How to Design a Golf Course on Paper

Thinking like a golf course architect can change the way you see the game, turning every hole into a story of risk and reward. Designing a golf course on paper is a fascinating exercise that blends art, engineering, and a deep appreciation for golf strategy. This guide will walk you through the fundamental steps of routing holes, using the land to your advantage, and creating a strategic challenge that is both fair and memorable, all from the comfort of your desk.

The Foundation: Understanding Your Canvas

Before a single line is drawn, a great golf course design begins with a deep understanding of the land it will occupy. You don’t force a design onto a property, you discover the design that the property wants to yield. This first phase is all about listening to the land and gathering information.

Start with a Topographical Map

Your primary tool is a topographical map, also known as a “topo map.” This isn’t just any map, it’s a detailed rendering of the property’s physical features. Here’s what it shows you:

• Contour Lines: These lines connect points of equal elevation. When lines are close together, it indicates a steep slope. When they are far apart, the terrain is flat or gently rolling. This is the single most important feature for routing holes and envisioning drainage.
• Water Features: Existing rivers, streams, ponds, and wetlands are all clearly marked. These are natural hazards and strategic elements waiting to be incorporated.
• Vegetation: The map will show wooded areas, highlighting stands of mature trees that you might want to preserve, either as aesthetic backdrops or as strategic obstacles.
• Existing Structures: Any buildings, roads, or property lines will be on the map, defining the boundaries you must work within.

You can often find these maps through a local government’s surveying office or a resource like the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). They provide the blueprint upon which your entire vision will be built.

Conduct a Site Analysis

A map tells you a lot, but nothing replaces the experience of walking the land. If you have access to a piece of property (even a local park or large backyard for practice), walk it with your topo map in hand. As you do, make notes about things a map can’t tell you:

• Prevailing Winds: In which direction does the wind typically blow? This will be a major factor in hole strategy and difficulty.
• Sun Direction: Where does the sun rise and set? You ideally want to avoid having players looking directly into a low morning or evening sun on holes 1, 10, 9, or 18.
• Unique Natural Features: Look for what makes the property special. A dramatic rock outcropping, a single ancient oak tree, a natural ridgeline with a stunning view - these are opportunities to create "signature" moments on the course.
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Where does water naturally want to go? Identifying low-lying areas that will be wet and high points that will be dry is essential for playability.
• Soil and Turf Conditions: What’s already there? Sandy soil drains well and is great for links-style golf. Clay soil holds water and requires more attention to drainage in the design.

The Big Picture: The Art of Routing

Once you understand the land, the next step is routing. Routing is the flow of the course - the journey a golfer takes from the first tee to the eighteenth green. This is a big-picture puzzle, and your goal is to lay out the 18-hole corridor in a way that is logical, enjoyable, and safe. You’ll be working with tracing paper over your topo map, sketching and re-sketching ideas.

Core Principles of Good Routing

A functional and celebrated golf course stands on a handful of routing principles:

• Flow and Pace of Play: The walk from a green to the next tee box should be short and intuitive. Long, confusing walks frustrate golfers and slow everything down. A good flow feels natural and effortless.
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This is a non-negotiable. You must provide ample space between parallel fairways to prevent golfers on one hole from hitting into players on another. Also, keep tee boxes out of the line of fire from the previous green.
• Variety is Everything: A monotonous course is a boring course. Good routing creates variety naturally. Change hole directions so players face shots with different winds (downwind, into the wind, crosswinds). Mix up the hole lengths - don't have three long par 4s in a row. A truly great routing asks questions of the golfer across the entire game, testing different shots and clubs sequentially.
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Identify the most stunning parts of the property. Do you have a coastline, a dramatic canyon, or a hilltop with a 360-degree view? Save these locations for your "signature" holes - often Par 3s or the finishing holes where you can build something spectacular that people will remember.
• Returning Nines: Whenever possible, design the 9th and 18th holes to finish back at the clubhouse. This allows for two starting points (the 1st and 10th tees), which is more efficient for running a golf course, and brings players back for a break after the front nine.

During this stage, you’re not designing the intricate details of each bunker or green. You are simply drawing corridors on tracing paper, saying, "Hole 1 will go from here to here... Hole 2 from here to here..." and so on, working to make all 18 puzzle pieces fit together perfectly on the property.

Crafting the Experience: Hole-by-Hole Strategy

With your routing roughed out, you can now zoom in and start designing the character of individual holes. This is where you put on your golf coach hat and think about strategy. A golf hole should be a puzzle that challenges the thinking player. The finest holes offer multiple ways to be played.

Introduce Strategic Options

Avoid simplistic, straight-ahead holes where the only challenge is execution. Instead, build in choices. This is known as strategic design. Here are a couple of classic concepts:

• The "Heroic" Route: This involves a direct shot that requires carrying a hazard (like a bunker, water, or deep gully). The player who pulls it off is rewarded with a much easier next shot. The player who fails is penalized significantly. Think of a dogleg par 4 where you can try to cut the corner over a cluster of tall trees. Success leaves you with a flip wedge to the green, failure leaves you with zero shot.
• The "Strategic" or "Safe" Route: This is a more conservative line of play that avoids the main hazard but leaves a more difficult or longer subsequent shot. On that same dogleg, the safe play is to aim for the wide part of the fairway, leaving a mid-iron shot into the green from a tougher angle.

The goal is to make the golfer think on the tee box. The best line of play shouldn't always be obvious.

Put Your Tools to Work: Drawing a Hole

This is where your vision truly comes to life on paper. Grab your tool kit: your base map, tracing paper, pencils, a scale ruler, and colored pencils.

Let's design a hypothetical 430-yard Par 4.

1. Identify Tee and Green Sites: Look at your routing and topo map. Find a natural high point for your tee box and an interesting spot for your green. Maybe there's a natural bowl in the landscape that would make a perfect amphitheater green site.
2. Sketch the Centerline: Draw a faint line from the middle of your teeing area to the center of your potential green site. Use your scale ruler to ensure it measures out correctly to 430 yards. This is your baseline.
3. Shape the Fairway: A fairway shouldn't be a uniform landing strip. Shape it according to your strategy. Maybe you have a wide landing area at 250 yards for the safe tee shot. For the "heroic" player, you might have the fairway narrow considerably near a bunker complex at the 280-yard mark. Color in the fairway with a green pencil.
4. Place Your Hazards: This is the fun part. Using your brown pencil, draw in fairway bunkers that force a decision off the tee. Do you put them on the left side, the right side, or in the middle to make players choose a side? Using your blue pencil, maybe a small stream crosses the front of the green, making the approach shot more demanding. Green-side bunkers should be placed to defend pin positions and penalize errant approach shots.
5. Detail the Green Complex: The green is the heart of the hole. Don’t just draw a circle. Think about its shape - is it long and narrow, or wide and shallow? Use pencil shading to indicate slopes or tiers. A "Biarritz" green has a deep swale in the middle. A "Redan" green slopes away from the player from front to back. How does the surrounding area feed balls onto the green, or repel them away? This level of detail transforms a drawing into a real golf experience.

Repeat this process for all 18 holes, always keeping variety in mind. If you just designed a hole that favors a right-to-left shot (a draw for a righty), make the next one favor a left-to-right shot. Follow a long hole with a shorter one. The rhythm and pacing are just as important as the individual holes themselves.

Final Thoughts

Designing a golf course on paper is an immersive creative process that reveals the beautiful connection between land, strategy, and the sport itself. By understanding the terrain through maps and site-walks, thoughtfully routing the holes for flow and variety, and crafting individual strategic puzzles, you can begin to think like the world's best architects.

While most of us won’t be building a course from scratch, applying this architectural mindset to our own games is incredibly powerful. Understanding why a bunker is placed precisely where it is, or seeing the safe versus the heroic route, elevates your course management from guessing to executing. That same kind of an expert perspective is now so much more accessible. Technology like Caddie AI acts like an on-demand course strategist in your pocket. I'm excited because a tool like this helps you analyze tricky lies or map out a smart plan for the hole ahead, giving you the same kind of strategic clarity that comes from understanding a course’s design inside and out.