Building the Gilroy: Old Barnwell's Second Course

What does a piece of land owe the people around it once the golf stops paying for itself?

In this episode of The Bag Drop: Untold Stories in Golf, host Matt Considine and co‑host Dr. Kevin Moore (a.k.a. “The Professor”) sit down with Blake Conant (golf course architect; co-designer of Old Barnwell and the Gilroy) to talk about the second course he is building in the dirt right now — and the master's thesis he wrote a decade earlier arguing that some golf courses should stop being golf courses.

The conversation dives into:

Why a painting degree and three months running equipment with Tom Doak at Dismal River turned out to be the right education for golf architectureBuilding the Gilroy next door to a course everybody already loves, and the Snoop Dogg rule Blake uses to keep from chasing itThe 90-acre parcel Nick Schreiber bought so the routing would work, and why Blake says architects are simply greedyA kids course with a tunnel and a ramp, built on Brian Schneider's premise that kids do not actually want to puttThe 2013 thesis on bankrupt courses: what Blake got right about supply, what he missed about demand, and why the courses that closed were the wrong onesThe arithmetic that decides whether affordable public golf gets built at all — roughly ten dollars of green fee for every million spentConnect with our guest

🎨 Blake Conant — https://www.dundeegolf.com/ 🐦 X/Twitter: https://x.com/Dundee_Golf — | 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dundeegolf/ | 💼 https://www.linkedin.com/in/blake-conant-90566a37/

⛳️ Old Barnwell — https://oldbarnwell.com

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