August 2011 - Parks & Recreation - 18

Who, What, Where & how Around the Parks

Devil's Thumb Golf Club,
Delta, Colorado

golf course work in the 1960s-70s. His father's reputation for high quality, affordable work attracted municipal golf course
clients from around the Rocky Mountain
region, according to Phelps.
" I grew up, like you see in a lot of father
and son teams in the business, seeing his
work get turned from lines on a piece of
paper into a gorgeous golf course, which
was something that I really enjoyed, " explains Phelps, who started helping his father with surveying when he was only 10
years old. " Municipal golf was part of my
upbringing. "
After graduating from the University of
Colorado with a degree in environmental design in 1989, he continued to work
with his father up until his father's recent
retirement. Then he teamed up with another of his father's employees, Kevin Atkinson, in 2006 to form Phelps-Atkinson
Golf Course Design, a firm which does
about 70 percent of its work for municipal
golf clients.
Phelps' design principles are evident
in two of his public course projects-Antler Creek Golf Course in Peyton, Colorado, near Colorado Springs, and Devil's
Thumb Golf Club in Delta, Colorado.
" An absolute beginning player has a
hard enough time just hitting the ball-
they don't need any hazards in their

16 Parks & Recreation

AUGUST 2011

An absolute beginning player has a hard
enough time just hitting the ball-
they don't need any hazards in their way.
way, " Phelps says. When you include senior players of various skill levels, along
with women players ranging from beginners to the very accomplished and everything in between, Phelps says that it can
be hard to design for any specific group.
" The challenge is to try to find the right
mix from each of the sets of tees, where
you present some challenges in the way
of hazards, either a carry over a bunker
or hitting a shot at a certain angle into a
green as a reward, but not continually either making it super dumbed down and
simple or also super difficult with forced
carries, " he says.
Antler Creek was designed at the beginning of the recent movement toward
shorter courses. Although it's 8,000 yards
long, playing from the front tees brings
the total distance down to 5,000 yards. At
Devil's Thumb, the easy-to-play desertstyle course includes no forced carries
from the forward tees.
" You can go shorter yet and tee off in

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the fairways, " Phelps says, explaining
that there were no tee boxes in early golf.
" The trick is getting people to use the
right tees. You don't have to be stretched
to the max all the time. The game is just
as much fun, if not more fun, when you're
playing up a little bit. "
Although Phelps feels that golf course
architects have a duty to introduce as
many people as possible to the game,
he personally doesn't buy into " the sky
is falling " mentality that seems to have
gripped the golf industry.
" You look at the correction that has taken place with the closures and it's in the 1
to 3 percent range. There are all kinds of
other industries in the United States that
have seen bigger corrections than that
during this recession, " he explains. " Relative to the big boom that we had in the
1990s and the early 2000s, it's seems like
a big deal but it's really not. "
Phelps explains that as the industry
saw 50 years of growth trying to catch

August 2011 - Parks & Recreation

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