National Links Trust – Syndication Server

National Links Trust hosting symposium to share what it has learned about municipal golf

The NLT symposium in Washington D.C. includes noted speakers with a wide range of expertise on how to save municipal golf courses.

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In just more than two years since its inception, the National Links Trust has developed a wealth of information that might help municipal golf operators around the country restore courses that are often considered a community’s gateway to the game.

Now the National Links Trust wants to share that information, starting with a symposium Nov. 8-10 in Washington D.C. More than 100 attendees are expected to discuss five pillars: sustainability, community impact, growing the game, architecture and alternative programming. Interested parties can learn more at nationallinkstrust.com.

Since its founding early in 2019, the non-profit National Links Trust surprised itself in some ways by earning the contract to renovate the National Park Service’s three golf courses in D.C.: East Potomac, Rock Creek and Langston.

The mission: provide accessible, affordable and engaging municipal golf courses to positively impact local communities across the U.S. That mission started in D.C., and the NLT hopes to expand its reach at the symposium and beyond.

The three D.C. courses have plenty of pedigree and have served their community as an introduction to golf and as civic hubs for decades. But as with many municipal golf courses, conditioning and funding ebbed and flowed, leaving the layouts in various states of disrepair after decades of deferred maintenance. The NLT was founded by golf-architecture experts Mike McMartin and Will Smith to address the problems. With pro-bono plans by course architects Tom Doak, Gil Hanse and Beau Welling, work has begun.

Historical photo of Rock Creek Golf Course in Washington, D.C. (Courtesy of National Links Trust)

“Things are going very well,” NLT CEO Sinclair Eaddy Jr. told Golfweek. “We continue to be very busy at all three golf courses. We’ve made some improvements to things like the golf shops and cart paths, with an eye toward moving toward the longer-term improvements.”

In tackling the three D.C.-area courses, the NLT has learned much about navigating many of the issues that municipal golf faces. It’s not as simple as growing grass. There are political pitfalls, funding issues, usage and accessibility problems that any community is likely to face. Golf has seen an incredible uptick since the COVID-19 pandemic began and as players look for relatively safe experiences outdoors, but saving a golf course – or three – involves much more than rounds played. The level of planning is intense, and NLT wants to share what it has learned.

“We think there’s a successful playbook for renovating and rehabilitating municipal golf courses,” Eaddy said. “We’re doing it here in Washington D.C., and NLT is really focused on the three facilities in the nation’s capital as a model for how to do this around the country.”

Eaddy said NLT has received requests for information from project operators around the country on how to establish leadership teams, recruit talented renovators, fundraise and more.

“Our goal, and this is part of why we created the symposium, is to be a thought leader about thoughtful rehabilitation and renovation of municipal golf courses,” Eaddy said. “That’s how we are able to contribute to other projects around the country right now. While we focus on Washington D.C., we have resources and partners in the industry who helped NLT in its bid to renovate the D.C. golf courses. …

“We think there are some potholes out there for people who are thinking about rehabilitating or renovating municipal golf courses. We’ve gone through that process, and we think we can be helpful to other individuals and organizations that are even considering these types of projects and let them know what the pitfalls are. The hardest process is not just the bricks and mortar or the grass and sand of golf courses. Part of it is project planning and coming up with a roadmap that makes sense for the golf course, the patrons and also the local officials. For most people and most groups, that is the hurdle.”

The NLT has recruited a considerable group to participate at the symposium. Guests include PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh, USGA senior management director of public services Rand Jerris, PGA of America honorary president Suzy Whaley and more than a dozen other guests with expertise in everything from land finance to marketing.

On the golf architecture side, Doak, Welling and Jay Blasi – also a course architect and a Golfweek contributing writer – will present on the importance of good design.

Expertise in such a wide range of topics has worked for NLT, Eaddy said, and all these featured guests are willing to share what they have learned to promote community-based, affordable public-access golf.

“We want to be thought partners, Eaddy said, “and we want to help in any way we can.”

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National Links Trust has big plans for three D.C.-area courses owned by Park Service

Gil Hanse, Tom Doak and Beau Welling offer renovation services to help restore historical public-access courses in Washington D.C.

The renaissance of community-oriented golf in America continues apace.

In June the National Park Service, the agency that controls the three federally owned golf courses in Washington D.C. – Langston, Rock Creek and East Potomac – awarded the right to negotiate a new lease on the properties to a recently established non-profit, the National Links Trust.

The NLT’s co-founders, Will Smith and Mike McCartin, are well-known in golf architecture circles. The pair met in the Landscape Architecture graduate program at the University of Georgia, and both served as shapers for Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf in the 2000s. Though they assembled a strong team of corporate and community leaders, partnered with Troon Golf on the management side and convinced star architects Doak (East Potomac), Gil Hanse (Rock Creek) and Beau Welling (Langston) to offer their restoration services pro bono, they still believed theirs was a dark horse bid.

When the National Park Service chose their proposal, McCartin said, “We went from the ‘This is so amazing and exciting’ phase to ‘Oh man, there’s so much to do.’ We have to put our heads down and make it all happen.”

It’s worth noting Smith and McCartin are both D.C. natives with a keen understanding of how the federal courses are woven into the fabric of the community. In the past, it was common to see urban golf projects that envision rewarding investment with a major championship windfall, sometimes at the expense of the clientele the course had previously served. Even if locals get a break on green fees, McCartin pointed out, “When you’re charging visitors $300, you have to cater to the $300 golfer, and it changes the welcoming, inclusive nature of the place.”

In contrast, the NLT centers affordability and accessibility at the heart of its plans.

“We look at these courses as gateways to golf for people who have never played,” McCartin said. “You hear it so often from people who grew up in the area – East Potomac, Langston and Rock Creek are the places where they first learned to play, where they explored golf and grew a love for the game. That’s such a key component of a healthy golf ecosystem. If you take that away, there’s a loss of culture and history that’s developed around these courses, but it’s also bad for the health of golf generally, to not have places that are natural starting points.”

Smith and McCartin concede that they face a significant fundraising challenge in the years to come—the three complexes need millions of dollars of repairs to overcome years of deferred maintenance. But they are confident the NLT’s nonprofit structure will prove attractive to donors.

“We believe that the greater golf community, both in D.C. and nationwide, will support us in this mission,” Smith said. “They’ll see that restoring these places, and the programming we want to surround these places with, will have such a great benefit to the community and the game of golf.”

The First Tee is already on board, as is “Golf. My Future. My Game.,” a nonprofit working to foster greater diversity in the golf industry. There’s a strong chance an Evans Scholars-style caddie program will emerge as a source of employment for local youths. Environmental groups, such as the Anacostia Watershed Society, are also on board.

The NLT’s plans for the architectural rejuvenation of the D.C. courses are catnip for golfers. Two of the three courses have serious pedigree: Rock Creek was laid out by William Flynn of Shinnecock Hills and Cherry Hills fame, while East Potomac, a reversible Walter Travis design on an island in the Potomac River, boasts vintage aerials to fire the imagination of any design aficionado. (It’s no surprise that Doak, designer of The Loop – the lauded reversible layout at Michigan’s Forest Dunes – was drawn to this latter project.)

It’s not yet clear in what sequence the renovations/restorations will take place. McCartin and Smith suspect the most bang for the initial buck might be found at Rock Creek, which boasts a prime location yet is the worst-performing of the three facilities and where the back nine has been closed since last summer.

East Potomac, for its part, has jaw-dropping potential, but its restoration would best be handled in concert with repairs to a damaged, century-old sea wall. As an engineering and environmental-mitigation task, East Potomac is likely to dwarf its sister courses in both expense and complexity.

Langston holds plenty of promise as well, as a portion of its back-nine routing tracks out onto an island in the Anacostia River where the clearing of invasive vegetation would unlock an array of appealing vistas.

McCartin said that regardless of how the projects unfold, though, “Our goal is to provide continued access to each of the properties at all times, to the extent that we can.”

Historical photo of Langston Golf Course in Washington, D.C. (Courtesy of National Links Trust)

Elevating the quality of golf without a corresponding rise in green fees is a proposition any golfer can get behind. But the D.C. courses always have held significance beyond the game itself. All three are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a reflection of the crucial part they played in the battle against Jim Crow. Black golfers fought for equal access to the D.C. facilities – East Potomac began its existence as a segregated, white-only course—from the beginning.

According to the National Park Service, “African American activism on the golf course had local and national impacts,” spurring Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration to desegregate the entire national park system in 1945. PGA Tour star Lee Elder – the first Black man to play in the Masters – gave lessons at Langston as a young man and managed the course for a few years in the late 1970s. The NLT and NPS share the mission of preserving and educating the next generation on the immense cultural and historical influence of these facilities.

The NLT still needs to finalize the terms of its lease with the government, but after that happens, projects could begin as early as this fall.

Shortly after Barack Obama entered office in 2009, he compared the American ship of state to an ocean liner rather than a speedboat – “It doesn’t turn around immediately.” Change may happen slowly in the nation’s capital, and it may take as much as a decade for the golf community to see the full impact of the National Links Trust’s transformation of Rock Creek, Langston and East Potomac. In this case, patience is required.