Update on Rick Jacobson Projects

Illinois-based golf course architect Rick Jacobson is busy with a variety of projects. Here is a glimpse of some of what Jacobson is up to this year:

- The grand opening of the new Club at Strawberry Creek in Kenosha, Wisc., a few miles north of the Illinois border. Although Jacobson is responsible for many original designs around the country, the Club at Strawberry Creek will be his first original design in the Chicago metropolitan area. The course is scheduled to open this spring.

- Jacobson will begin construction on Bowes Creek Golf Club, an 18-hole course in Elgin, Ill., which is the focal point of an upscale golf course community being developed by Toll Brothers.

- Jacobson will complete the first phase of The Wilds Golf Club, a 27-hole facility that will serve as the centerpiece of a new residential community in Greenwood, Mo., in suburban Kansas City. The first nine holes of the course are scheduled to open this fall.

- The first nine holes of Jacobson's renovation of Sportsman's Country Club, a municipally-owned facility in Northbrook, Ill., are expected to reopen this spring as work begins on the second nine. Renovating the course in the spirit of the original Donald Ross-style design, Jacobson has reshaped and relocated bunkers in a manner that revives characteristics of Ross courses while adapting the 1920s-era course to the increased distance many golfers enjoy as a result of improved club and ball technology.

- Anets GC, a nine-hole course operated by the Northbrook Park District and redesigned by Jacobson, is expected to reopen this summer as a family-friendly par-3 course.

- Jacobson will implement a master plan renovation/restoration that has been approved by the membership of Oak Park Country Club, a historic private club in River Grove, Ill., originally designed by Donald Ross.

- Jacobson will produce a master plan to renovate Richland Country Club in Nashville, an 18-hole private club course designed by Jack Nicklaus and opened for play in 1988.

- Jacobson will continue bunker renovation work at Cantigny GC in Wheaton, Ill., this year's site of the Western Junior Amateur conducted by the Western Golf Association, and the site of the 2007 U.S. Public Links Championship run by the USGA.

A protégé of Nicklaus, Jacobson founded Jacobson Golf Course Design, Inc. in 1991 as a full-service golf design firm specializing in new course designs as well as master plan renovations and additions to existing facilities. Jacobson stays busy because of a philosophy involving the creation of golf courses that are challenging for the low-handicap player, playable for the average golfer, and aesthetically pleasing for everybody.

Jacobson's first original 18-hole project in North America – Augustine Golf Club in Stafford, Va. - has been ranked among the nation's Top 100 Public Golf Courses by Golf Magazine and was ranked among the best new upscale courses in 1996 by Golf Digest Magazine. In recent years, Jacobson has opened a number of other original designs, including Vista Links in Buena Vista, Va. (2004); Makefield Highlands GC in suburban Philadelphia (2004), and Patriot Hills GC in Stony Point, N.Y. (2003), rated among the Top 10 New Courses in the U.S. by Travel & Leisure Golf magazine.

In 2004, Golf Magazine named Jacobson's Spirit Hollow GC in Burlington, Iowa, one its "Thrifty Fifty" – i.e. one of the nation's top 50 courses costing less than $50 to play. Golf Digest currently ranks Spirit Hollow among the top 10 courses in the state of Iowa. Golfweek ranks it fourth best public-access course in Iowa.