Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon, USA, will open its fifth 18-hole course, Sheep Ranch, to the public in June 2020, following completion of design work by Coore & Crenshaw.
Co-founded by Phil Friedmann and Mike Keiser, the resort’s new par-71 layout measures 6,785 yards and plays along one mile of ocean frontage.
Sheep Ranch originally comprised 13 greens laid out by Doak and Jim Urbina in 2001, while they worked on the Pacific Dunes course at the resort. Since then, became something of a ‘secret’, not open to the public and only few golfers having experienced it.
In recent years, Friedmann and Keiser appointed Coore & Crenshaw to complete a full 18-hole design for the course, which has now been fully constructed. Nine of the course’s greens sit directly on the cliff edges overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
The course is set on approximately 140 acres north of the resort’s Old Macdonald course, and the routing features a shared green (the third and sixteenth) and several fairways that blend together.
Bill Coore told Golf Digest: “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. 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.”
According to Coore, clustering teeing areas on the second and eighteenth, the fifth and fifteenth, and eighth and tenth, connected the routing. “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,” he told Golf Digest. “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.”
Nine holes recently opened for preview play and the back nine is currently being grassed.
