New Tom Doak-designed course in Texas hugs the landscape beautifully

MOUNT ENTERPRISE, Texas – I was walking through the parking lot of the Jalapeno Tree Mexican restaurant on my way to a diet-busting combo platter after a hot June day of golf, when a man saw my Bandon Dunes hat and waved me down at the door. He was on his way to a booth with his wife and young daughter, but he had questions.

Had I been to Oregon to play golf at the famed resort? Which course was my favorite? Are the courses hard? What’s the weather really like? The man was wearing a Titleist hat and a polo, and he was a hard-core golf nut. My kind of people.

His wife and daughter went ahead to their table while we chatted golf for several minutes. “You know, somebody’s building a new course north of town,” he mentioned offhand.

As a matter of fact, I did know. I had spent all day traipsing around the in-development property at Wild Spring Dunes, playing 18 and shooting sunset drone video. I asked him if he knew the new development was being led by Michael Keiser, son of Bandon Dunes founder Michael Keiser? “No way,” he said with a smile, as if coastal Oregon was soon to be transported straight to East Texas.

In this region of rolling hills and piney forests, there are several options for golf but none of the big-name destination resorts that have cropped up elsewhere around the United States in recent decades, several of which have involved Michael Keiser. Wild Spring Dunes, with its first course designed by highly acclaimed architect Tom Doak and with more golf on the way, is like nothing else in this eastern stretch of the Lone Star State.

Best of all: Unlike many courses to open or that soon will following golf’s post-COVID boom, Wild Spring Dunes will be public-access. Already being played by founding members, Wild Spring Dunes will open to the public Sept. 8, and tee times for 2027 are available.

Michael Keiser – who along with his brother, Chris, developed Sand Valley in Wisconsin – has plans for three such new destinations in all, with Wild Spring Dunes joined by Rodeo Dunes (one course open, more to come) near Denver and Old Shores (one course to open in 2027, more to come) in the Florida Panhandle. Each will feature layouts by several of the top designers in the game.

At the 2,400-acre Wild Spring Dunes property that formerly served as a hunting lease, Doak was given a rolling, sandy tract that features several deep gullies carved by creeks. Never too steep and never really flat, this type of terrain is perfect for golf. The holes were laid upon this landscape close to the ground, with no feel of ever being manufactured. They incorporate the creeks where appropriate and play with ample width alongside stretches of pines and hardwoods.

Doak’s course at Wild Spring Dunes embraces the landscape with so much sense of place that I would expect the flagsticks to hum in the breeze with a Texas twang. The most common term to describe such golf design is minimalism. Doak and other top architects have said before that they want a course to fit naturally into a landscape without superficial or artificial intrusions, and that’s a better description. Doak showed his mastery of such design at Wild Spring Dunes, where long slopes and East Texas topography create plenty of interest.

But don’t confuse minimalism – or better said, naturalism wherever possible – and the frequent use of wide corridors such as those found at Wild Spring Dunes with a coddling ease of use for players. Doak introduced plenty of quirk to keep players interested, especially off the tees.

It starts at No. 1, a 408-yard par 4 that launches players off a giant mound known to locals at Mount Baldy – it’s the steepest part of the property, and it’s downhill. A series of bunkers and sandy scrapes guards the right side of the wide fairway of the gentle dogleg-right closer to the tee, but it’s a larger trap that juts into the fairway from the left farther downrange that will concern better players. This trap essentially forces right-handed players to hit a perfect cut off the tee, or play intentionally short of the sand. There’s a choice to be made, right from the start.

It’s more of the same at No. 2, a dogleg-right par 5 of 533 yards. The eye is drawn to a possible shortcut up the right, past a single tall pine set at the fairway’s edge with sand, rough and more trees farther right. There’s plenty of room left to accept nearly any type of drive, but better players will want to challenge that right side to set up a possible second shot toward the green. Farther down the fairway, the fairway pinches, the width seemingly evaporating under the Texas sun as a centerline bunker forces players to think hard about where to play a layup.

The theme continues throughout Wild Spring Dunes, the fairways wide but Doak asking plenty of questions about where a player wants to land a ball. Hit the right side of No. 14 fairway? You might be blocked by trees on the approach to the par 4. Drive up the left at the short par-4 17 th ? A whole string of scrubby, sandy misery awaits. Drive left on the par-5 18 th  past a centerline stand of spindly trees, or go much farther right where the sightlines are more obscured? You might quickly discover how quickly all that width to the left tumbles into more pines.

It’s brilliant stuff, the at-times width of these fairways lulling players into comfort that sometimes just vanishes into sand or trees. Combined with the firm, bouncy fairway turf of Stadium zoysia grass, these fairways pack plenty of surprises.

Michael Keiser said he shouldn’t be surprised by anything Doak comes up with, the pair having combined to build new courses before such as Sedge Valley and the Lido at Sand Valley, but the tee shots at Wild Spring Dunes stood out for the golf-obsessed developer.

“You know, it's wide enough for me to go slop it around, but it requires a good player to shape it in different directions on different...

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