No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - NLU Podcast, Episode 707: Christine Fraser

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Golf course architect Christine Fraser joins Soly to detail her philosophy around her golf course design work, creating community centered courses, learning the tools of the trade under Martin Hawtree while living in Europe, getting her own company started and working as a woman in the GCA space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm going to be the right club today. Yes! That is better than most. I'm not in. That is better than most. Better than most. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the No Laying Up podcast. Solid here. Got an interview coming shortly with a first time guest on this show, which is Christine Fraser.

She's a golf course architect. You may have seen her in some commercials lately, some Charles Schwab commercials. She's a part of the Challenger series this past year. Great story behind her and her path to golf. I really strongly recommend you go to SchwabGolf.com. Check out the Challenger video they did with her the full five and a half minute version, more than just the commercial to learn a bit more about her

and kind of compliment this episode, which I think is a fantastic interview. As the official investment firm of the PGA Tour, it is obvious Schwab has both a passion for golf and investing. And now through October 31st, when you make a qualifying net-depositive cash or securities into a Schwab taxable brokerage account, you can get up to six rounds of golf at top golf courses, a titleist T.S.R. driver, and a dozen ProV1 golf balls. You can tee off at over 100 participating courses nationwide, including some of our favorites, Bannon Dune, San Valley, Gearheart,

Cordaline, TPC Sawgrass, for more details about Schwab's golf promotion and terms and conditions, please visit SchwabGolf.com without any further delay. Here is Christine Fraser. All right, Christine, welcome to the show. We are excited to have you for the listeners driving in their car that have clicked on this episode that are not familiar with who Christine Fraser is.

Give us, it can be a two minute, it can be a 10 minute. What's your background and why are we here today? Oh my gosh, hi, I'm so happy to be here. So yeah, I'm a golf course architect and it's taken me a long time to be able to, say that out loud and admit that to myself, but that's just clearing that. That's my dog in the background.

So don't mind that. Yeah, so I'm a golf course architect and I started out playing golf, and I happened to get good at it, and it allowed me to go down to Florida and have a golf scholarship, and see a lot of different types of golf courses that we don't have in Canada,

so that was kind of my first introduction to different kinds of golf courses. And I really fell in love with the golf landscape, and I had actually grown up on a Gulf course. My grandparents in the 70s bought a cornfield and decided they wanted to design and build a Gulf course. And that would be the family business. So I've kind of, it's kind of been around to be my whole life.

And my brother and I would spend every waking hour during the summers on the Gulf course messing around. And the only role was don't bother the golfers. So we were on our own to just find pick golf balls from the pond or find them in the woods. And my first job was bagging teas of make 10 cents of bags. So Well, I would suggest for listeners go to Schwab golf.com. Check out her Challenger video where they go to to that golf course with your grandmother.

It's a it's a heartwarming. It just made me smile. I was watching it. It's so special. So special. So golf is just it means so much to me because it is a family business. And my grandfather and my grandmother started this incredible legacy. And golf has just given me so much through through them. I'm excited to talk to you today because a lot of what we've been talking about in this podcast for years and months recently has been really not fun side of golf, but the reason we all got into this was kind of hearing you talk about it and reading about your philosophy and things is exactly a lot of why I love golf.

But you said, and I've read this from you, you've said, you want to invite people to the game through accessible architecture. And I have personally found that I see people can kind of thumb their nose at the term architecture, yet I contend that everyone has their golf experience heavily influenced by a lot of the considerations that I think you're gonna talk to me about today. So what does that turn me to you?

What do you mean by accessible architecture? Yeah, I mean, very basically, as a woman stepping on a golf course, we need to have bathrooms out there. So that's like, that's a great place to start of just making sure there are accessible bathrooms throughout the golf course for us. And just focusing on the experience of golf rather than the actual technique or strategy or or playing of golf is where that really excites me. If you know, how can we use golf as a tool to better people's lives and enrich people's lives

and evolve relationships and evolve your mental health and work on your physical health. So to me, golf is kind of just the tool that I like to use to allow people to evolve. The little bit of this that I've experienced is when we're like hosting a tournament and we are setting up a golf course, setting up teas or whatever it is. I've gone through that whole experiment of like, man, there's there's two

ladies playing in this and I put next to no thought into where we put the forward teas in this. I have it's morning of we got to set the teas and I haven't thought about this and I you know through that lens I think of I imagine a lot of golf course design is done with the forward teas, the female teas being a bit of an afterthought. I think we end up with them being too far back in a lot of cases. But what's kind of, what can your perspective bring in that regard and kind of bringing that to light at clubs that maybe there is a large female presence of female players, maybe the clubs where there's not and you're trying to encourage that. what's kind of your philosophy and introducing that to clubs you work with? Yeah, in both cases, I mean, we want to give everyone an equal experience of greatness or

challenge and enjoyment on the golf course. And all that really is, is just being considerate about how we use architecture to guide people through a routing or through a hole. And it starts at the T's, really. And in a lot of the cases, it's just adapting existing golf courses to accommodate beginners, seniors, women, people with injuries, people with adaptive needs, people who generally aren't the first person that architects consider historically. So just bringing a different perspective to golf and making sure that we're intentional and we create equality. And that just leads

to a better experience for everyone and at the end of the day. I mean, if we have more women and more marginalized people playing golf, it's more revenue for our industry. It's interesting to just hearing, I guess, we've been involved in some way with Jacksonville Beach Golf Club here in Jacksonville, which is a municipal course that I don't think until COVID, I had full appreciation for what, how important, like some open green space for people to co-recreate is, it really is a game-changer in terms of, again, if you look at the map of so many cities and seeing how little green space there is in some stuff, and that's some people think there shouldn't be golf courses there, and that's a different question and whatnot. But it seems like a big part of what you talk about

and you preach a lot about is the proper maintenance of these things and setting them up for the community. For golf, golf gets a bad rep for a lot of good reasons. And like, how do you go about changing that? And what's your been in your experience in that? Do you feel like that golf is kind of making a shift in that regard? Yeah, and I think I in particular feel this great responsibility to not only serve golfers,

but to serve non-golfers as well, because golf is only cool to people who play golf. So part of that, like, sustainability for the sport going forward is making sure we invite new people and recruit and ret retain new golfers. And I think golf is in a great position to extend a hand and invite people to these great green spaces, especially with the urban communities, and really allow people to buy into what, to the greatness of golf and what golf can offer people's lives and and simply, you know, environmental justice of having access to green space is so important. And especially the way that cities are evolving and green space is becoming, you know, repurposed into something not green.

It's really important to make sure that golf is serving not only golfers, but the community. And that's how I think we create sustainability and golf is having that multi-use, having, and just allowing people to use golf courses, however they want. Like, and that doesn't always necessarily mean, you know, playing golf. It can mean a lot of different things. This kind of dawned on me.

I think it was a trip we took to San Valley where after we walked off mammoth dunes when I was playing with a four sum of maybe two or three handicapers or better, right? And mammoth dunes for those that haven't seen it, I would consider to be an easy golf course. I think it is very scoreable. It's a lot of birdie opportunities.

We were all really good golfers when you compare them to the overall golf population. And we walked off with the biggest smiles on our faces. We had so much fun. And it just like fine, and maybe it shouldn't have taken this long, but it clicked for me. It was like, man,

I think like the ratio of hard golf courses to easy golf courses should be completely flipped. It may, let's say it's 80% hard, 20% are easy. It should be the exact opposite because way more of the population is not skilled at the game yet and is intimidated by that barrier to entry and it's kind of a self-selecting process.

And hey, if you're a highly skilled player, you can go travel, go work your butt off to go find challenging places for you if that's how you get your enjoyment, but you're also probably gonna enjoy the easy courses. Do you feel a shift in kind of general philosophies? I feel like for a long time in golf architecture it was you were measured on how challenging your golf courses.

I think people are starting to wake up to, why are we doing this? This is not even fun and we're intimidating people. Yeah, exactly. And the golf did go through that phase where you know, that harder or more penal, more challenging, bigger is better. And golf really is experiencing a shift away from

that, whereas if we can, if we can, you know, make golf fun and still allow it to be challenging for the best players, but also playable for the rest of us, like that's, that makes sense. And that's kind of been proven as we, as we sort of revert back to this golden age era of architecture that we see in a lot of the British architects who did it in the 20s and the 30s, we're kind of going back to that and it's stood the test of time and a lot of that architecture is considering the ground game

and allowing people to get from teet to green using the contours, using the ground game and allowing people to get from teet to green using the contours, using the ground without having to carry big penal hazards. And to me, that kind of golf is really exciting, really fun, really playable. I mean, you're not losing 10 balls around. You're not taking five and a half hours to play. There are so many benefits to that.

And then that kind of leads into the environmental side of golf of making sure that our water consumption is maximized and our efficiencies are maximized. And just making sure golf is as small and efficient as it can be to create sustainability going forward. I hate how I talk about Lynx Golf. It's my actual job to use my words to describe the experiences I've had, and I have not found the ability to fully capture it.

And I have a feeling between the two of us we can maybe combine our answers into. Some way of a good description of the feelings that have come from our best Ling Skolf experiences. And you have a lot of experience there, both working and learning under Martin Haltry, that I want to talk to you about. But there's a connection with the ancient nature of the game,

which speaks to as cheesy as it sounds, speaks to my soul, a connection to the earth and nature that's being encouraged to play shots along the ground is just way more activating for my brain. You know, to walk the terrain, to forget about score, I forget about score a lot more when I play over there. I'm curious kind of how that, your influence, the places you've seen played and learned under, you know, with Martin Holtzrey, how that's kind of influenced the way you're trying to bring architecture to other

parts of the golf world. Yeah, and I think another element to that is, is how golf in the UK in particular, to me, feels like a service, whereas golf in North America can often feel like a business. And that really, there's really a divergence in the values behind those two ideals. I've really learned to become, after my competitive golf career was over, and I got into golf architecture, and I spent five years working for Hottery in the UK,

I really became aware of my surroundings because that's the job. And it's kind of blood into my golf of like being this idea of a look up or versus a look downer, where the look downers are really, really concentrating on your yardage, your technique, your club selection, the pin location. It's very much a numbers game because numbers are easy to understand to five is worse than a four and golf.

Like we can get our minds around that. Whereas look uppers, it's a bit more abstract. We like to take in our surroundings and speak with our playing partners and smell the sea air and walk off the 18th tee directly to the pub beside the green. And it just creates a different experience and a lot of that experience is more abstract

and less easy to define. So I always try to encourage people to be a look-uper as often as they can. And I just feel like the overall experience is so much more rich. Talk to me about your path into golf course architecture, how you ended up with the opportunities that you have and what it was like kind of breaking into this industry

as it's safe to say there's not too many female golf architects in this industry, but your path to it was particularly interesting. Yeah, so as I said, I finished my four-year undergrad playing D1 college golf, super competitive, very intense. And I knew at that point that I did not have the mental fortitude or the, or the skill to make a goal of playing professional golf. And, but I also knew that golf was so special to me

and the industry that I wanted to dedicate my career to. And so I decided to get my master's degree in landscape architecture. So move back to Canada, went to the University of Guelph and did a master's degree there. And the third year of your master's degrees is writing a thesis. So it's all self-led study and research. And during that time, I was fortunate enough to get a scholarship from the

Stanley Thompson Society. Stanley Thompson is a really well-known and respected and revered Canadian Gulf architect. I took that money and I decided to go to Scotland and play golf. And I called it a lot of collections. It's work, you're learning it. It's studying. Exactly. So that was my first, the first link's golf course I ever played was Royal Dornock. It literally changed my life.

It truly, in every sense, that you can It literally changed my life. It truly in every sense that you can imagine changed my life. And I was in those formative mid-20 years where it experienced like that of traveling to Scotland on my own, driving on the wrong side of the road, playing Ling's golf. It really affected me. And I just, I fell in love with golf again because I had lost that during my competitive career. I really had lost the fun of golf and that trip to Scotland gifted that back to me. And also on that trip, I was interviewing a superintendant for part of the data collection. So it was actually work. And he took a call.

It's like, I'm sorry, I have to take this call. And I saw Martin Hatchery come up on his screen. And in the course of my studies and writing my thesis, I had come across the Hatchery generations so frequently there. They're all woven throughout the history of Gulf architecture in the UK and abroad. And so when he got back, I geeked out a little bit.

I was like, was that? Sorry, we were talking to Martin Haughty on the phone. And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you want me to, like, do you want to, are you a fan? Or like, I was like, yes, I am a fan. Is there any way that you could put us in touch? And he did. And Martin and I had a conversation on that trip. Um, I, I, I, is there any way that, you know, you could put us in touch. And he did, and Martin and I had a conversation on that trip and we had a great chat.

Um, and it was really apparent really quickly that we were going to have, you know, really meaningful relationship and some capacity. And he happened to be working on the Toronto Golf Club at that time and he said, I'm going to be in Canada next month. Maybe we should meet. And we did and we hit it off and I grinded through the next six months of my thesis and when I graduated, he offered me a job. So I had never been to England before. I packed up, I moved to the UK and I spent five years

being so privileged to access the best golf courses in the world and hone my craft under one of the greatest golf course architects to come out of England. Wow. So what do you show up in England? What's your job description? You're not redesigning courses right off the bat. No.

You're learning part of the process. What do you do? That's so interesting. You asked that because I had no idea. Like, I have no idea what golf course architects do. I mean, it's all theory up to this point. It's all just like reading and studying. And to be thrown into an office like Martin Hotchries was such a learning curve and, you

know, such a chaos and adventure. And he's like, you're going to France next week to look at this seventh hole at Chantilly. And I was like, okay, like, great. And that was just my next five years of traveling across Europe, trying to understand Gulf architecture through his mind, being a representative of him and his philosophies and his ideal in his office, and also just like going to Rome on the weekend because it's an hour and a half flight and it

costs 89 pounds on fly B. Like it was just, it was the best five years of my life and I developed as a person and as an architect. I knew we were gonna get along great. I knew we were gonna go on great because I, I, listeners of this show are probably sick of me bringing it up at every stop but I lived in Amsterdam for three years and just getting out of my comfort zone and going and experiencing Europe for three years

playing a little bit of golf a long way but not a whole lot. I, I get a lot of people reach out for advice or I have this opportunity in Germany or should I go do live in France. Just go do it. Just go do it. You're never going to be in your 20s again and it opens up. You can always come back to whatever you have going on locally, but it's really hard to describe and put into words how much it can change you to go experience different cultures and just be like you just when go over, you don't have, you're

no longer going to be attending the weddings, the reunions, the birthday parties, the Friday night drinks with your friends. You just have your own blank canvas. You start over and you can go experience whatever you want. And if it's in a field of work that you're passionate about, I can only imagine how incredible that experience was. Yeah. And I was privileged enough to be able to do that and travel and extend,

you know, my work trips a day so that I could, you know, try out new things and see new places. And it really, you know, I am a different person because I was vulnerable and I took those risks and I did scary things and I love that you say that because I would also encourage anyone, especially women to just say yes to these scary things because they will serve you. Quick break here to check in with our friends at Woop. This episode is brought to you by Woop, the official fitness wearable of the PGA tour. If you don't know by now, Woop is a sleek, screenless wearable that tracks your sleep, your strain, your recovery, your stress, and gives you more personalized insights that

help you reach your goals. You might be obsessed with squeezing a little bit more out of the gym, shooting your lowest score. This number, getting extra hours of sleep this week. Woop helps you build better habits and make healthier choices. I cannot tell you how much of an effect it has on me when I'm up to date on my woop. I'm tracking it. I want to see scores of my sleep in the green.

Make better decisions when it comes to alcohol, when it comes to food, when it comes to eating late, when it comes to drinking late, well, that does to my sleep, how my body doesn't actually rest during the night, even though I think I'm getting good sleep, I have a way better energy when I'm up to date and keeping, I make better decisions, like I said, when I'm using my WOOP.

With features like strength trainer and stress monitor, you can finally track the intensity of your weightlifting or manage your stress levels with real- stress scores and a science back network. Try whoop for one month free. Get ready to unlock the best version of yourself. Head to whoop.com, whop.com to get started. Use code NLU for 10% off your order. Again, code NLU at whoop.com whop.com now back to Christine Fraser.

So you go to see the seventh hole in France. What's what do you come back with? What's your job when you go see this, right? Is it is he trying to, you know, trying to train you? There's a it feels like everyone all golf architects have this story of a time period in their life where they traveled around to go see things that would later influence a lot of what they did. But is Martin kind of almost like sponsoring you in that part of the process or what do you come back to him with? It kind of felt like that in retrospect at the time I didn't really know, I didn't really fully see that big picture,

but I think he was. He would always tell me to take notes and to take photographs and to journal and to describe the meetings minutes. And at the time, I thought that was like the stuff that I had no interest in doing. I just wanted to be outside on the golf course. And but that was part of the training

and that exercise still serves me today. And it's how I developed my design process of being able to see what is already in place and understand that first before you change anything. And that really served me in the way that he taught. And so much of Gulf architecture, as we know is subjective, and so much of it in doing this job is intuitive, and that's so difficult to teach. And I think that was Martin's way of teaching me intuition is just to allow me space to figure it out on my own

with his guidance. And I feel like my intuition is very trustworthy at this point because of that foundation that he provided me with. So what projects stick out in your mind as some of your first projects that you worked on where you're starting to maybe learn what your role is within working for Martin? Yeah, so I had been working for Martin for less than a year and he gave me the biggest responsibility and role that I had ever had up to that point.

We were redesigning the Watson course, which is a nine-hole course at the Toronto Golf Club. Toronto Golf Club is one of Canada's greatest most historic clubs, and he really wanted me to take that on. And it was a full, I mean, no single blade of grass was left untouched. On that property, it was three months, I mean, no single blade of grass was left untouched on that property. It was three months on site consistently.

I was the sort of the lead architect on site at this really prestigious, important project. And it was absolutely terrifying. And I made so many mistakes. And I still open my notebook from that project and refer back to it today, 10 years later. Hmm. What mistakes? What are some examples of mistakes you made that I imagine there's a pro everyone's got to go through it at some point and there's only way to learn is to make the mistake but what are some things you look back on like, oh, that was a mistake. Yeah, I, I, and it's more than just

like, oh, I, if I were to have the opportunity, I probably wouldn't put that T there. It's a little bit more than that of not being confident in my decision-making or second-guessing myself or feeling like I couldn't speak up in a room full of men. Those kind of things that are really a bit of a deeper level than just, you know, the golf course that T-Shin have been there really or the angle is wrong or the yardage is a little bit off. And also, there's, you know, golf building a project like that is there's so many moving parts. The budgets on these projects are millions and millions of dollars. It feels like a big responsibility. I also learned in that project to that I am capable of doing this job and doing it well.

So that's one of my most favorite and meaningful projects to date. I've heard you speak a bit about how art affects your job and your profession and what not. But again, I'm not on a golf course architect, but I would imagine there's also a bit of a learning curve to say I imagine project management becomes one of the biggest, if not the biggest aspects of this job that is maybe not as, there's not as much art that goes into that part of it.

I'm wondering, again, this is maybe all in my head, but I think there's a process every architect goes through to be like, oh, this is what the day-to-day is like of this job. It's not just all drawing stuff in the sand every day. Yeah, I mean, there's very much a less sexy side to go for architecture than his portrait, a lot of the time. And that's stuff that they don't teach you in school or you can't read in the books

about navigating the politics of a club or boards or presenting to memberships or trying to convince people why your design is valid or project managing on a construction site with people that you've never met before who are twice as old as you with twice as much experience. That's tricky, that's like very delicate and something that you have to learn by doing. What are some examples of places that you worked on in the UK

that had an impact on you? Or places you played in the UK that you walked off and said, like, okay, whoa, that now, we just opened up a whole new world of understanding here. Yeah, I mean, you might just end this podcast right now, but I didn't actually even take my clubs over to the UK with me when I lived there. It really was like a full on dedication to golf architecture and playing golf doesn't

serve me in that same way. I find it really difficult to play golf and interpret the architecture at the same time. It's just my mind doesn't work that way. There wasn't too many golfing experiences that I had that with, but I will say from something that really, that I always look back on very fondly, is my relationship with Ireland and the people of Ireland and the places of Ireland. I have such great respect and admiration for their kindness and hospitality, and maybe that's because it kind of reminds me of home a little bit. Canada kind of has that same generosity that Ireland does. So I have such

fond memories of Ireland being in Ireland and in the dead of winter and people surfing out beside the Gulf course at LeHinge and coming in after a windy day and having a nice cold Guinness, not just really as special to me. And again, it wasn't as much about the golf as it was about the community and the people and the evolution of me as a person. Well, and for our listeners sake,

they've, you know, a lot of people are familiar with these places, but if you watch season four of our Taurus sauce series, we visited many golf courses that you were involved in with Duin Bag, LeHinch, Trelie. I don't know if courses that you were involved in with Dunebag, Lahinch, Treli, I don't know if I'm sure I'm missing some out in there, but those are some of the most special places in the world, especially Lahinch and Treli, I would say.

So when you guys are doing work on these ancient relics like this, what happens to golf courses over time that require somebody to come in and say, all right, we're going to change this, you know, this, this artifact that's here, it now needs to be changed. What's that process like from an evaluation standpoint and implementing those changes? It's a really delicate process and golf courses are living breathing things that have evolved over time and bunker lines change and infrastructure fails and trends evolve and golf requires modernization. And a lot of what I enjoy doing is putting those practical

elements in play and of course to allow as many people as possible to play them and what what that means now for me today is is often a forward tea program or looking at mowing lines or widening fairways or removing bunkers that don't serve a function anymore to not necessarily reduce maintenance budgets but reallocate that budget to somewhere else more efficiently. What are some examples of things that you've picked up from the UK and Ireland that should be implemented more widely across Northern American Gulf? And I'm sensitive to this because I feel like I've been trying

to unlock this for as long as I've been making trips over there. But the terrain differences, the soil differences are vast. And it's not as simple as let's just play it fast and firm like they trips over there, but the terrain differences, the soil differences are vast, and it's not as simple as let's just play it fast and firm like they do over there. It's different. But what kind of philosophies can we in North America, Canada and the US take from golf over there and that would make golf more enjoyable? I think this is a really simple answer, but I think if you ask yourself why, then it opens up a bigger, more macro vision of the difference between golf and the UK and golf in North America,

our resistance to allowing dogs on golf courses. Like if that is the case at your golf course, I really just want you to sit down and ask yourself why. Like why do you not want case at your golf course, I really just want you to sit down and ask yourself why. Like, why do you not want dogs on your golf course? And the answer is because they're going to cause more work for us and it's going to cost us X amount of dollars or whatever your reasoning is. Like, it's just different in the UK, that becomes an opportunity to allow

more people to play golf and use the golf course as they want as a service to the community. So we're talking, we're inviting golf dog walkers into our community of golf and expanding it in that way. And I think that's just a really simple example of how they're so different and the very basic understanding of service versus business, why? I believe it was in your Schwab video.

You said, there's a quote, this is, every day I work to persuade people that there's value in brown turf. What's that process like? I've tried to convince people that everything doesn't have to be green. It's really hard. I mean, we've been conditioned as golfers to understand that green golf courses are better. They're more maintained, they're more thoughtful, they're more intentional. They give us more value for our money. And it's really hard work to unpack that and reverse that.

And there are places that works for places like Augusta. You know, Augusta wouldn't be Augusta if it wasn't maintained the way it is. And I think there is room for that in golf. But I don't think Augusta is the model we should be emulating for a lot of reasons firstly firstly because you know a lot of our golf courses don't have the money and labor and capacities to do that. And secondly, I don't think green necessarily means better, it's just different and we can have great golf

courses that are firm and fast and brown and just really accept and understand the natural life cycle of turf. If you look at your lawn and your backyard or your garden, it's not always green. It evolves over the seasons. It browns with drought and with dormancy. And then it comes back in the summer. That's just a natural evolution of turf. And being a little bit more accepting of that and understanding of that can create a really great model for sustainability and make Gulf more accessible for a lot of people at the same time. Is it as simple as saying Gulf courses tend to be overwatered, right? In North America, is it that simple?

I hate to reduce it to that, but I struggle sometimes with, you know, I watch like my club go through, you know, when it, a period of rain, like we just had in June, and a couple weeks in June, like it, fairway's just gonna be soggy, right? And they need to also water it after that.

I don't understand a granomy enough to say, I understand the soil type over in the UK and what that, you can rain over there and the turf can still be as firm as you could possibly imagine. Yet in the North American soils, it's just different. And I don't know enough about it, how to get it to play fast and firm when you're dealing with natural elements

and keeping the grass healthy. I'm just, I'm wondering what you see in how courses are maintained that could be adjusted if we got rid of our concept of the Gulf has to be green. Yeah, and I also like to clarify that it's not like Gulf has to be brown. It's Gulf has to suit your own ecosystem

and your own landscape. Like that very different from Oregon to Arizona to England. Like all three of those things require very different inputs. And it's just realizing that one set of standardization does not apply to everyone. So sometimes it's green and sometimes it's not. And sometimes it's both. It just depends on your golf course. So trying to make your golf course look like a gusta or trying to make your golf course look like Karnusti is really a losing battle.

Like you need to figure out what serves your property and your consumers. Well, tell us about the process of breaking out on your own and starting your own design shop. What encourage that and what's up and like? Oh my God, I'm terrified even just you asking that question. It was so scary. It was so scary.

I mean, there's nothing about this job that is consistent or guaranteed. It so, it fluctuates so much as our Gulf industry does, so does Gulf architecture. And it was a really scary thing to do at that time. Martin was thinking about reducing his workload and retiring and quieting down. And also at that time, I felt like I had the tools and the skills to really, you know, make something of myself. And I thought I had a lot to offer to this industry apart from Martin and what I had learned from him. It just felt like

the right time. And then, COVID happened. And I was able to really kind of settle in to myself and my product and how I was going to differentiate myself from the industry and I made my website which I'm really proud of and think it gives a pretty good indication of how I'm trying to differentiate myself and the service I'm trying to provide. So it was a scary process, but I'm so happy I did it and it seems to be going well. Have there been a noticeable boon to the golf architecture industry, golf course design business from COVID? Obviously, we've seen all the numbers of increased level of golf, and it felt like things were trending the wrong way for quite some time. I mean, there's always work

to be done on existing golf courses, you know, that can afford to do to make changes like that. But is the industry picking up? Or do you have a steady workflow of requests coming in and kind of tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, I think I don't have a lot to compare it to because I kind of just got started in that really lucky space where people wanted to reinvest in golf. So for me, it's been, it's been really full on from the beginning of starting my own firm over here in Canada. And I think consumers and golf courses are starting to really see the value of reinvesting in golf and reinvesting in the service they provide through architecture and trying to diversify their clientele and maximize revenue through being more welcoming to women and the BIPOC community

and whatever it is they're trying to target. Tell me about what your process looks like. So let's say you're gonna potentially do work at a club, they give you a call and say we're thinking about doing some work. You know, let's, in this hypothetical, this is not a rush job. You've got some time to kind of go through this process. How do you acclimate yourself with the landscape you're going to be on, the clientele of the golf

course, kind of describe what that would look like? For me, it really is kind of an uncovering of the character of the golf course in the beginning of, of trying to understand as you would when you meet a new person for the golf course, in the beginning of trying to understand, as you would when you meet a new person for the first time, what their values are, what their interests are, what their history is, their past traumas that have led them to become this way. And so it really is an uncovering of character in a lot of ways. And one of the things that I really enjoy about my job is, and one of the design philosophies that I really lean on quite heavily is designing with, not for, and what that means is,

in finding as many people, stakeholders, management, golfers in on the process as possible to understand how they use the golf and also what they wanna get out of the experience. How would you describe what that process is like going through as a woman? Do you find, is there any intimidation factor of maybe speaking in large groups of the rooms that are probably likely filled with a lot of men

Do you see do you sense resistance in some way because you are a woman working in golf course architecture? What's that been like? Yeah, I mean I did a presentation to a membership last month and I still get you know crazy nervous about that but I think I have as women in this industry a lot of us experience I think I have, as women in this industry, a lot of us experience pretty significant bias in stereotyping and discrimination that has really forced us to develop tools to navigate the system and navigate from within the system. And what that has led to is great collaboration among women And what that has led to is great collaboration among women who have had similar experiences and similar perspectives.

So I have some great people in the industry that I can lean on that I can ask advice about. And we are seeing a lot more representation across all fields of the Gulf industry. Journalism, superintendents, pros, caddies, I mean, we're here and our voice is getting louder. Curious if you, when any of your time in the UK, did you visit, I only, I've only visited one. I'm only really intimately familiar with one and that's the Form B Ladies Club. Did you visit any other ladies clubs? No. When you were in the UK.

No, I did, I didn't go to Form B's, but no, I haven't. I haven't, we have a Toronto ladies club here too as well in Toronto. The four-be-ladies club was also an eye-opener to me. I mean, my dad and I played it and had just an absolute blast. It was awesome. I mean, it was 5,000 yards, but you know, it was just an intimate little design, kind of weaving in and out of these, like, Heather Fields and into the into-pines and the forest nature.

And it had plenty of challenge attached with it, and it's not only for ladies to play, but I found that concept to be interesting of an old school club that has the championship course and they have what's called the ladies course and I just found that interesting. No, it's really interesting and just a testament to how golf architecture has no gender and we can have fun golf without even mentioning ladies' teeth or mentees. It's just golf as golf.

What do you find, let's say, when you are brought in to do work on an existing club, what are typical things that are like, I hate to generalize it, but a typical checklist of things that kind of, as things have evolved over time, you mentioned mowing lines and whatnot, but what are elements that you find that you want to be introducing to the golf courses? Do you find you're making the courses easier or do you find you're making them more challenging or how do you strike that balance of making more playable

for beginners and making it challenging for higher skill players? Yeah, I think there's been a lot of pushback against what I come up against most is trying to introduce more playable elements for the higher handicaps without negatively affecting the lower handicaps. And I come up against a lot of pushback of how is widening the approach or pulling the fairway back going to affect our rating system and our slopes? And, you know, we don't want the golf course to be easier, which is really important to some people. And it's hard, without people having experience this type of golf, it's hard to convince people that

what I'm trying to do is not make it easier for the people who want it to be challenging. For example, if you have two bunkers in front of the green and there's sort of a four yard wide entranceway into the green, if I were to suggest widening that approach and pulling the munkers around, so now you have say a 12 yard wide entrance into the green, there there often can be big pushback against that because I'm now making the whole easier. What I would say to that is considering how a lot of golfers navigate golf holes on the ground without being able to get the ball consistently in the air. We really need that space to access the green.

Contrasting that, the better players, the higher handicaps, especially, or sorry, the lower handicaps, especially in North America, play the air game pretty consistently. They're flying the ball onto the green. They're not bumping and running onto the green. So by opening up that approach, expanding that approach, we're really only affecting the game

of the higher handicaps. So it's a process in context, explanation, education. And at the end of the day, there's a lot of trust that you have to put into your architect, which is why making sure you do the legwork in the beginning of choosing an architect that shares your values and understands the vision of your golf course is really important to make sure that the end product is going to be successful. And then you just, that problem you just gave there that has layers to it too, because the lower handicap golfer that gets in that bunker is going to have less trouble getting out of it also.

So you're really talking about an exacerbating effect of if you give the higher handicap golfer a way to avoid that better, it, you know, they might be ping ponging back and forth if they do go into a bunker, taking several shots to get out. And it's an interesting push and pull because I feel like I don't want to dumb the game down for higher handicapers. And I feel like I probably do give that vibe off a little too much on the show, but because they do want to be challenged. They do want to feel the accomplishment of, you know, of taking on a hard shot and hitting

the island green on the 17th at sawgrass and things like that. But there are ways still I feel like that's a main part of your job is there's ways to find that balance where it stays interesting for everyone. Like I find water hazards in general to be relatively avoidable for the highest skill players with the right strategy and the right understanding of your dispersion cones

and things like that. And yet for higher handicappers, it just kind of forces you into, well, you're not finishing this whole no matter what. Yeah, exactly. And that's the kind of like the unlock that we're always trying to find of creating equal and equitable challenge for everyone.

So we want this challenge to be like eight out of 10 for your skill level. So if you're a scratch golfer or you're 25 handicap, we want this whole to play at eight out of 10 for your skill level. So if you're a scratch golfer or you're 25 handicap, we want this whole to play at 8 out of 10 hard. And that's really, really difficult to accomplish, but it is possible. And the example you're giving, like a water carry is like 10 out of 10 hard for the 30 handicap.

It's one out of 10 hard for the 30 handicap, it's one out of 10 hard for your scratch welfare. So it's like, how do we use different architectural tools to create something a little bit more strategic or interesting or understandable or playable for both of those people? We want, like we don't want it to be one out of 10 hard for the good players and we don't want it to be 10 out of 10 hard for the good players. And we don't want it to be 10 to 10. We want it to be five out of five.

Like, that's the balance. And I find that that contouring is a consistent way to do that, right? I mean, if there's, if there's a flop shot over a bunker that needs to be hit, like I'm a scratch-ish golfer in the D-stays, uh, I can hit that shot. That's not much of a problem. Hi, handicap. Her has a lot of problem with that. Whereas if you put a big mound in front of us,

like he can put over that, he can seven iron, he can nine iron, she can nine, like the different levels of that. It seems like I'm not sure what your philosophy is on bunkering as well. It's like, you know, the driving holes where there's just a bunker on the left and a bunker on the right that are relatively within the driving zone.

It's like, that's going to only mostly punish the higher handicap or more than it is to say, add some width, put some hazards and towards the middle of the hole that the good players to think their way around. They're the option, yep. And I guess that just got to be hard though with golf courses that have been in existence

for quite some time that aren't designed around that philosophy. How do you incorporate that? Yeah, it's really challenging and it is just, you know, it really is setting golfers up with the foundation of knowledge that they can then contextualize themselves. It's like such an education process of like bringing these people along the journey with you

so that they understand how we got to this end design because that context is so important, and a really important tool of communication and transparency to really get people to buy into this process, and eventually spend money and time and renovating their golf course. What if I asked you what are some holes you've seen in your travels that stand out

in terms of things that made you think about things differently, things you draw back on constantly? I can think of a couple in my mind that are not the most famous golf holes in the world. I think of a hole at Kill Spindy, I think of a hole at County Slido in Ireland as well that I just never seen that before. And it made me think of design a different way. What comes to mind when I ask that? I would always go back to St Andrews on this question because to me it is the perfect example of what we're talking about of challenging the best players in the world, but also being really playable for whoever's going out on the Monday after the open

can play that golf course and have a blast and not lose balls and play in four hours. So to me St. Andrews is the perfect balance of equity, of challenge, of strategy. We in the strategic nature of St. Andrews is really impeccable and worth a study for anyone who's interested in golf design. And also the kind of the icing on the cake for me about St. Andrews is is their dedication to their community and their involvement of the community and everything that they do and shutting down the golf course on Sunday for people to go and throw Frisbee or play soccer or walk their dog or whatever. Maybe that's super inspirational to me.

Gosh, that's a, it's a special place. It really is the best. The connectivity of the town and that place and you don't even have to go play the golf course to just have an absolute blast there. No, and that's it. And that's exactly the point is like, how do we get to the place where non-golfers value their community golf courses like they do at St Andrews?

Because that golf course to non-golfers is so important and such a part of their lives in their community that it's something really that I would love to be able to emulate over here in North America. So what's currently on your docket and what can we expect to see out of you in the future? Oh wow, that's a great question. Okay. I want to say I want to just say something fun. I just got back I just got back from Alberta. We went out for a little golf trip out there and I

played BAMF and I played Jasper and I'm a little biased, but I think Canada is the most beautiful country in the entire world, and that just like solidified it for me. And I'm really enjoying like getting back into playing golf through the lens of, you know, recovering competitive golfer. I'm just finding the joy in golf again and being that look up around the golf course has been really fun for me and really pleasant.

But apart from that, I just got my first solo lead architect role at the Toronto Hunt last summer. So that that project is ongoing and so grateful to them. And I've learned a lot and I have I have a lot of respect for what they're doing there and a lot of appreciation for them putting their trust in me. So there's some great photos of Toronto Hoke clump on your website, Christine phrase or design.com for listeners, I suggest you you check that out. And her whole look and brand and everything is really cool. It's a lot of fun to scroll through. So well, we greatly appreciate your time, Christine. This has been fantastic. I hope to get to, I've already been to some golf courses where you've done some work, but I hope to get to some of your solo work here in the future as well.

And we hope to chat with you sometime in the future. But thanks for spending some time with us and best of luck with everything and hope to chat with you soon. Thank you so much for your curiosity. This has been a blast. Your dog is ready to see you again. That's it. That is it. Thank you.

See you, Christine. Okay. be the right club today. Yes. Yes. Yes. That is better than most. How about in? That is better than most. Better than most. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Anything different?