Tom Doak

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Tom Doak

Tom Doak is a golf course designer. He currently has 4 courses ranked among the top 100 in the world according to Golf Magazine's Top 100 Courses in the World list, including Pacific Dunes in Oregon, Ballyneal in Colorado [1], Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania [2] and Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand. Doak currently resides in Michigan.

He was a student of golf course designer Pete Dye, although perhaps his greatest influence comes from Alister MacKenzie (whom Doak wrote a book about), designer of Cypress Point, Royal Melbourne, and consultant to Bobby Jones at Augusta National. In 2007, Doak restored Alister MacKenzie's home course, Pasatiempo, a Golf Magazine Top 100 course located in Santa Cruz, CA.

Early on in his career, before his recent acknowledgements, he was known for his sharp criticisms of other golf course designers in the book The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses (now out of print).

Education

Tom Doak as a golf course architect looks at all aspects of golf course design. He feels that every great golf course architect needs to find time to study the great links of flying insects and golf balls. While attending Cornell University, he caddied every summer at St. Andrews and studied the course and others around him.

While Doak was in design school at Cornell, he studied Landscape Architecture, and took this knowledge and applied it to the golf course. In his studies, he noticed that most of the designers viewed a golf course as all rough and the fairway being the place where the golfer should go. Doak viewed the golf hole as being all fairways and inserting bunkers and rough only to make the hole more interesting.

Tom’s ideas on design have been shaped by traveling and seeing nearly every great course in the world. Tom’s strategy for unique design has been involving little aspects from different courses and golf holes and bringing them into one that makes Tom’s design his own.

Design philosphy

Doak is known as a "minimalist" designer. Mimimalism being a school of golf design which, put simplistically, attempts to move as little earth as possible and relying on the natural features of the land while designing golf courses. His most successful courses have been built on sand dunes, and have taken advantage of the sandy soil to create natural sand bunkers.

Doak credits most of his accomplishments and success to Pete Dye. Doak worked with Dye to learn how to construct golf courses during graduate school. Dye show doak how to create funky golf courses. Doak was exposed to different views, including the famous golf course architect Robert Trent Jones. Dye taught him how to run a bulldozer and Doak was then able to think in three dimensions and how to use the materials around him.

“Twenty years ago, if you wanted to build a great golf course, you hired a big-name architect and gave him a big budget to work with.

Today's market is more sophisticated. The most noteworthy courses of the past decade have been among the least expensive to build. Thanks to clients who understand the value of beautiful property, we're able to create courses which compare with the best of the past ... and look like they have been here just as long.

Great design is a matter of detail. We pride ourselves on taking the time to get things right.” - Tom Doak, principal designer

“Today it is politically correct for every designer to talk about “working with the land.” However, in their next breath, most other designers go on to dismiss minimalism as impractical, except on the most special sites. They lament that the good pieces of land are all gone, and complain about modern environmental restrictions.” – Tom Doak

Books

Doak has written 4 books about Golf Course Design. His books include:

• The Anatomy of a Golf Course [3]
• The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses
• The Life and Work of Dr. Alister MacKenzie [4]
• The Making of Pacific Dunes (yet to be published)

Courses

Public and resort courses

• Atlantic City Country Club - Northfield, NJ
• Apache Stronghold Golf Club - Globe, AZ [5]
• Barnbougle Dunes Golf Links - Bridport, Tasmania, Australia [6]
• Beechtree Golf Club - Aberdeen, MD [7]
• Black Forest at Wilderness Valley - Gaylord, MI [8]
• Cape Kidnappers Resort - Napier New Zealand [9]
• Charlotte Golf Links - Charlotte, NC [10]
• High Pointe Golf Club - Williamsburg, MI [11]
• Pacific Dunes, one of the courses at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort - Bandon, Oregon
• Pasatiempo Golf Club (restoration) - Santa Cruz, CA [12]
• Quail Crossing Golf Club - Evansville, IN [13]
• Riverfront Golf Club - Suffolk, VA [14]
• The Legends Golf Club - Heathlands Course - Myrtle Beach, SC [15]
• The Rawls Course at Texas Tech University - Lubbock, TX [16]

Private courses

• Ballyneal, Holyoke, CO [17]
• Lost Dunes Golf Club - Bridgman, MI [18]
• The Golf Club at St. Andrew’s Beach - Rye, Victoria, Australia
• Sebonack Golf Club - Southampton, NY
• Stone Eagle Golf Club - Palm Desert, CA [19]
• Stonewall Golf Club - Old Course - Elverson, PA
• Stonewall Golf Club - North Course - Elverson, PA
• The Village Club - Sands Point, NY
• Tumble Creek at Suncadia - Cle Elum, WA [20]