# Bayside Golf Club: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/bayside-golf-club-profile/

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A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The 11th hole at Bayside runs 648 yards from the back tees. Twenty-eight bunkers stand between the tee and the green, on a par 5 that course reviews describe as arguably the longest hole in Nebraska. That is the Axland and Proctor school of design in one hole: take open ground near Lake McConaughy, give the player a problem too big to solve with one good swing, and scatter sand everywhere the lazy line wants to go. Bayside, opened in 2000 near Brule, is the sister course to Wild Horse, and it carries the same design DNA that made Nebraska's sandhills country the most interesting address in American golf architecture. State context lives in [the best courses in Nebraska ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-nebraska/).

Dave Axland and Dan Proctor learned their trade building courses for other famous names before they built their own, and the education shows in what they leave alone. The dunes terrain around Lake McConaughy does the heavy lifting here. Rather than flattening the ground into fairways, the routing rides it, so the lake views arrive as part of the golf instead of scenery behind it. The yardage book says 6,490 yards, par 71, rating 70.4, slope 126. Modest numbers. They lie, in the way numbers at wind-open courses always lie. Six thousand four hundred ninety yards with the lake wind up and 28 bunkers on one hole is a different examination than the same yardage in a sheltered valley.

## Borrowed from Troon, built in Nebraska

The second hole was modeled on Royal Troon's Postage Stamp, the famous short par 3 in Scotland, per The Fried Egg's course tour. Borrowing that hole is a declaration of intent. The Postage Stamp works because it is tiny and terrifying, a green the size of its name with disaster on every side, and a designer who recreates it in Nebraska is telling you he values the short, sharp question over the long, dull one. Then the course turns around and asks the opposite question at the 11th, 648 yards of it. Range is a design virtue. Bayside has it in consecutive breaths.

The 17th completes the argument. One hundred thirty-eight yards, par 3, with a bunker in the center of the green. A bunker inside the putting surface is a shot-maker's riddle: the flag's position decides which side of the green is the green, and a tee shot that finishes on the wrong side of the sand leaves a putt that has to go around, over, or through trouble that should never be on a green at all. It is the kind of hole golfers argue about in the parking lot, which is precisely what a signature hole is supposed to produce. Calling it the signature, as the course guides do, undersells it slightly. It is the hole you will describe to anyone who asks about Bayside, probably before you mention the 648-yard 11th.

## The public reality

Bayside is public, on lake country in Keith County, and that access is central to its standing. Nebraska's celebrated courses include some of the most private addresses in the game, clubs a public golfer will only ever read about. Bayside gives that same dunes-and-wind golf to anyone who drives to Brule. The concession: the drive is the toll. Brule is not on the way to anywhere most golfers are going, the wind that makes the course interesting can make it punishing on the wrong day, and a slope of 126 tells you the design, for all its craft, will not separate a championship field. It was not built to.

It was built to prove that the ideas behind Nebraska's famous private golf work at a public course on a lake, at public prices, for public golfers. A Postage Stamp on the second, the longest hole in the state on the 11th, a bunker in the middle of the green on the 17th. Play those three holes and you understand Axland and Proctor better than a hundred pages of design theory could explain them.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.