What some pros, and designer Gil Hanse, are saying about new golf course at Fields Ranch East at PGA Frisco, host of 83rd KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship

“Incredibly exciting. A little nerve-racking. We were saying it’s not every day you open a golf course and have a major championship be hosted on it.

“We love a little feedback. I guess we’re going to get some this week, and we’ll see how that goes. But we’re very excited, very proud. Jim Wagner, my partner, and I are really proud of what we’ve done and really excited. Took a ride around with Roger Meier, the director of agronomy, and the place looks great.

“It’s an interesting feeling because we’ve been fortunate to work on a lot of restorations of classic golf courses that have hosted major championships, and while we’re fully invested and that’s our work, it’s not our design because we believe strongly that what we’re trying to do is put Tillinghast back into Winged Foot, put Maxwell back into Southern Hills.

“Here it’s just us. It’s our ideas, our thoughts, what we believe about golf architecture, what we think ultimately will provide a good test of golf for the best players in the world. Not that there’s more at stake, but you just feel a little more of a tingle, I think.

“I’m expecting that we’re going to feel a similar sense of pride. We’re going to feel probably a similar sense of relief if all goes well, which we expect it will, and we get a great champion on Sunday.

“Most of our architecture focuses on playability and design and what we’re trying to do to challenge golfers, whether that be resort golfers or the best golfers in the world. We’re going to get to do both here. So we tend to really enjoy sinking our teeth into that aspect of it. But this project was so complex from the standpoint of it’s not just an 18-hole golf course. It’s a world-class resort. It’s another 18-hole golf course. It’s the PGA of America’s headquarters. It’s practice facilities, short game facility.

Gil Hanse designed the East Course and Beau Welling designed the West Course at Fields Ranch on the PGA Frisco complex. (Photo: Gabe Gudgel/Golfweek)

“From a land planning perspective, there was a lot more going on here as to the full campus and the design that Beau Welling, who did a great job on the West Course, was very involved in from a land planning standpoint. Then throwing on top of that, the difficulties of this site as it related to engineering.

“We had to figure out how to get the golf course above the 100-year floodplain level, and then we had to figure out how all that ties in to make those holes look natural.

“So you’ve got all this extra stuff happening, but at the end of the day, when we dug our feet into the dirt here, it was all about what do we think is a compelling test of golf, what do we think are interesting golf holes.

“A lot of that has to do with variety. You see super long par 4s, super short ones … we feel like not only are we looking at it from a scorecard, like okay, a 490 versus 350, it’s really what are the questions we’re asking you to solve.

“I’ve had a few comments and conversations with some of the players here, and probably the greatest compliment we could get is they said ‘I haven’t figured this out yet’ and from an architect standpoint, you really don’t want golfers to figure out. You want them to eventually figure it out, and hopefully, they get the right answers and the answers can be solved, but you’d rather there be some mystery and some figuring out.

“As I said to David Toms, I don’t want to say that this is a great golf course, but what I’m saying is if you play a great golf course, if you ever walked off any great golf course after one round and gone ‘Yeah, I got this, I know exactly where to hit it every single shot’ … no. There’s nuances, there’s strategy, there’s subtlety. So Jim and I feel like that’s really an integral part of what we’re trying to create.

“There were a lot of different layers to this, but at the end of the day, what we’re most excited and proud about is what we think is the strategy and the subtleties and the nuances that hopefully every round these guys play on this golf course they’ll come to a better understanding of it.”

“I think the holes that we really enjoyed building were more of the natural ones. I’ve said we found eight holes, and we had to create 10. I think holes 2, 3, 4 and 5 were just naturally there, and we had to embellish them and work around on them, but that stretch of golf I really love. I love the way they sit in the landscape, I love the questions they ask, and I think they’re some of the prettier golf holes on the property. And same on the back when we got to 13, 14, 15 and 16, that stretch of holes.

“There, I just ruined the surprise. It was the eight holes we found, and the other 10 are the ones we had to create. But from that standpoint, those holes have a great natural flow and feel to them.”