The Short Course

Call it short, but mighty.

That’s the perspective golfers will have when visiting Turnberry Golf Club. While the course may only measure 3,408 yards over 18 holes and take up 85 acres, it is unlike any other golfing experience in the Toronto area. Over 16 par-3s and two par-4 holes, the course captures the feel of Eagles Nest, its sister course 20 minutes to the east, while also emulating several of the great one-shot holes in the game of golf.

“I think it is important, even with the beginning golfer, that we are not insulting them by giving them a mundane experience that they won’t remember,” says Cam Tyers, an associate golf designer at the firm of Carrick Design who created Turnberry with Doug Carrick. “We want the beginning golfer to be exciting and amazed. And we know the course will challenge better players as well.”

Like Eagles Nest, Turnberry is reclaims a landscape that had been extensively used as an aggregate pit. It bore the deep scars of massive excavations. Duane Aubie, Executive Director at Eagles Nest, knew the site would not contain a full-length course, and turned to Carrick Design for alternatives. Carrick, along with Tyers, had created Eagles Nest and immediately felt similarities between that course and the site for Turnberry.

Both sites contained abandoned quarries, and both had been used as areas to deposit unwanted earth from other construction sites. Given connections to the construction industry of the ownership group for both Eagles Nest and Turnberry, Tyers was given the opportunity to bring in more earth that could then be used to create landscape features.

That meant recreating some of the massive outcroppings of earth that appear like seaside dunes at Eagles Nest and offer separation between the holes. Tyers notes that while the land at Turnberry may have precluded a full-length facility, the scale of the mounding makes each of the 18 holes will feel isolated, allowing golfers to focus on the task at hand. Some of the created dunes, like those on the first and final holes, are actually larger in scale than anything attempted at Eagles Nest. It still proved a challenge to find a final routing that made the best use of the available land, Tyers says.

“Getting the right golf envelope to work was difficult,” he adds. “Once you have that, creating the ideas for the holes was the fun part.”

The concept of a short-length course has become diluted by so-called “executive” courses where little consideration was given to the design. Lacking character, they inevitably fail to capture the imagination of golfers, whether they are established players or new to the game. The concept with Turnberry was to move away from the “executive” concept and craft a course of par-3s that would rival those on any championship-length course.

“This isn’t a mom-and-pop kind of golf course,” Tyers explains. “It is way more than that. We’ve created interesting holes and interesting green sites.”

Tyers tapped into the archetypes of golf, including some of the game’s most famous holes, when developing the project. Though there are no replica holes on the property, Tyers took inspiration from some of the game’s classic par-3 holes. A trip to Long Island, New York yielded the concept for the second hole, based around “Short,” the sixth hole at the fabled National Golf Links, typically considered the first great golf course in North America. The 12th at National Golf Links, with its dip in the middle of the green, also turns up on the Biarritz hole on Turnberry’s 13th. A crafty feature that some might immediately feel is unfair, the 13th, at 165-yards, contains a three foot dip gully that runs through the middle of the green, separating the back and front of the putting surface.  In other parts of the course, Tyers used examples from Scotland’s Royal Troon (and its much vaunted Postage Stamp hole, seen on Turnberry’s 120-yard 4th hole) and North Berwick’s West Links (the famed Redan, which shows up as Turnberry’s 11th) to build holes that would excite all those that played them.

The project is also a success beyond the golf, Tyers says. One of the most rewarding factors for Tyers is that once completed Turnberry transformed a piece of property from an eyesore into a course that is breathtaking and beautiful.

“There is some satisfaction to rehabilitate a site like that and put it to use,” he explains. “You could let nature take over but that would take years. We are speeding up the process and putting it to use.”

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