The historic William Land Golf Course in Sacramento celebrated its 100th anniversary on Saturday and revealed a new restoration plan designed to take the course into its next 100 years, officials said.
“Land park is a community asset,” said Ken Morton Sr. of Morton Golf, which manages a number of Sacramento’s public courses.
“It improves the quality of life for the people who live around it. It has created generations and generations of families who have grown up playing golf together here.”
William Land Golf Course is a public nine-hole course that sits on the southeast corner of William Land Regional Park just south of downtown Sacramento. Locals consider it a historic site and one of the best urban courses in Northern California.
Restoration plans include: modernizing its antiquated water system, improving tee boxes and updating greens and bunkers.
The plan is expected to cost $5 to $7 million and will be completed over the next decade, Morton said, with the timing heavily dependent on funding.
Brett Hochstein of Hochstein Design is overseeing the project, which was submitted to the city and approved this spring.
“It’s hard to describe, because it means a ton to me,” Hochstein said. “To see a place like this and know how special it is, right off the bat, and then to spend more time here and being here from dawn to dusk, and all the different people who come by. Just the energy and the vibes of the whole place, it’s truly special. There’s few places that I’d rather be working at than this.”
Hochstein Design has worked on a slew of prominent courses, including helping architect Jim Urbina recently with restorative shaping around the greens at Pasatiempo in the Santa Cruz mountains. Pasatiempo was originally designed by famous architect Alister MacKenzie, who went on to design the course at Augusta which hosts the Masters.
Hochstein has also done work with architect Jay Blasi on the greens, sand scrape, detailing, shaping and finish work at the newly-opened Golden Gate Park Golf Course in San Francisco.
The William Land Park Course currently features five par 4s, three par 3s and a par 5. It has wide fairways and pronounced bunkers, giving Hochstein a canvas to add more details.
“There’s a big opportunity to create a lot of strategy, interest and charm with some very simple, easy-to-pull-off moves,” Hochstein said. “We don’t have to do major earth moving out here to make this very interesting.”
The hope is the improvements will make the course sustainable long into the future.
“We need to have a long-range plan. We can’t just go in and fix things,” Morton said. “Everything we do has to have a purpose behind it. That’s what brought in Brett. And then we talked to the city, and we said we want to create a long term plan for the golf course to prepare it for the next 100 years.
“And they were totally on board with that and have been very good to work with along the way to get that in place.”
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