Don't Shrink the Game. Educate It.

A tragic argument in golf right now is whether the game needs to get smaller. Designer Sam Beckman has a different answer: educate.

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 Samuel Beckman (owner and designer behind Emergency 9 Golf) to talk about building golf courses that clubs can actually afford to keep — and about the high school coaching job that turned out to fill the void he missed from leading large teams in corporate America.

The conversation dives into:

Why Sam came in at roughly half the master planning fee at Ridgeway, on purpose, and what "any budget" really costs the person who says itNorth Hills, where the greens had shrunk from six thousand square feet to three thousand, and every one of them is being rebuilt — from a single pin position to as many as sixteenThe tee boxes at Port Huron that Matt couldn't stop noticing, and why Scotland taught Sam that you play through a golf course rather than over itGlen Flora's restoration: two bunkers a year, built in-house with a Kubota front loader straight through COVID, and a membership that went from 160 to 275Why the superintendent is a co-author on every project, and the day one of them answered a steep bunker face with "we're gonna buy robots"Twenty-nine girls on the Lake Forest team, a Coaches Cup played for an old brass flower vase, and the freshman's video that got Sam through a bad dayConnect with our guests

⛳ Samuel Beckman — https://www.emergency9golf.com — 🐦 X/Twitter: https://x.com/emergency9golf | 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emergency9golf/ | 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-beckman-emergency9golf/

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