20 INNOVATIVE DESIGN When Southmoore Golf Course near Allentown, Pennsylvania, required changes to its eighteen-hole layout (originally designed by ASGCA Fellow James Blaukovitch) due to development plans for a portion of the property, a trio of designers came together to propose a unique and innovative design. ASGCA Past President Forrest Richardson, Jeff Danner, ASGCA, and Mark Fine, ASGCA, had to find a way to incorporate the new development while preserving as much golf as possible. Conventional solutions weren’t cutting it. So it was time to throw out the rulebook and get very creative. “Mark made extensive studies of the land,” says Richardson, who led the collaboration with Fine. “Together we put on our thinking caps to come up with alternatives that would be fun and engaging. We were looking for a routing concept that was new – something that would be ‘outside the box’ and exciting.” The trio landed on a completely new concept; each hole would play alongside a ‘twin’. Richardson says: “They’re definitely not identical twins. In fact, the pairs of holes – each pair referred to as ‘left’ and ‘right’ – are often a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ of one another.” An eighteen-hole routing, comprising nine pairs of holes was completed, and ‘Duel on the Hill’ was borne. Both holes in each pair may be nearly identical in length, but with stark contrasts: for example, one may play on a sidehill sloping left, while the other slopes to the right, one may be heavily bunkered while the other has a creek. By Design takes a look at ‘Duel on the Hill’, an out-of-the-box design that has two sets of nine holes playing alongside each other. The concept is the result of a collaboration between three golf course architects. Seeing double The proposed ‘Duel on the Hill’ design is for each nine to be around 2,300 yards and a par of 32
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