Sheep Ranch Takes Digest's Best New, Golf Posts State-By-State Rankings

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2020 saw the opening of fifteen courses eligible for Golf Digest’s “Best New” award in what appears more like the new normal than an aberration, as Derek Duncan writes of the three courses singled out this year:

It’s humorous now to think that the 40 or so new courses that opened in 2010 didn’t form a critical mass large enough to merit the magazine’s full attention and thus an award. The course-construction recession was considered a temporary squall, but course openings have remained maddeningly scarce over the past 10 years, and this year’s class consists of just 15 graduates. But feeling that new course openings are now more newsworthy than ever, we’ve decided to proceed with the prize—though because of travel difficulties and the extenuating circumstances of the moment we gave each facility that opened in late 2019 or 2020 the option to postpone its candidacy until 2021. (A number of courses took us up on the offer; wait for them next year.)

The Sheep Ranch by Coore and Crenshaw won, with some comically-artificial Tom Fazio real estate play called Troubadour finishing second. Nothing says natural like a creek atop a mountain guarding six tee boxes: