Williamson AM
- Bonnie Burch
FRANKLIN — Doug Wright will have something on his résumé that most of his college-age peers most likely can't match.
The 20-year-old civil engineering student designed the 13th hole at Westhaven Golf Club, which is under construction in the Franklin mixed-use development. He did so after winning an amateur golf-design contest presented by Links magazine.
"I was extremely excited. It was probably one of the best days of my life," Wright said. "It's always been a dream of mine to be a golf course architect."
A native of Brunswick, Maine, Wright is an undergraduate student at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Penn. In high school, Wright golfed competitively, but his game has fallen by the wayside in recent years with his studies.
Wright's award-winning design of the par-4 hole appears in the July/August issue of Links magazine, which received 1,159 entries in the contest. Two other finalists' designs — by Darwin Webb of Issaquah, Wash., and Todd Bramwell of Raleigh, N.C. — appear in the same issue.
Contestants were given a photo of the undeveloped site's corridor and a map showing the topography and physical parameters of the area. Each person was then asked to draft the golf hole of his dreams.
"The design process was pretty easy. From the time I began thinking about the hole to the time it was done was all in about a two- or three-hour time span. I didn't put a whole lot of time into it. I just kind of busted it out," Wright said.
What he came up with for the private golf course was a 447-yard, aborted double-fairway with a hybrid dogleg right. The editors at Links, a golf lifestyles publication that caters to affluent golfers, and the Toledo, Ohio-based architects for the Westhaven course, Arthur Hills/Steve Forrest and Associates, chose Wright's design above the rest.
As part of receiving top prize, Wright traveled twice to Tennessee to see his design in progress — once before the grading of the land and then to see the contours of his hole take shape.
"I designed the hole without ever having seen the land. So when I finally saw it, it was much more dramatic than I had initially envisioned," he said.
Once in town, the college student also had an opportunity to work personally with architects from Arthur Hill and senior partner Chris Wilczynski in fine-tuning the design. Several changes were made to the original work, including lengthening the hole after an old stone wall was removed from behind the tees and raising the greens a few feet to avoid underlying rock.
Wright's third and final trip is scheduled for 2009 during the course's grand opening celebration.
Contact Bonnie Burch at 771-5421 or bburch@tennessean.com.