USGA: Courses Built In Last Three Decades Around 64 Acres Larger Than Yesteryear's Footprint

Adam Moeller and George Waters of the USGA Green Section set out to determine how much golf courses footprints have changed as the sport has chased distance.

They developed an 80-course random sample with an even distribution of public and private from different regions and built in different eras. As always I urge you to read the whole thing. But the key takeaway part is a landmark finding and explains precisely why the USGA invested in studying distance. Well done.

A carefully selected case study of courses that had recently hosted men’s professional golf events was also included in the research because we recognized that these facilities face unique pressures with regard to hitting distance, and because these facilities typically have resources above and beyond what is available to most golf courses, so their patterns of change were likely to be different. The championship courses selected had a variety of opening dates and architects, and came from different regions.

For the purposes of this study, footprint is defined as all playing areas of the golf course, all practice facilities, all native areas that are likely to require some maintenance, ponds and lakes, roads and paths, the maintenance facility, the clubhouse, and any dumping or staging areas that can clearly be attributed to the golf facility. Where a course had woodland borders, an approximation within the perimeter of the tree line was made to account for maintenance that likely occurs along and within the woodland margins.

In the 80-course sample, courses built during the three most recent decades had an average total footprint of 216.3 acres. Courses from the earliest three decades – the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s – had an average footprint of 152.3 acres, a difference of 64 acres. This pattern was also observed in the championship course case study, where the five most-recently opened courses had an average footprint 47 acres larger than the five oldest courses (260 acres versus 213 acres, respectively).

There could be folks out there who love a bigger, longer walk in the park that wastes more resources and spreads out those strolls between holes. I just haven’t met them yet.

Another key finding: the average total area of greens and bunkers decreased over time. Meaning the expansion also came at the expense of design features in favor of dead space or roughs.

In the 80-course sample, the average total putting green area was 109,077 square feet for the earliest map year and 101,197 square feet for the last map year. The average total putting green area for the championship courses decreased from 125,642 square feet in the earliest map year to 115,755 square feet in the last map year. The average area of bunkers in the 80-course sample decreased from 82,573 square feet to 76,823 square feet. In the championship course case study, the decrease was even more pronounced, with a drop from an average of 243,971 square feet of bunker area in the earliest map year to 156,033 square feet in the most recent map year.

Course alterations for distance have been more recent:

In both the 80-course sample and the championship course case study, alterations to golf courses with a clear distance component have increased from 1990 onward. In the 80-course sample, 79% of the total distance added through new tees or moved greens occurred from 1990 to the present. In the championship course case study, a more pronounced version of this pattern arises, with 92.9% of all distance added since 1990. This suggests that courses have faced more pressure in recent years to accommodate increased hitting distance than in decades past.