Naming a golf course? Can be more difficult than building a

As the summer of 2024 crashed into East Washington, Tory Wulf, a project manager at Hazardous sandwas due to excitement and worry. In the decade since it opened, the Gamble Sands had gained a reputation as an attitude and game should mainly in the strength of a single, eponymous course. Now, though, after a few years you adapt and begins, a second 18-hole was close to finishing, designed, as her sister, by David McLay Kidd.

In the long, warm days of July and August, the terrain had taken root and the layout contours had come to relief. Wulf felt sure he was working for a winner, even though he was worried about uncertainty. He had no data on what the new course will be called.

“From the beginning, I knew we had good land and a good stylist, so I realized that building course would be the light part,” Wulf says. “The hardest part was coming by a name.”

For a game that bills itself as ancient, nomenclature questions are relatively new. It seems sure to assume, however, that the 15th-century Scottish shepherds spent some time debating how to mark the roads they left from the dunes. But that was then. The issues of the naming appeared quickly.

In 1821, to quote a noticeable early example, plans were designed for a course in St. Andrews referring to the appearance as a pilmoor connection. The label did not stick. The locals dealt with the call of St. Course links. Andrews, and continued in that practice until 1895, when another course was built in the city. The arrival of this new course, AKA, the new course, returned the old course Old coursea historical transformation overnight.

Name game is no longer simple.

Nowadays, courses are born in a widespread market and all the trade machinery that surrounds it. The handwriting on the tongue is equal to the process. Matherts of images. It’s about making money. Golf courses are a business. Their name is too.

Many industry consultants offer their assistance in the field. Because the service tends to join the next work of brands and communication, it is difficult to determine how much it costs. But a veterans’ course operator who demanded anonymity said that developers with deep pocket routinely end up paying tens of thousands of dollars for a moniker that fits.

A cynical can regard this as a record. How complicated is it, really, to baptize a golf course? Simply attach a bird prey with a geological trait (Eagle Lake, Osprey Ridge) or Tack On national with a proper name or name (National troutNational Carolina) and the work is done. Indeed, the most common golf courses, according to the National Golf Foundation, are Rolling Hills and Riverside.

But you get the essence of the tired look.

More generous is that naming the golf course, though far from neuroscience, requires some thoughts. In addition to creative requirements, there are legal considerations. An industry veteran told Golf.com that he abandoned plans to name a Kitsune course-a spirit of Japanese folklore fox-when he discovered that it was already taken from a line of Korean clothing. Woe is the course operator that inadvertently copies a religious competitor in possession of a trademark name.

As vice president of communication links, a respected Golf -based firm based on Scottsdale, Jerry Rose has been in the brand business quite a while to know that the challenges of naming vary from case to case.

Sometimes, when future customers reach Rose and his colleagues, they already have a name in mind, usually for personal reasons. One such project was 21 Club, a private club-in South Carolina, where one of the co-founders had a special link to the number in the name: 21 was the birthday of his father and his three daughters. Moreover, one of the two planned property courses was configured in 21 alternative holes.

“How can you argue with an original story like this?” Rose says.

In other cases, deeper research is included. A consultant can spend days reading local history and culture, or hours in the country in search of inspiration from a defining feature – a view, a valley, a rock exit. You never know when the muse can speak. In the early 2000s, after walking a property with a developer in North Scottsdale and turned out to be empty, Rose and his team hit the dirt on the pages of an elderly Architectural Digestin which the former landowner described a parcel that was thought to have served as a astral prehistoric observation.

“If you hear closely,” read the quote, “you can hear the whisper on the rocks.”

And with that, rock-end whispering of the high desert and the Tour Popular Pro Hangout is done.

Back to East Washington, where Summer had given the way in early fall, Tory Wulf and Co. still had to complete their opinion. But they would narrow their choices.

“We had three parameters,” he says. “The name had to be simple, only one or two words. Had to have a connection to the land. And it had to be something that would allow us to create a good logo. “

An option they would consider was a rotation in the first course. Gamble Sands is owned by a long agricultural family for a long time, whose patriarch, Dan Gamble, moved west by Nova Scotia in the 1800s. The land where he settled happened to be Sandy. Said enough.

Gamble may have worked again in a name – cliffs gamble? Bluffs gamble? – But the family decided it was not the way to go. The new course must have an identity of all its own.

Brain storm sessions produced a candidate culture. Old Kob. Deer farm. Twisted saddle. The first was a knot for corn raising the family, the second a reference to a past local new creator, the third one description of the course, which zigged and zagged along a ridge.

None of them cut it enough.

“After all, they just didn’t get right or the explanation behind them was too much,” Wulf says.

As much as he praised the group’s contribution, Wulf envied operations where a single voice had an authoritarian saying. This can make an easier decision. Surely no one argued much with Michael Jordan when he chose to duplicate his club in Florida Grove XXIII.

Not that you have to be a Hooper fame hall to slam the name of Dunk. In the late 1990s, while Bandon Dunes was being built on Oregon’s coast, there was little agonizing on what would be called, according to Josh Lesnik of the Kempersports Sports Management Company, who helped form the resort in its planning stages and early life. The course passed through the dunes a few miles north of the city of Bandon. The name, as the layout, matched the location.

Serendipity can also play a role. In Streamsong, which opened in Florida in 2013, the first two courses were dreamed of at the same time in the parcels adjacent to different stylists, Tom Doak and Bill Coore. To distinguish their roads in the drafting stages, DOAK drew in the blue pen, coore with red. Therefore, courses names: blue and red, a topic that was repeated four years later, when the resort cut the ribbon in its black flow. Recently, Streamsong left the model when he opened a short course whose name, the chain, is related to the past of property mines. But now comes news that However, another full -sized layout is in the works. Yellow streamsong? Green? Purple? Puce? Smart Money says its name will be a color.

After all, what is true in Golf applies to the Golf Course brand: it is often better not to overthrow it. Examine the experience of Tom Pasley, the president of Pinhurst Resort, who revealed her 10th course this last April. When he first notified the project, Pinhurst took pain to avoid calling it no. 10. But no one was surprised when the last word came down.

“I always joke that we hire expensive consultants and then decide to mention the next course sequentially,” Pasley says.

There is a school of opinion that holds that golf courses are like children: they grow up in whatever name you give them. (Stripped of the context, Pine Valley does not stand as a name; it is the course that gives the words cachet, not the other way around).

Tory Wulf was inclined to agree. Time was also short. Although the magnificent opening of the new course was not planned until August 2025, a humiliating view to the media settled in mid -October. The press needed a moniker to print. Beyond that was the issue of trading. You can’t book a pro -branded store, shirts, hats and more if you didn’t have a name from which to work.

Sitting down the clock, the Gamble Sands collective reappeared an option that had begun earlier, a single -word, logo -friendly name with a clear agricultural association.

What about scarecrow?

“We’ve got all the predictable criticism,” says Wulf. “Too a lot of Halloween. Is very much Oz. That’s how it goes. ”

The whole comment can promote a crazy person. Jerry Rose, in Scottsdale, had learned to rise above him.

“Developers set up a lot of shares in getting the right name,” he says. “But I have believed the name is completely secondary to experience. If a place is extraordinary, it really doesn’t matter how you call it.”

Tory Wulf agreed. Moreover, he was convinced that Scarecrow would be a killer. This perspective gave him comfort, as well as another conclusion he had come to.

“You can try everything you want, but no matter which name you present, you will never enjoy everyone all the time.”