By Joel Beall
The USGA and Bandon Dunes Golf Resort announced a formal relationship Tuesday that will bring 13 USGA championships to the Oregon property over the next 24 years.

The agreement, which begins with next year’s U.S. Junior Amateur, includes bringing the 2029 Walker Cup and 2038 Curtis Cup to Bandon, along with both the U.S. Amateur and U.S. Women’s Amateur.

“This is our chance to give back to the game, to lead by example,” says Mike Keiser, owner of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort. “The USGA is all about amateur golf, and we support broadening that reach.”

“It’s one of the world’s special places for golf, and the way the resort treats amateurs and amateurs championship is second to none,” says John Bodenhamer, USGA senior managing director of championships. “It starts with Mike Keiser. The player experience, it will just be outstanding on every front. I think when you see the events that will be broadcast, golfers and non-golfers will see the spectacular setting across those links, it will elevate the interest and viewership.”

Bodenhamer clarified that Bandon is not viewed as an “anchor site,” as that designation applies to venues that will be hosting U.S. Opens. Due to Bandon’s remoteness, at the moment the USGA feels that is not on the horizon for the resort.

“We really look at this as a long-term relationship, with Bandon delivering the purest essence of golf at the amateur level,” Bodenhamer said. “Mike and the resort have a passion for hosting our championships, and what we strive to do is have our championships be aspirational events. We want to go places where players are excited to play at, and Bandon certainly meets that goal.”

Added Keiser: “These amateur events don’t require tents, trucks and tens of thousands of people to run them as a U.S. Open would. But every USGA championship deserves to feel like a major experience, and we can do that here.”

One of the highlights of the agreement is Bandon hosting the U.S. Amateur and Women’s Amateur in 2032, the first time those two original USGA championships will be played at the same venue in the same season. Following a similar experiment with the U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open at Pinehurst in 2014, the USGA feels that having the events in back-to-back weeks allows for both events to be put on equal footing.

Bandon already has hosted six USGA events, most recently the 2020 U.S. Amateur, and Keiser sees this agreement as an extension of the resort’s values.

“Amateur golf will always have a place at Bandon Dunes, and this commitment from the USGA is significant,” Keiser said. “We are welcoming of all the great championships that the USGA will bring to the resort as Bandon Dunes is the home of amateur golf.”

​​Future USGA Championships at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort:

2022 U.S. Junior Amateur
2025 U.S. Women’s Amateur
2029 Walker Cup
2032 U.S. Amateur and U.S. Women’s Amateur
2035 U.S. Girls’ Junior
2037 U.S. Amateur Four-Ball and U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball
2038 Curtis Cup
2041 U.S. Amateur and U.S. Women’s Amateur
2045 U.S. Junior Amateur and U.S. Girls’ Junior

The post Bandon Dunes to host 13 USGA championships appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

The course would be on a piece of land the resort had originally planned for the Bandon Muni course, south of town along the New River. The land is covered in dramatic sand dunes and dotted with scattered pines. The course is tentatively titled “New River Dunes.”

While an architect hasn’t been officially tapped, officials are leaning towards David McLay-Kidd, who submitted a “very strong routing” according to sources. McLay-Kidd was the architect behind the resort’s first links, Bandon Dunes, which opened in 1999 and ranks seventh on Golf Digest’s most recent ranking of America’s 100 Greatest Public Courses.

Plans for New River Dunes have not been finalized and timing on construction is unclear, but the resort is already in the approval process, sources confirmed.

Bandon Dunes Golf Resort’s fifth 18-hole links, The Sheep Ranch, opened last summer to acclaim. Along with Bandon Dunes and Sheep Ranch the resort boasts five 18-hole courses in Pacific Dunes (ranked second on America’s Top 100 Greatest Public Courses), Bandon Trails and Old Macdonald, along with a 13-hole par-3, Brandon Preserve.

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By Tod Leonard
There are 264 golfers who will tee it up on Monday in the first stroke-play round of the 120th U.S. Amateur Championship at the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon. That’s down from the 312 that would have been entered had the coronavirus not eliminated qualifying. But that still means there are 264 unique stories of who the golfers are and what they’ve accomplished to get here.

In this year’s tournament, there are businessmen in their 50s and 60s, the reigning U.S. Am champ and runner-up, former USGA winners, college and high school stars, and past touring pros who recaptured their amateur status.

We have to begin, though, with twins, because who isn’t at least slightly fascinated by twins? For both to reach a marquee event such as the U.S. Amateur is impressive—and it gets better this year, with two sets of twins, as well as another pair of brothers who are only a couple of years apart in age.

The USGA does a fine job of gathering information on each player heading into the tournament. Gleaned from those notes, here are a few of our favourite storylines.

RELATED: Andy Ogletree gets unexpected shot at defending U.S. Amateur title

Parker and Pierceson Coody
The 20-year-old twins, who play for the University of Texas, are the grandsons of 1971 Masters champion Charles Coody. Both reached the Round of 16 in last year’s U.S. Amateur at Pinehurst. Pierceson won the Western Amateur on Aug. 1.

David and Maxwell Ford
The 17-year-old identical twins from Peachtree Corners, Ga., have a triplet sister, Abigail. David won the prestigious AJGA Invitational at Sedgefield in June, and Maxwell qualified for last year’s U.S. Amateur.

Trent and Trevor Phillips
The brothers from Boiling Springs, S.C, are NOT twins, though they’re teammates at the University of Georgia. Trent, 20, earned All-Southeast Region honors for 2019-’20. Trevor, 22, has advanced to the Round of 32 in two U.S. Ams.

Andy Ogletree
The 22-year-old from Little Rock, Miss., won last year’s U.S. Amateur and will try to be the first player to win the Havemeyer Trophy in back-to-back years since Tiger Woods won three straight (1994-’96).

RELATED: Career Path Changed By Virus, Andy Ogletree Gets Unexpected Shot To Repeat As U.S. Amateur Champ

John Augenstein
He lost to Ogletree, 2 and 1, in the 2019 U.S. Amateur final and has decided to return to Vanderbilt for a fifth year rather than turn pro. Like Ogletree, he played on the winning U.S. side in the 2019 Walker Cup.

Matthew Stockman
Preston Summerhays recently won the Sunnehanna Amateur.

Preston Summerhays
The 18-year-old from an extensive professional golf family became the youngest champion of the Sunnehanna Amateur in July, and he captured last year’s U.S. Junior.

Ricky Castillo
At No. 2, he is the highest-ranked player in the field from the World Amateur Golf Rankings. With two wins in his first college season at the University of Florida, the 19-year-old earned the NCAA Division I Phil Mickelson Outstanding Freshman Award and was a first-team All-American. He was the youngest player, at 14, in the 2015 U.S. Am.

Sean Knapp
The 58-year-old from Oakmont, Pa., reaches a milestone this week by playing in his 50th USGA event. How long has he been around? He lost to eventual champion Tiger Woods in the 1995 U.S. Amateur’s Round of 16, and 22 years later won the 2017 U.S. Senior Amateur.

Alex Fitzpatrick
The 21-year-old Englishman is the younger brother of PGA Tour player Matthew Fitzpatrick. He was a member of the 2019 Great Britain and Ireland Walker Cup team and posted victories in singles and foursomes.

Noah Goodwin
The 20-year-old Texan beat current PGA Tour player Matthew Wolff in the final of the 2017 U.S. Junior.

Scott Harvey
With 32 USGA championships under his belt, the 42-year-old property manager from North Carolina won the 2014 U.S. Mid-Amateur, and he and partner Todd Mitchell captured last year’s U.S. Four-Ball at Bandon Dunes.

FELIPE TRUEBA
Yuxin Lin has twice captured the Asia-Pacific Amateur.

Yuxin Lin
The 19-year-old from China won his second Asia-Pacific Amateur last September in a playoff, qualifying him for a second appearance in the Masters.

Devon Bling
The UCLA golfer won the collegiate Bandon Dunes Championship in March. He lost to current PGA Tour professional Viktor Hovland in the finals at the 2018 U.S. Amateur at Pebble Beach.

Gene Elliott
The 58-year-old from West Des Moines, Iowa, has won the Canadian Men’s Senior Amateur and finished second to Craig Davis in the R&A’s 2019 Senior Amateur. He owns a sanitation and street equipment company and underwent open-heart surgery 20 years ago.

Stewart Hagestad
The 29-year-old from Newport Beach, Calif., has been a USGA stalwart, winning the 2016 U.S. Mid-Amateur while playing on the victorious U.S. Walker Cup teams in 2017 and 2019. He was the low amateur in the 2017 Masters.

Kelly Chinn
The 17-year-old was a semifinalist in the 2019 U.S. Junior Amateur. His father, Colin, is a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy who serves as joint staff surgeon at the Pentagon.

Doug Hanzel
The 63-year-old from Savannah, Ga., has played in 36 USGA championships, including 12 U.S. Amateurs over five different decades. The retired pulmonologist won the 2013 U.S. Senior Amateur.

Joseph Deraney
The 37-year-old from Tupelo, Miss., is a stay-at-home dad and a two-time Canadian Mid-Amateur champion. He was the runner-up to Lukas Michel in last year’s U.S. Mid-Amateur. His wife is a radiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Jovan Rebula
The 23-year-old nephew of Ernie Els is playing in his third straight U.S. Amateur. In 2018, he won the 123rd Amateur Championship, staged by the R&A, becoming the first South African to do so since 1966.

Dave Ryan
The oldest player in the field at 66, he’s played in 27 USGA championships and won the 2016 U.S. Senior Amateur.

Palmer Jackson
Named for Arnold Palmer, the 19-year-old from Murrysville, Pa., reached the quarterfinals in last year’s U.S. Amateur, becoming the first Notre Dame golfer to get that far since 1950. He helped his high school baseball team reach the quarterfinals of the Class 5A state playoffs.

Roger Newsom
The 56-year-old from Virginia Beach, Va., is a board-certified eye surgeon who in 2019 lost in the finals of the U.S. Senior Amateur.

Jeff Wilson
Copyright USGA/J.D. Cuban

Jeff Wilson
The 58-year-old car dealer in Fairfield, Calif., is playing in his 11th U.S. Amateur—among 36 total USGA starts. He won the 2018 U.S. Senior Amateur and has played in four U.S. Opens (was low amateur in 2000) and five U.S. Senior Opens.

Jackson Van Paris
Let’s call him precocious. The 16-year-old from Pinehurst, N.C., is the second-youngest player in this year’s U.S. Amateur field, and in 2018 he became the youngest golfer, at 14, since Bobby Joines in 1916 to win a first-round match.

Turk Pettit
The 21-year-old was All-East Region for Clemson this past college season. He was a high school quarterback and linebacker on the Lee-Scott Academy football team and won the Alabama Independent School Association state golf title twice.

Aurelien Meunier
Michael Thorbjornsen celebrates with teammates after the U.S. team won the 2018 Junior Ryder Cup in Paris.

Michael Thorbjornsen
The 18-year-old who is headed for Stanford in the fall captured the 2018 U.S. Junior, and in the 2019 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach he became the second-youngest player (at 17) since World War II to make the 36-hole cut, finishing 79th. His caddie at Bandon Dunes will be future Cardinal teammate Karl Vilips, a quarterfinalist in last year’s U.S. Amateur who is unable to play due to a broken finger

Travis Vick
The 20-year-old, who will be a sophomore at Texas in the fall, was a Texas all-state high school linebacker and all-district quarterback. He made the first double eagle in the history of the U.S. Junior Amateur in 2018.

The post Twins have us seeing double and 25 other intriguing storylines heading into U.S. Amateur appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

To understand why this is such a highly anticipated opening, one must appreciate the evolution of this land.

Sheep Ranch sits on about 140 acres north of the resort’s Old Macdonald course, and for the past 16 or so years, there were 13 unirrigated greens played by a very small group of golfers. Fire trucks watered the turf, where Tom Doak and Jim Urbina did initial construction after they built Pacific Dunes. Mike Keiser, owner of Bandon Dunes among his other highly popular golf resorts, bought this land in 2000 with his business partner Phil Friedmann for $4 million in cash. Doak had designed these 13 greens with crisscrossing fairways accompanying them, allowing golfers to play into them from various directions. But at the time, Keiser and Friedmann, intending at first for their land to be the site of a new private 18-hole course, stopped funding the construction after locals started talking about this secret project, worried that the success of the resort could be in jeopardy.

So Sheep Ranch sat as an unlikely, untouched golf meadow of sorts for years: Only a select number of resort guests who asked the right person were given access to this informal golf experience on the ocean’s edge. Finally, now, Sheep Ranch has been developed and is a complete golf course.

Coore and Crenshaw, after designing Bandon Trails in 2005 as the third course at the resort, in addition to the 13-hole par-3 course, The Preserve, which opened in 2012, took over the project. Nine green complexes are built against the bluffs, as Sheep Ranch boasts a mile of ocean acreage (compared to a combined two miles of ocean acreage on Bandon’s other courses).

“Getting the chance to go back to Bandon and work right on the ocean is almost beyond imagination,” Coore told Golf Digest in an interview last month. “There’s no way we could express our appreciation, certainly to Mike [Keiser], and perhaps even more so to Phil Friedmann.”

Friedmann is someone golfers will begin to hear more about. Keiser’s business partner at Recycled Paper Greetings had passed on Keiser’s original offer to partner with him on the Bandon Dunes project. And after he and Keiser purchased the Sheep Ranch land in 2000, they decided the time was now to bring Sheep Ranch to the masses.

Coore admitted to being surprised when Keiser called him to gauge his interest in studying the land for a potential routing. He figured Doak and Urbina, having done the original work, would be the likely team. Gil Hanse had also submitted a routing, and word got around that he might be working on the site.

“We just expected one of them would get the job,” Coore said. “But as I got to wander around that property over a fairly lengthy period of time, I just came to realize it had such beautiful contours for golf.”

The par 3 7th atSheep Ranch Bandon Dunes

One of the things that makes Sheep Ranch unique to the other courses at Bandon is not just its lack of sand bunkers, but its varied shoreline. Instead of sitting linearly on the coast, Sheep Ranch moves in and out with peninsulas offering the opportunity to play over cliffs on tee shots.

“You can play diagonally across the ocean away from the promontories that jut out toward the ocean, which you can’t do from any of the other [Bandon Dunes} courses,” Coore said.

“The ability to watch your tee shot go, literally, over water and over a cliff, instead of just along the water [is exciting]. The key was how best to use the shoreline.”

What connected the entire routing was clustering a handful of teeing areas (namely Nos. 2 and 18; Nos. 5 and 15 and Nos. 8 and 10). This allowed Coore and Crenshaw to build holes in different angles away from each tee, instead of the traditional adjacent fairways and landing areas.

Doing this on a walking course made this possible, without having to worry about golf-cart traffic.

“We have not, that I can recall, used three sets of tees clustering them together so deliberately to increase the latitude of area where there could be landing areas,” Coore said. “That was new for us. It was simply a matter of studying the ground and figuring out how to fit in as much golf as we could.”

What is inherently unique about this land is how windy Sheep Ranch is. And that’s due to its history as being used by a wind farm for a utility company back in 1970s. Except, the site proved too windy, and the windmills fell apart.

That was the task Coore and Crenshaw had: Find as much area for golf along the coast on a small piece of property, while also making golf playable in the extreme wind conditions. Coore admits it “wasn’t a cinch,” but his team’s routing solved the challenge.

And for Coore, it was going back to Bandon, which already meant a lot to he and his design team. Coore recalls joking with Keiser as they were working on Bandon Trails, routed through the forest and not on the water, and pointed out to the land that would become Old Macdonald, just south of where his newest course will open up: “Mike, what are we doing up in the trees?”

Coming back to build another 18-hole course was a matter of Keiser giving Coore and Crenshaw, one of the most storied teams in modern design, one more opportunity: “Mike told us, ‘You guys worked away from the ocean, you probably deserve to work on the ocean here eventually.’ And we are so grateful for that.”

The 16th at Sheep Ranch Bandon Dunes

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