How David McLay Kidd doubled down on fun with new Scarecrow course at Gamble Sands—giving him another Best New winner

The first course at Gamble Sands opened in 2014 and marked David Kidd’s return to “happy” architecture after a detour into the dark corners of extreme design at places like Tetherow and St. Andrews’ Castle Course. With its broad fairways, half-par holes and feeding contours, the Sands was swashbuckling fun tailored to the joys of resort golfers rather than the vanities of elite players, and each course Kidd has built since possesses elements of this formula.

For Scarecrow, Gamble Sands’ second course, the question was how to incorporate the trademarks of the first—width, versatility, the ground game, wall-to-wall fescue turf—without replicating it. Both courses showcase panoramas of central Washington’s wide Columbia River valley, but whereas Sands plays primarily at the same grade across a broad benchland, the new course climbs and plunges, with holes like three, six, 10 and 14 climbing up and downhill as much as 70 feet. The heart of the routing, three through 14, plays across parts of what were formerly 100-acre agricultural patches covered by circular water pivots where the natural nuance and interest had been scraped away by dozers. Kidd and his shapers imagined the site as it might have been and gouged ravines and arroyos, making low spots lower and the highs higher.

A hallmark of the Sands design is long, diagonal tee shots over valleys and open washes of sand. Kidd and his lead associate, Nick Schaan, decided not to do that at Scarecrow, so the bunkers are smaller and more gnarly. The greens are also smaller but have much more internal movement than the Sands course, where even shots that miss the greens often result in recoveries with minimal break. “That’s not the case at Scarecrow,” Kidd says. “You can land the ball on the green, catch a slope and it will bounce into a hollow. You’ll have a lie you can putt from, but it’s going to have to go up a slope, onto the putting surface and then deal with a contour. The recoveries are a little more complex.”

Scarecrow gives Gamble Sands a robust counterpoint to its original course. Most golfers can swing aggressively and stoke their egos at Sands, then see if they can hold it together on a sibling that demands more from their game. “We expected players to say Scarecrow is a little tougher, and that’s generally been the reaction so far,” Kidd says. “We were willing to push the design to the point that it might offend you, and there are holes that people might walk off with doubles or triples and say, ‘That wasn’t fair!’ ” He’s perfectly OK with that—golf isn’t meant to be fair. It is meant to be fun, and early signs indicate Gamble Sands has just doubled it.

Kidd won his first Best New Course award for the original Bandon Dunes course in 1999. He also won Best Transformation in 2022 for Entrada at Snow Canyon in Utah and earned a runner-up in the 2018 Best New Public contest for Mammoth Dunes at Sand Valley.

Here's drone footage from Jeff Marsh of the Scarecrow course at Gamble Sands:

SECOND PLACE
THE KEEP AT MCLEMORE

Rising Fawn, Ga.
7,700 yards, par 72
Architects: Bill Bergin, Rees Jones

The Keep’s scenic vantage point, peering over a flank of Lookout Mountain in northwest Georgia from over 300 feet above the valley below, is almost unmatched for an inland course. Five holes flow along the cliff edge with the rest routed through the open interior providing views that stretch 10 to 20 miles into the distance. Friendly for resort golfers, the wide fairways tumble toward ample greens that alternate between gentle, almost flat surfaces like the first and 12th and more accentuated surfaces that demand short-game acumen. The par 5s are the strength of the design, but the best single hole might be the par-4 ninth playing into an elevated skyline green set against the vast horizon.

THIRD PLACE

ROOST AT CABOT CITRUS FARMS

The second course to open at the old World Woods property an hour north of Tampa is a sublime counterpoint to Cabot’s more volatile first course, Karoo, the ego to that design’s id. All the golf at Cabot Citrus Farms is big and expressionistic, but Roost also possesses an elegant coherence, partly derived from its tranquil setting amid moss-draped oaks, a terrific achievement given that four designers had input. Whitman, architect of Cabot Links in Nova Scotia, shaped the greens, and his artistic sweeps and dips and fades at holes like the par-5 third and par-4 15th carry the day, pushing right against the edge of extremity without stepping over.

HONORABLE MENTION

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