Texas for a number of generations both my parents when the University of Texas I went to the University of Texas my wife went to the University of Texas um and you know so we’ve we’ve been around the school and around the golf team and uh for a number of years and become great friends with Coach fields and I Enlisted the help of my athletic director Chris Delante and Mike holder Mike holder is one of the greatest salesmen on the planet and I knew if I could get him in that room and then present my idea that he likely could close the deal you know coach fields and uh coach holder and Chris elanti came to the office and I think in the back of our heads we were we were we were probably in uh pretty much immediately but we wanted to do a little more research on it um and and get Gil involved have a conversation at least with Gil get his thoughts on the golf course and what he thought it could be U make sure he thought it could be of the quality that it needed to be hi I’m Gil Hans Chief bulldozer operator for H Golf Course design Gil’s name is as big as there is in golf uh design we were familiar with Gil uh H we felt like we needed something that um without question theca would know kind of the product they going to get everything I I knew about losta came from the the Tournament of Champions I remember you know growing up on the East Coast it was always cold and frequently snowy and um you know that was the start of the PGA Tour golf season I’m terrible with dates but we were into well into the construction of PGA Frisco uh you know where Omni has their Resort and uh there was just conversations about the potential for hosting NCAA championships and I went out to lacasta and I it been a long time since I’ve been there probably 10 or 15 years and they’d had a subsequent renovation of the golf course in that period and so they just asked me to go and give an evaluation of what we thought the potential of the place could be but also longterm what it could look like from hosting significant golf championships I was not with Gil when he when he was uh when he walked the course but not long after he came to our office and had a whole by ho layout of every single bunker every Green how you know all the different ideas he had we flipped Pages whole by hole and went through every single bunker every layout of every hole which was and you you could see the excitement that Gil had for the project as he’s going through this hole by hole I think that report and and our conversations uh were enabled us to get them excited about the potential and and then we you know continue to go forward with their team and they obviously reached out to the NCAA and uh yeah it was all systems go after that for us to do a master plan to come back to them and say okay you know the first report was our our 30,000 foot look at the golf course but here’s a a more detailed and nuanced look at what we thought we could do Gil Hance is particularly Adept at restoring golf courses and bringing them into the future so the North Course at the time was called the Champions Course it’s called the North Course again because that was the original and um it was probably 7,000 yards so he showed us where he could create length on the golf course um by moving staying with the same routing but moving certain greens to different spots uh and creating a more natural Southern California look on the golf course by taking out a few man-made lakes and inserting Southern California baranas which exist at La North and Riviera our work at LCC informs a lot of our projects um you know I’ve said it before that I became a much better golf course architect by being able to study and learn uh from what George Thomas did at at LACC and and obviously you know the contributions of my partner Jim Wagner and Jeff Shackleford who worked with us on that also led to you know our education as far as understanding really conceptually at a much higher level strategy and courses within a course and trying to set up whole locations that correlated with different T locations and and just really the the whole concept of setup and flexibility and setup as golf architecture especially when you’re hosting significant championships that the other part of the the puzzle there was that we started to truly study and appreciate the Southern California landscape and you know his use of the Native vegetation there the baranas the way they wound their way through Lac and obviously he did the same thing at Riviera but the the fact of these dry washes and becoming an integral part of the presentation of the golf course but also the strategy of the golf course and so I think looking at both the way that he had such a high level appreciation for Golf Course architecture and then how he fitted beautifully into the Southern California golf landscape was was exactly what we needed and what we decided we wanted to try to do at losta he’s kind of one of those artists uh I I don’t know that I would call him rbrand but I would say that he’s one of those in our world today um Jim Wagner and I are big fans of match play and we’re we’re delighted that the NCAA championships has you know that component in it as well once the team’s advance and so what we’ like to think and what we’re hopeful is that you know they’ll the golf course will ask some compelling questions and one of the great things about match play is that depending on where you stand in the match your answers might be completely different to what those questions are Gil did the Olympic course down in Brazil um and they built they knew they were going to hold the Olympics there prior to seeing a golf course and uh you know Gil has that reputation where you know you’re going to get something of extremely high quality that you can host a major event on we had a really interesting experience working with Amy alut uh on the Olympic course you know really discussing and talking about shot values and and the the type of shot you know require it a lot of people think it’s just setting the te’s up right getting them to a place where um you know they’re everybody’s Landing in the same area but when if you get everybody to the same area they’re not hitting the same clubs may be hitting a nine iron the women may be hitting a seven iron and so really trying to get the landing areas in places where that whether you’re male or female you hitting a similar Club into the green and then that allowed us to from a design perspective to design greens that were receptive to that type of shot and I think at the end of the day you know the basic concepts of the Rio Golf Course were focused on whole locations being accessible from proper angles off of the T and I think that’s the same thing we’ve been able to do at Lacosta is try to set it up where the golf course will play wide but to score and to play well there whether you’re male or female you’re going to have to come from the proper angle in November of 2019 I remember I was in the golf shop and I remember seeing that seeing it come up on Golf Channel we have breaking news to share this morning as the NCAA division 1 men’s and women’s golf committees have selected Omni Lacosta Resort and Spa as the host site for the 2024 2025 and 2026 Division 1 men’s and women’s golf championships contingent Upon A renovation of our of our North Course um and there were a lot of people ask how did University how is University of Texas hosting the NCAA championships in Southern California which is a great question when I knew that we were going to host this and it had been announced that om losta and the University of Texas were going to host the 24 25 and 26 National Championship because obviously it’s a head scratcher and so uh we brought that first group out we wanted we wanted Buy in from all of our coaches we want this to be successful we want them to love it and so obviously we couldn’t have 300 division one coaches out there or 220 Division 1 women’s coaches out there so we selected a cross-section of of of um very successful coaches that had been into multiple national championships there were probably 15 to 20 of us uh people from both sides uh men’s and women’s and was a joint effort basically it was a very interesting meeting one of the more interesting ones I’ve ever been in because I’ve always been a Believer uh and Jim feels the same way as to all of our guys that you know we don’t know it all there’s a lot to learn about Golf Course architecture and there’s certainly an awful lot to learn um from players who play at the highest level but also the coaches who teach them you could see his wheels churning when he talked about both sides and you know okay for this hole we’re going to put te’s here or there whatever for the men it’ll be in this venue or this location and so from the from the jump he was thinking that way he was speaking that way he was it was already in his mind what he was going to do it was kind of a mutual brain picking exercise where we wanted to learn you know what makes these players uncomfortable what makes them think what makes them uh nervous you know if they’re coming down the stretch and and what what might ultimately get into their heads conversely what do they get excited about what what you know kind of makes them play more aggressively and I think the coaches were asking us like what can you do with this golf course with this landscape how long can you get it how difficult can it be um How do you answer the questions between making it challenging enough for the best college players in the world and also playable and day in and day out for the resort guests so there was a lot of give and take and a lot of feedback and it was really at the end of the day an incredibly productive meeting he was very receptive with every comment like I said you could see the wheels churning um and it it was fun I think at that point everybody was pretty excited about what this could potentially become he took a took several men’s coaches from around the nation uh and several women’s coaches from around the nation and and really built on this idea that we would have kind of a cross of Riviera and La North when he was finished and I believe that that’s exactly what he has done with the influence of the Olympic course in Rio that he built with men and women in mind the Olympics is prime example I mean he he did an unbelievable job in what you said about the winning score being the same on both sides that’s that’s what we’re trying to get to so he was vested in creating a spectacular venue Omni Lacosta was vested with their thousand employees on site uh to create a major championship venue as well and the NCAA and the golf channel are there with us in support along with the University of Texas so the mix is uh quite a recipe and then I went to our golf coaches association of America and our counterparts women’s convention uh in Las Vegas early December and rolled it out for everybody and um initially there was it it is a head scratcher University of Texas hosting a tournament in California and but when you think about the benefits of it weather time slot on the Golf Channel uh iconic shots and all the different things that that a permanent site and a site in Southern California can do they are slowly percolating into uh acceptance and uh I I get up in the morning praying that this is going to come off right and I go to bed at night praying that this is going to come off right this this project was on a very very tight timeline we we broke ground on it basically to start 2023 today’s world when you’re building you have to go through state government in in this case the California Coastal commission you also have to go through um city councils and city government I mean we just kind of work in uh wait and SE mode for a while there um and then you know full full bore ahead because the time the time frame was fairly tight it’s kind of like going into an older house taking out a taking a painting Off the Wall then extracting the nail that held up the painting and the whole wall came with it and I think that’s essentially what happened at omn Lacosta North course we we had a lot of those moments um we had a lot of a lot of um just just just a lot of heart-to-heart meetings and and a lot you know we all supported each other and tried to stay strong the biggest challenge was the weather you know you can never complain when California gets rain right they need it so badly out there so you feel really guilty when you say you all right you’ve had enough rain it’s making this project uh be behind schedule um so I think that there were a lot of issues you know it was one of the rainiest Winters um that we were building the golf course in and we had very tight grassing Windows uh in order to get the golf course ready for this year’s championship the the Manpower that has gone into it is is tremendous and I I would be remiss if I didn’t give just so much appreciation to David Smallwood who’s our director of agronomy um he’s been through it from the start and I I can’t even tell you the number of curveballs that were thrown David’s way and so one thing led to another to another to another yeah there were definitely doubts and you we have to give Omni all the credit in the world that they decide they they ponied up and they paid for a lot more sod than I think they were thinking they were going to have to and and so they they looked at the the long-term outcome of this championship and getting the golf course and is presentable fashion as they could while still being budget conscious they they did the right thing and we very appreciative of omni you taking that step forward I say it often I’m not a religious man but I’ve done a lot of praying in the last 18 months and it was again it just felt so incredible the it was literally the day we put down sprigs which was June 21st the day we put sprigs down in our first hole like the June Gloom just snapped and the sun came out and it was 75° and we were Off to the [Music] [Music] Races so you get into these projects and sometimes when you have this tight time frame uh the main you you’ve got a great contractor out there you’ve got great team from Amy everybody’s pulling in the same direction our Shapers Neil Cameron who led the project for us did an amazing amazing job um but you get to a place where you can only do so much when the weather’s not cooperating so yeah there was definitely some angs I I I really take my hat off to David and and Jeff Wilson are our our superintendent on on that Golf Course for I mean the amount of hours they’ve worked the Blood Sweat and Tears that they put into it um has been nothing short of of incredible and uh we kind of joke about it now that it’s almost over but like you know when we say if it doesn’t kill you it only makes you stronger we’re all still here and I I think you know I I’m I’m I just I’m so excited to for them to get the the appreciation that they deserve especially when that Golf Course is shown on Golf Channel on live TV and and all the people are watching it and and you know when when you see what went went on behind the scenes in a very short timeline to get it from from dirt to what it is now it is it is it’s not a miracle but it’s pretty close to it now you got a place where you can come on an annual basis count on the weather count on the golf course and count on a great viewership that’s going to grow and possibly grow our fan base I my vision is that someday 10,000 people are watching Collegian golf um at omn Lacosta and that uh moms and dads and parents from all over the world will come to watch this go tournament and then come to Omni Lacosta from time to time and play this great Golf Course there’s been a lot of great college golf championships but but we want to we want to change um kind of how special the event is and I think if we do that long term it can build momentum and and we hopefully can end up with 10,000 people at omy losta you know filling up the golf course uh because it’s that good of an event the excitement is is uh it’s it is tangible I mean you can feel it it’s it’s um you know the the the property itself is going through a transformation there’s a lot of really exciting things happening at Lacosta right now and it’s all building up for the NCAA championships they have invested heavily not only in the golf course but in the resort itself and I think these players when they get there it’s going to feel like a Tour event it’s a worldclass facility from the minute you step on property we call Coach Fields our chief dreamer um and you know I think we owe a lot to to coach for for seeing this all the way through you know I remember when he said wool host and I remember thinking what you know but he that’s how committed he is to making sure that this works and Texas has stepped up big time and John has um he has not flinched uh at any part of this or any issue or any little piece that might come up uh he is uh incredibly committed to this is and I’m not going to say it’ll be his legacy but because he’s done so much in the game but I think his his passion and his vision his ability to have this vision of what our Championship could be and should be I think is what drives him you know it’s coach Field’s uh dream and we’re all we’re all uh helpful Spectators um working working with him on this and uh you know I think his vision is is for for what college golf is and can be um is exceptional to be perfectly honest I think coach Field’s vision for it you know we we talked a lot about Omaha being you know the home of the College World Series and baseball and just every year the excitement they builds up around that event um we talked a lot about being able to compare you know the best college golfers you know this year hopefully to the ones 10 15 20 years from now but also I think from from the perspective of the game of college golf I think it’ll be a really exciting venue um you know the weather in theory should cooperate it should be you know Prime Time on the East Coast there’s there’s a ton of positives behind pushing this yeah when John Fields talked about that it was kind of Goosebump moment of the fact that you we might be able to participate and be involved in creating the home for the NCAA golf championships for a long time to come and that that’s something you we’ve been fortunate to be involved in restoring golf courses that are hosting major championships and the thrill that comes along with that um I’m I’m fully expecting that Jim and I are going to feel the same way when the NCAA Championship are played at La [Music] Costa one one of the things that we’re trying to do with the national championship not only to identify this great player both men and women and this great team both men and women but we want our fans to enjoy it and we want our fan base to grow we want our fan base to come from all over the world and enjoy this event and bring their 7 8 9y Old 10 year old 11y old 12y old that’s Fallen in love with the game and can get up and close and personal with these Collegiate golfers that are going to be the next Tiger Woods Phil Mickelson Jordan SP Scotty Sheffer ANUK sainan um what a what a great way to bring that to the world [Music]