Architect Gil Hanse on building a major a championship venue to test the best men and women

USA Today

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Architect Gil Hanse on building a major a championship venue to test the best men and women
FRISCO, Texas – It's been a whirlwind stretch for architect Gil Hanse. From the renovations at Oakmont to his creation at PGA Frisco, Hanse's handiwork stands at the center of back-to-back major championships this month.
The KPMG Women's PGA Championship marks the second major championship held at the PGA of America's sprawling Frisco campus, following the 2023 Senior PGA, staged shortly after the opening of Fields Ranch East.
The course is scheduled to host a whopping 29 championships through 2034, including six majors. Golfweek caught up with Hanse on the eve of the KPMG, the third major on the LPGA's 2025 calendar.
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Transitioning from old to new
It's obviously very different from our full restoration of a golf course to a brand new golf course. I think my partner, Jim Wagner, and I love the idea that we're getting to show both sides. This golf course here, Fields Ranch East, is a lot more indicative of what we think of when we think of golf architecture – wider and angles are relevant here. We give you room to hit it off the tee, but if you're in the wrong spot, you're probably going to struggle with your second shot. Whereas Oakmont was just tight and difficult and that was the original architecture. Being able to show the ability to kind of live in the two different worlds of golf architecture is exciting for us, and it's tiring. (laughs)
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Building for the best men and women in the world
In a way, it's reminiscent of what we did in Rio for the (2016) Olympics, where we knew we were going to have multiple championships on that golf course, but we're also going to have men and women playing, so how do we set that up? We got a huge assist from Amy Alcott down in Rio and that kind of helped us understand a little bit more. Because a lot of people think, well, you just have to move the tees back and forwards and that's it, but if the women are hitting from the same landing areas as the men, the men are hitting 7-iron and they're hitting 5-iron, or maybe even higher. So you've got to get them to a place where it's commensurate with the shot values of the hole.
One of the more interesting aspects of what we did in Rio and here was that we had multiple sets of bunkers or hazards, water hazards that are in play which would be in play for the women in the main landing area, but the longer men, Rory and Bryson, might hit it there.
This golf course is all the same grass, with the exception of the greens, so we can manipulate the mowing lines any way we want to. So if we want to make it wider this week and narrow it for '27 (PGA Championship), we can do that, but we also had to figure out, we don't want to narrow it, have bunkers sitting 20 yards out in the rough that are irrelevant.
So we had to kind of figure out how do we bunker one side of the hole that we can keep the fairway right up against them, and then bring it in from the other side, and then same thing with the multiple sets of hazards for different classes of player. So it's a little bit of a jigsaw puzzle in that regard, which was, to be honest, pretty exciting.
The Amy Alcott influence
There was a lot of conversations (in Rio) about those sort of landing areas, the angles and needing to make sure, you know, if we're asking a male professional golfer to hit a shot in, they're more than likely going to get much more elevation on the shot, and we needed to make sure that hole locations that were going to be tucked behind bunkers or behind ridges, etc., that we got the women golfers far enough up that the elevation of their shots could actually match and hold the green. So it's not only distance, but it was a lot of talk about trajectory.
What the land provided
This golf course is really divided. There are natural holes, so you go, you know, two, three, four, five, six, and seven are more natural. And then on the back line, it would be 13, 14, 15, and 16 are natural. All the other holes we just had to create, all totally artificial. We hope that we did enough earthwork, that we made them look natural, and the people wouldn't know, they would just feel as if it's the entire golf course, but the holes we had to manipulate were for two reasons: They were dead flat and not very interesting, but they were also in the flood plain.
We had to elevate them to get them out of the 100-year flood plain, so that, you know, it looks like this week, touch wood, we're going to be dry. But in May, we get a lot of thunderstorms in this area and the creek floods pretty good. So we had to build these holes up. It was not an easy build, because the dirt here was really bad.
The philosophy of 'ribbon tees'
I mean, we've always been big believers in multiple options, and the ability to kind of move things around, and sometimes it's hard for people to understand or accept, because they think, well, I got to post a score. … We just want to create different options because it's super windy here. If the wind is blowing, you can always move tees up, and you're not limited to just the pods. You have a lot of flexibility in the setup of the golf course. You also feel like there's a way where you can correlate tee setup with hole locations. You can put a difficult hole location and move the tees up on that day. Or a benign hole location moving the tees back. So we just love the flexibility these ribbon tees give to you, and we also love the presentation. They just kind of feel as if they're extensions of the fairway, just kind of wander, ripple their way down.