Each subject attracts precocious abilities. Golf-course architecture is not any completely different. Should you’re passingly acquainted with the career, you understand a number of the huge names of the trendy period. Tom Doak. Gil Hanse. Invoice Coore. David McLay Kidd.

Right here’s one on your watch listing: William Carlson, the Doogie Howser of golf design.

Carlson is 17 and about to graduate from Cardinal Newman Excessive College, in Santa Rosa, Calif., the place he lettered for 4 years on the golf staff. He loves the sport, however his fondness for it goes hand-in-hand with a fascination for the grounds on which it’s performed.

“I’ve at all times appreciated the thought of making one thing that individuals get to expertise after which react to,” Carlson says. “Seeing these reactions is a robust factor.”

Lately, Carlson has entered design competitions and utilized for internships at golf structure corporations. A distinguished store responded with a proposal that Carlson couldn’t settle for because it required a transfer to Florida; he was 15 on the time.

Nor has Carlson’s work been confined to paper. At Santa Rosa Nation Membership, the place his household belongs, his urged tweaks to the dog-leg left par-4 thirteenth gap (tee field shifted; bushes eliminated) have been adopted. After which there’s the undertaking he wrapped up simply this month at Northwood Golf Club, a beloved nine-hole, Golden Age design, tucked into the redwoods of Sonoma County, the place Carlson spearheaded a focused enchancment.

That’s proper. The teenager prodigy helped contact up a MacKenzie.

“He got here to us with a really nicely thought-out concept, and we trusted him with it,” says course supervisor Gaylord Schaap, whose household has run Northwood for greater than 50 years. “It was just about, Okay, child, now present us what you’ve bought.”

Within the glittery portfolio of Alister MacKenzie, which incorporates Augusta National and Cypress Level, public-access Northwood is much from the highest-profile course. However it’s a darling of design aficionados. Carlson has recognized of it for greater than half his life.

He first performed it along with his grandparents, in 2015, when he wasn’t but attuned to the charms of the structure or the historical past behind it. Lower him some slack. He was nonetheless in grade college. 

In addition to, he bought the image quickly sufficient.

Higher readability arrived for him in 2020, when lockdowns hit and golf grew to become for Carlson what it was for a lot of: a uncommon outlet for recent air and train. Northwood was roughly half-hour from his home, and, as a junior golfer, he might play it for $5.

The extra he looped it, the extra he beloved it. In 2023, he poured that zeal right into a analysis undertaking.

“I made a decision I’d study all the things I might in regards to the course,” Carlson says. 

There was a lot to digest. In-built 1928 and opened for play the next 12 months, Northwood sits throughout the Russian River from the Bohemian Grove, a greater than 150-year-old artists’ encampment that marries the free-spiritedness of Woodstock with the blue bloodlines of a tweedy non-public membership. The concept for a nine-hole course on this sylvan setting was initially proposed by Bohemian Grove member and Pebble Seaside co-designer, Jack Neville, who inspired MacKenzie to hold out the work.

In its early years, Northwood went by a turnstile of householders whereas weathering fallout from the Nice Despair. Over the many years, its MacKenzie glow grew dim.

By the point Carlson first noticed it, the Schaap household had completed a lot to revive Northwood. However nobody might have rightly argued that the course had returned absolutely to its roots. 

Carlson resolved to do some digging.

“I needed to see what it regarded like at first,” he says.

His job was difficult by the truth that MacKenzie’s authentic drawings of the course had been consumed by a hearth many years earlier than. Carlson leaned as an alternative on previous postcards of the property, which the Schaaps supplied, together with aerial pictures and different imagery that he unearthed within the county archives.

The items of a puzzle had been coming collectively. Carlson simply wanted to provide them remaining form.

From a really early age, Carlson had displayed a creative streak. He loved creating board video games and drawing imaginary landscapes, a pastime he took up proper across the time he realized to carry a crayon. Now, he used these abilities to provide a map of Northwood, which he introduced to the Schaaps, who in flip displayed it within the Northwood clubhouse, the place it grew to become a dialog piece amongst golfers and employees alike.

For Carlson, although, speak was not sufficient.

“I’d been desperate to do some kind of design undertaking of my very own,” he says.

By way of his analysis, he’d found that Northwood had as soon as sported round 40 sand bunkers. Solely 9 remained. The remaining had been deserted, their imprint gone or overgrown. 

Rebuilding all of them was not an possibility. A undertaking of that scope was past Carlson’s bandwidth and Northwood’s funds. It will additionally bathroom down operations at a busy public course. However a single bunker. That was life like. In collaboration with Trevor Schaap, Northwood’s superintendent (and Gaylord’s son), Carlson set his sights on the par-4 sixth gap, which was lacking its authentic fairway bunker, a slyly located hazard, 40 yards wanting the placing floor, that appeared to take a seat straight in entrance of the inexperienced.

“We selected it as a result of it’s central to the course and would convey lots of technique to a beforehand simple par-4,” Carlson says. “It will additionally convey again a few of MacKenzie’s signature deception.”

They submitted a proposal and the Northwood board signed off.

Work on the undertaking started in April. Carlson was concerned in a number of phases, portray the bunker’s amoeba-like define and getting his fingers soiled with preliminary excavation. Schaap and his staff dealt with the majority building, with Carlson pitching in on the ultimate particulars. On Could 8, the unique bunker was again in play.

For Northwood, the undertaking was the right place to begin, a pleasant technique to check the waters with out getting in too deep. Strategic problem was all nicely and good, however not if it slowed down play.

“We didn’t need it to backfire on us,” Gaylord Schaap says. “We’re a nine-hole course with two-and-quarter hour rounds. We couldn’t afford to make them two-hour-and-forty-five minute rounds.”

Thus far, that hasn’t occurred. The early suggestions, Schaap says, has been buoyant, suggesting that the sixth gap would possibly grow to be a prelude to additional bunker work. Carlson would seemingly be concerned with something that occurs.

Within the meantime, although, he’s bought a lot on his plate. Yearly since 2021, Carlson has submitted for the Ray Haddock Lido Prize, which is awarded by the Alister MacKenzie Society in reminiscence of the architect, whose rise to prominence was propelled by his personal victory in a design competitors greater than a century in the past. Carlson has but to win, however this 12 months’s outcomes are anticipated any day.

No matter transpires on that entrance, Carlson is aware of what’s subsequent. This fall, he begins faculty at California Polytechnic State College, in San Luis Obispo, the place he plans to main in panorama structure. The long run lies earlier than him, a reachable par-5 stuffed with promise. And the draw of the Golden Age however, there’s no trying again.