Tag: Landmand Golf Club

Architect Trev Dormer to reimagine nine-hole Nebraska course for owner of Landmand

Trev Dormer plans to do some “different, quirky things” in his renovation of a Nebraska nine-holer.

Canadian golf architect Trev Dormer, perhaps best known in the industry for his work as an associate for the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, has signed on for his first solo project.

Working with the farming family behind the development of the popular new Landmand Golf Club in eastern Nebraska, Dormer will completely renovate the family’s nearby nine-hole course at Old Dane Golf Club in Dakota City, Nebraska.

The Andersen family bought an 18-hole course in 2007 and converted it to nine holes, the current Old Dane. Dormer’s plan is to tear out the entire course and introduce a 12-hole routing that can be played as loops of six, nine or 12 holes across 93 acres of what is currently flat ground. Dormer’s team will build a lake that will provide fill to introduce elevation changes.

“There will be different ways to play the course – I just wanted to get as much golf on the property as I could,” Dormer, who recently completed his work at the new Point Hardy Golf Club at Cabot Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, said in a media release announcing the renovation of Old Dane. “It’s a dead flat site, so I’m trying to do some different, quirky things – a tee shot over the previous green for example. I think it will be significantly more fun and more interesting, and I hope it raises some questions among those who play it.”

Trev Dormer’s routing plans for the soon-to-be-remodeled Old Dane Golf Club in Dakota City, Nebraska (Courtesy of Old Dane Golf Club/Trev Dormer)

The current version of Old Dane will shut down in October, with Dormer and his crew immediately beginning the renovation, which will include the removal of the current driving range. Dormer expects the new, walking-only version of Old Dane to open in 2026.

The operators expect the green fees to remain substantially near the current $15 for nine holes and $25 for a double-loop of 18 holes. Dormer said he hopes to attract new players, especially children and families, to what will be an entirely new course.

“There will not be a single square yard of ground on the property that is untouched by the plow,” Dormer said.

The Andersen family has been in the golf news in recent years after employing King-Collins Golf Course Design to build the large-scale Landmand, which opened in 2022 to become the Golfweek’s Best No. 1 public-access layout in Nebraska and tie for No. 26 among all modern courses in the U.S.

Old Dane sits even closer to the Iowa border, about an 8-mile drive to the northeast of Landmand. Old Dane is about a 15-minute drive from Sioux City, Iowa, and is close to Sioux Gateway Airport.

“This project is about finishing what we didn’t completely do when we built the course originally,” owner Will Andersen said in the media release. “We bought the course because my dad wanted a place to go and hang out with his friends, and we achieved that, but we didn’t do that much with the golf course. The irrigation system is 23 years old, and it’s falling apart.”

Cabot Saint Lucia
Trev Dormer, right, speaks with Bill Coore, center, and Ben Crenshaw during construction of the recently completed Point Hardy Golf Club at Cabot Saint Lucia. (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)

Dormer worked briefly with King-Collins on Landmand, and Andersen was impressed with Dormer’s efforts. Dormer started his career in the early 2000s and has worked with several top architects including Ron Prichard, Rod Whitman, Nicklaus Design and Gil Hanse.

“When I thought about rebuilding Old Dane, I had a chat with Rob Collins (of King-Collins), and he confirmed my thought that Trevor would be the right candidate to do the job,” Andersen said.

This heartland golf course sold all of its 2024 tee times in less time than it would take to play the course

This eastern Nebraska track was the first original 18-hole layout by King-Collins Golf Course Design.

The public-access Landmand Golf Club in Homer, Nebraska, the first original 18-hole layout by King-Collins Golf Course Design, opened for regular play Sept. 3, 2022, to a rousing reception and word is spreading fast.

“For 2023, our first full season, we sold out in approximately two and a half months,” general manager Adam Fletcher told Golf Business News.

But that was just a warm-up.

“This year it was more like two and a half hours,” he said.

You read that right. Tee times for the entire year of 2024 were gone in less time than it would take to play the course, which debuted in a tie for No. 26 on Golfweek’s Best 2023: Top 200 Modern Courses in the U.S., the highest debut of any course. It’s ranked No. 1 in the Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play 2023: State-by-state rankings for public-access layouts for Nebraska. And while the course is already a huge hit, the prices remain somewhat reasonable at $150 a round.

Built atop and around bluffs and dunes in the Loess Hills – geologic terrain left in the wake of retreating glaciers during the last Ice Age – Landmand presented unique challenges and opportunities in a wide-open and extreme landscape with views for miles. Collins said he and King went all-out in trying to take advantage of everything the site, including its 150 feet of elevation changes, offered.

“The first time you see it, the scale is just going to blow your mind. Every time I go out there, I laugh about it. Things that are gigantic in reality just shrink in this landscape,” Collins said.

Read more about the course here from Golfweek‘s Jason Lusk and check out a few photos below.

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No. 8 at Landmand Golf Club in Homer, Nebraska (Courtesy of Landmand Golf Club)
Landmand Golf Club
Landmand Golf Club in Nebraska (Courtesy of Landmand/Vaughn Halyard)
Landmand Golf Club
Landmand Golf Club in Nebraska (Courtesy of Landmand Golf Club)

‘Put the pedal down and go for it’: King-Collins’ Landmand Golf Club opens in Nebraska

Rob Collins and design partner Tad King break the glass ceiling with Landmand Golf Club in Nebraska.

Big and bold – good words to live by. Interesting, different, unlikely. All attributes ascribed to artists, authors, chefs, actors … really anyone who can grab attention and hold it. 

Even golf course architects. 

Rob Collins initially grabbed attention for his big and bold design at Sweetens Cove Golf Club which opened in 2015 in remote Tennessee. A nine-holer built on a flat floodplain amidst the Appalachian Mountains, Sweetens Cove had to grab attention and hold it – a run-of-the-mill design atop the previous course named Sequatchie Valley on the same damp site might have drawn flies, but not many golfers.

Instead, Collins and his design partner, Tad King, moved some 300,000 cubic yards of dirt to erect what has become Tennessee’s No. 1-ranked public-access course in Golfweek’s Best ratings. Big greens, bold slopes – there are those words again, and at Sweetens Cove, those concepts have drawn a loyal following of golfers who will drive to the middle of nowhere to experience something different and entirely interesting. 

“I always did believe there was some form of greatness to be achieved out there, and that it could be very popular,” Collins said of Sweetens Cove, the first course built by his and King’s then-new golf architecture firm, King-Collins. “It was so different and so unique and so much fun, the early adopters of the place gave us so much enthusiasm and belief in what we had done. It was like a religious experience for a lot of people.”

Now comes the next step in big and bold for King-Collins, on a completely different landscape and scale – and after waiting longer than either could have imagined after Sweetens Cove’s ascent into the top 100 modern golf courses in the U.S.

The public-access Landmand Golf Club in eastern Nebraska, King-Collins’ first original 18-hole layout, opens for regular play September 3 on what Collins describes as simply crazy terrain for golf. Built atop and around bluffs and dunes near the village of Homer in the Loess Hills – geologic terrain left in the wake of retreating glaciers during the last Ice Age – Landmand presented unique challenges and opportunities in a wide-open and extreme landscape with views for miles. Collins said he and King went all-out in trying to take advantage of everything the site, including its 150 feet of elevation changes, offered. 

“You had to just put the pedal down and go for it,” Collins said of his approach to Landmand. “The first time you see it, the scale is just going to blow your mind. Every time I go out there, I laugh about it. Things that are gigantic in reality just shrink in this landscape.”

On such a vast playing field – and because of the region’s frequent gusty winds – Collins said his team was inspired to install massive fairways, sometimes with one fairway corridor serving two holes. None of the fairways are less than 80 yards wide, several single fairways top out at more than 100 yards wide and the connecting fairways are stretched beyond 150 yards. 

“A 60- or 70-yard-wide fairway just doesn’t cut it out there because it shrinks visually in the scale of that landscape,” Collins said. “And so, a 60-yard fairway would look 30 yards wide. You hit a ball out there and walk down into the fairway, you’re like, ‘My God, it’s gigantic, there’s no way I could have missed this fairway.’ You need features that are just that big out there.”

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The green for the short par-4 17th as the grass grows in at Landmand Golf Club in Homer, Nebraska (Courtesy of Landmand Golf Club)

 The greens at Landmand are similarly huge. Average greens at most U.S. courses are between 5,000 and 7,000 square feet – purely for example, Augusta National Golf Club’s greens average just over 6,400 square feet, while those at Pebble Beach Golf Links are tiny at about 3,500 square feet. At Landmand, King-Collins constructed putting surfaces that frequently blow past 20,000 square feet. 

As a comparison for King-Collins fans, Collins said he receives frequent comments on the size of the fourth green at Sweetens Cove, an Alps-inspired putting surface stretching some 80 yards front to back. At Landmand, the fourth green from Sweetens would be only the fifth-largest putting surface.

Collins cites the par-3 fifth at Landmand as a great example of a large green fitting a big landscape. The approach from the back tee is some 240 yards across a chasm to a putting surface of more than 25,000 square feet. 

“You look at it, and yeah it seems big, but then you get on it and realize it’s huge,” Collins said. “It has to be to fit. Standing on the tee, even a 12,000-square-foot green on top of that ridge would look stupid. It would look like a pimple on the ass of an elephant. It would look like we shied away from the landscape. We had to build features that embraced that boldness.”

It’s all part of the width and size serving strategy. Players shouldn’t just whack away and expect an easy next shot from a wide, forgiving fairway, especially if the wind blows. There’s skill to discerning the best route to any hole, Collins said, and golfers better think before they swing. 

“Every shot on every golf course we ever do, we want to have a meaning behind it,” he said. “We don’t want any hole to take a shot off. We always want the golfer engaged. That may mean hazard placement, or in a lot of cases at a place like Landmand, it’s a big contour. … Each hole at Landmand was built to ask varying versions of some type of questions, and a lot of that is through contour.”