Poppy Ridge in California renovated by architect Jay Blasi

• Poppy Ridge Golf Course in Livermore, California, underwent a complete renovation led by architect Jay Blasi.
• Key design elements focused on walkability, sustainability and playability for all skill levels.
• Blasi aimed to create a fun, unique and beautiful course that rivals California’s best.

Sometimes it’s better to start over than to start trying to fix things. That was the approach architect Jay Blasi took in renovating Poppy Ridge Golf Course in the wine country of Livermore, California. 

Blasi was tasked by the Northern California Golf Association, owner and operator of Poppy Ridge, with totally reimagining an amazing piece of ground. Poppy Ridge opened in 1996 with an original design by Rees Jones, but time had caught up with the layout. A renovation to much of the infrastructure was in need, and since shovels were going to be in the ground, the NCGA decided to consider a complete remodel to better serve its hundreds of thousands of members and the players who rack up more than 50,000 rounds a year on the layout.

Blasi worked for years for architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. before hanging his own shingle in 2012. His work with Jones included Chambers Bay in Washington, site of the 2015 U.S. Open, and SentryWorld in Wisconsin, site of the 2023 U.S. Senior Open. His builds as lead architect include the highly ranked Santa Ana Country Club in California. He recently renovated Lakeside Country Club in Houston, then shifted focus back to California to complete extensive renovations of Golden Gate Park’s short course and the new 18s holes at Poppy Ridge. 

The facility previously had 27 holes and a practice facility. Besides reworking the main 18 holes (now par 72 tipping out at 7,010 yards), Blasi also renovated the Poppy Ridge range to double its capacity and added a huge practice green and chipping area. The other nine holes, comprised mainly from Jones’ original Merlot nine, is now The Ridge 9 short course that plays to a par of 34. 

The new main 18 officially opens May 31, and most importantly to many, NCGA members can play for $70 on most weekdays and $100 Friday through Sunday.

Blasi is an occasional contributor to Golfweek and often hosts Golfweek’s Best course raters at layouts around the world, usually serving up educational seminars on golf course design. He chatted with Golfweek about Poppy Ridge, when clubs should consider a course renovation, his love of routing and much more. Following are edited excerpts of that conversation. 

Why should golf courses be renovated?

Golfweek: When should course operators or club members start looking at their golf course and think about a real renovation versus just trying to maintain a course that is degrading?

Blasi: Well, I think there’s a couple different aspects to that. I would encourage any private club or any facility, for that matter, to try to always be thinking ahead. Probably the best way to always be looking to the future is to seek out professionals to help craft a golf course master plan. And the master plan will allow you to make smart decisions in the long term.

Many private clubs kind of get stuck in a cycle where they have revolving leadership.  Boards turn over, presidents turn over, green committees turn over. And they end up kind of putting out the fire of the day, you know. They say, “Oh, we have a drainage issue on hole 6,” or “Somebody doesn’t like the way our bunkers play.” And so they run over there, and they work on that one thing. And then the next year there’s a new chairman and a new committee, and they do something else. And if you look back over a 20-year period of time, what you find is that you’ve got this crazy hodgepodge of work. And so master planning is a good way to be thinking to the future. 

One of the critical parts of putting together a master plan is to understand the life cycle of the golf course. The parts of a golf course don’t last forever. Typically, the various elements of a golf course might last somewhere between 10 and 30 years. And your biggest component there would be your irrigation system, which usually last kind of in the 25-year range. So understanding where the parts of the golf course are in their life cycles gives you a hint as to what’s probably due for investment.

By coming up with one comprehensive vision so that when the time comes that you do need to spend money, you’re spending it toward one consistent vision, and you’re not wasting money undoing the work that a committee did two years. 

Why did the NCGA decide to take on this project? 

The Northern California Golf Association, I believe, is the second biggest golf association in America, 220,000-plus members. It owns two golf courses: Poppy Hills down on the Monterey Peninsula, and Poppy Ridge in Livermore. And to my earlier point, they had been spending a lot of time doing planning. 

At Poppy Ridge, the golf course infrastructure – the irrigation system, the drainage, those different elements – were kind of at the end of their useful life. So they knew that they were due for investment. And then there were a couple of other elements that they were thinking about. 

So in Northern California, water is a huge issue. The golf course, when it was built in the mid-’90s, was built with cool-season grasses. Over the last 25 years in northern California, our climate has changed enough so that warm-season grasses thrive now where they didn’t really 25 years ago. And warm-season grasses use far less water. So there was an interest in being more sustainable as we looked to the future, and there was an opportunity for new turf grasses. (Poppy Ridge now has tees, fairways and green surrounds of Santa Ana Bermuda, and the new greens are Prestige Bentgrass.)

When you took a look at the whole and recognized that we were due for significant investment due to the infrastructure, there was also the opportunity to re-grass the golf course for sustainability to the future. It really became clear that, okay, this was the right time to make a big investment.

Then the question became, do we want to put all the pieces back where they were, or is this an opportunity to try to do something different and maybe craft a golf course that fit the needs of the NCGA better as we look to the future.

What do you think about your proposal grabbed their attention and really sparked their interest in having you do the work there.

What I’ve been told was that they were ready to make an investment in the golf course, and they really had some distinct goals they were trying to achieve. They wanted one standalone 18-hole championship golf course. They wanted the golf course to be fun and playable for all of their members. 

The golf course that was out there that was built in the mid-’90s, and it was essentially an unwalkable golf course. For 98 percent of the people who played, it was not walkable. There were 200-yard journeys between greens and tees. And for the NCGA, which puts on dozens and dozens if not hundreds of championships, having a facility that’s not walkable is really tough to be able to utilize for their championship. So they wanted a facility they could use for their championships, a golf course that was fun and playable for everybody, a golf course that was walkable and sustainable. Those are all things that I firmly believe in. 

When I went out and visited the site, I got very excited about the opportunity. I fell in love with the property. And so I think as we went through the process, we had a very similar vision for what could be, and I think that was probably what maybe won the day.

Working with the North California Golf Association

Is there anything unique in working on a course for the Northern California Golf Association? What sets it apart from some of the other work you have done?

It was very unique in terms of thinking about the big organization and who’s going to play. This is a public facility open to all – a very, very busy facility. They’re going to do probably 50,000-plus rounds of golf out there every year. So understanding that was really important. 

So, if this was a private club with a high golf-IQ membership that was only going to do 5,000 or 10,000 rounds a year, you might be inclined to do green complexes that are maybe on the more wild side, right? In this instance, knowing that we’re going to do 50,000-plus rounds, knowing that the site is big and bold and fairly windy, we made the conscious decision very early on that we wanted the green surfaces to be very subtle and to have a ton of hole locations available for the NCGA for when they set up their championships.

There were a number of elements that were a little bit different designing for the NCGA. We made decisions in the field constantly, thinking about, okay, a bunker would look really great right here. This would fit in the landscape beautifully. And then we would ask ourselves, well, who’s going to hit into that? Is the scratch player going to hit into that bunker, or is that going to be something that the 15-handicaper hits into more often. And if the 15-handicaper hits into it more often, are they going to be able to get out and finish the hole and keep the pace of play moving, and things like that. 

And so we looked for ways to make sure that the golf course was fun and playable for everybody, but thought-provoking and challenging for the scratch player.

What makes Poppy Ridge special?

You mentioned how excited you were when you first got out there. How would you describe that terrain at Poppy Ridge to somebody who’s never seen it?

It’s very unique. It’s a postcard of what people would think of when they think of California wine country. So if you’re standing out there, you’re going to see big rolling hills covered in golden grasses and dotted with oak trees. You’ll actually see vineyards in the distance in an adjacent property.  And then in the distance, a couple of miles away, you’ll see foothills or small mountains that are, again, covered in golden grass, so big, long views all over the place. There are lots of elevation changes, over 200 feet of elevation change. 

I want to ask you about routing, because you are a massive routing fan and that always comes up in any conversation. How did you tackle the routing for this golf course in this project? 

You’re right. Routing matters. This started as a 27-hole facility, kind of three equal nines, if you will. But the property had different landforms to it, and so it was really kind of broken into a two-thirds, one-third scenario of the property. So two-thirds of the site sits north of the clubhouse, and that terrain was big and rolling, all usable. And then one third of the site sits kind of south of the clubhouse, and that’s where a lot of the terrain was a little more severe. So the first order of business was to figure out where is the 18-hole championship course going to go? 

We wanted to use everything to the north of the clubhouse. That was all great. And then there was the southeast corner of the property, which was very dynamic. There was a big valley and a big ridgeline over there that we wanted to make use of. So once we kind of understood where we thought the outline for the 18 holes would go, it almost started as a math equation. 

I typically start at the perimeter of a property, and in this case we had property boundaries. So we had an entry road to the west. We had a property boundary to the north, a property boundary to the east. And then this area to the south. And so I typically kind of start at the perimeter and figure out, how are we going to work along those boundaries?

Then there were other natural landforms. There was kind of a small barranca, a creek/ravine type of feature. So how is that going to fit into the equation? There were some big, strong ridge lines. How are we going to get over those ridge lines? And it really is a process where you kind of have to think ahead a little bit, too. 

This was a site that was big and bold. In order to make it walkable, we had to move about 250,000 cubic yards of dirt, and we probably shaped a lot more than that. And most of that earth-moving was done to soften the landscape to make it more walkable and more usable. 

So in some instances, you could see where a hole might go on paper, but when you’re out in the field, you can’t see it because you’re going to need to make a big earthwork move. And so there were a couple of situations like that. 

Were there any constraints that limited you?

When they built the golf course in the mid-’90s, they added a number of lakes and creeks, and those were elements that I preferred not to have. I wish that we could have had a setting that looked like it might have 100 years ago. I wouldn’t necessarily want to fill in those lakes or creeks, but I wanted to naturalize those to make them feel more like a wash or a barranca, something that would have been there naturally. We were able to get rid of one pond that had been added. The others we weren’t able to get rid of. From a routing standpoint, I tried to kind of minimize the impact of those elements, and then we tried to naturalize them. 

So there was a kind of a creek feature that when players will encounter on holes 2 and 7. And hopefully, when they go out there, especially if they are somebody who had played there before, they’ll say, “Wow, this just feels a lot more natural.”

They did say, we’re going to have to have full-length concrete cart paths. That is hard to incorporate, or hard to hide on a big, open site. If you’re planning a golf course through a forest, it’s one thing to hide a golf cart path, but when you’re out in an open landscape, it’s much harder. So we worked really hard to try to make those not have an adverse impact on the experience as you play golf.

You’ve shortened the walk, and you’ve made it an easier walk as far as the elevation changes. Why was that important?

For the goals of the NCGA, they wanted to host championships out there. They put on dozens and dozens of championships. And in order to put on a championship, you need to be able to walk your golf course. And I’m a walker – I love to walk. I feel like when you walk, you get a far better sense of the golf course. It’s just a much better experience. And so I worked really, really hard on the routing to make it so that it was easy to navigate. You walk off of a green and you’re 20 steps away from the next tee, and it’s easy to find where the next tee is. 

So if you had played the old golf course and let’s say you played from the 6,500-yard tees, the walk to play those 6,500-yard tees was, I believe, a little over 10,000 yards. A very long walk, and there was – I forget what the exact number was – maybe 1,700 feet of elevation change. By rerouting the golf course, if you still play the 6,500-yard tees, your walk is going to be 2,000 yards shorter. Think about that from a pace-of-play standpoint and from an enjoyment standpoint. So the same 18 holes, the same overall yardage, but your walk is 2,000 yards shorter and 400 feet less elevation change to deal with over the course of your round. 

We’ve had a couple kind of preview days out there now, and we’ve been walking, and we’ve heard from many people that it is very much a manageable walk. It’s still a big site. It’s a big site with plenty of elevation change. But it’s very, very manageable. 

When you’re working on a routing, do you start shaping a hole in your mind as soon as you’re working on that routing? Or later, when you’re on the ground and able to look at all those different land features?

With a routing, I think you’re identifying natural landforms that you want to take advantage of. You’re always doing that right from the start. In terms of the details, you might have an idea here or there, but at least for me over the past 20 years, most of that occurs in the field and in construction. And there is truly an evolution.

You can draw a plan until you’re blue in the face, but you need to be out there in the dirt and see it and feel it and understand what’s going on to the right and going on to the left and feeling the wind, and how that’s interacting with everything before you can ultimately craft the features. 

The third hole at Poppy Ridge was a perfect example of this. There was a pond that had been created in the mid-’90s, and that pond actually sat on high ground, in a place that would never occur in nature, which is a huge pet peeve of mine. I encounter this, and it just drives me crazy. So I was hell bent on having the golfer not see or not interact with that pond. But where it was located, it was really hard to deal with that. In the routing, it was tough to figure out.

Early in the construction process, I just stood on what was likely to be the third tee for like two or three hours, and people were coming by looking at me like I was ready to keel over. And finally, it was like a light bulb just kind of came on. The backdrop for that hole is these beautiful, small mountains in the distance, and the ridge line of the mountains has an interesting line to it. And then I kind of stole a trick from (famed architect) Stanley Thompson up at Jasper in Canada, where he would take the mountain backdrop and then kind of replicate that on the ground. And so I said, “Okay, now if we created a really big ridge line here that would tie in really well with the backdrop, we could frame the hole beautifully. And, oh, by the way, nobody would ever know there’s this pond back there on high ground.”

And so sure enough, we created a ridge line. We set a bunch of bunkers into that ridge line. And now you play the golf hole and nobody would ever know there’s a pond there. I think people will find it to be one of the more exciting, compelling holes on the golf course. And then you walk off the third hole, you walk a little bit uphill to the fourth tee, and then you see there’s this pond over here, but by that point the pond is below you. It kind of feels natural. It kind of fits into its setting. That’s something that you could never get on a plan. You have to get it right out in the field.

How do wide fairways affect strategy in golf?

How do you take a 40-yard, 50-yard, 60-yard wide fairway and encourage players to go into a specific spot to play to a specific flag?

It’s a great question. At Poppy Ridge, again, it’s a big site, a windy site. So we felt not only did the wide fairways offer the room to play golf for the 220,000-plus members that were going to play, but they also fit the site, too – just big, rolling and windy, so you needed room for the ball to roll out and to accommodate the wind.

I have found that the best way to challenge top players is the ground plane itself and the undulations on the ground. Scratch players and top players, they have amazing control of their golf ball in the air. They don’t have control once it hits the ground when the land is firm and there are interesting contours. And so at Poppy Ridge, we were committed to firm and fast golf. We installed a lot of drainage to make sure the golf course will play firm and fast. We have a lot of green complexes that have a lot of short grass around them. They might be open in front. So again, that’s inviting to a higher handicapper, or somebody with a slower swing speed who maybe can’t hit it high and land it soft.

But for championship play, if you have the option to run the ball into the green, it’s an additional thing to think about. And I find that when top players are asked to think, they perform worse. If you give them three or four options, they’ve got to figure out, which option do I want to choose? I have to start thinking about the trajectory of my golf ball. I have to start thinking about, am I going to move it right to left or left to right? What’s happening with the wind.

So to me, it’s totally fine to have all sorts of width so long as your green complexes have interesting contours and they play firm. And then when you have a lot of width, you can set it up so that there might be a preferred angle to come in from. So you might have an 80-yard-wide fairway, but for a scratch player, they would need to know that if I’m going to access that hole location, I need to be in the left 10 yards of that 80-yard fairway.

The other thing about that, I really love golf courses that encourage aggressive play. And so if you think about a hole with a nice wide fairway, let’s say a scratch player gets up there and they really needed to be on the left 10 yards of the fairway to have a good approach into the green, but they hit it on the right half of the fairway. Because their ball is on the fairway, they think that they’re going to be capable of executing this shot, even if the angle is bad. They’re going to be inclined to play aggressively, because they’re playing off a fairway. And as such, their penalty might be compounded because they get overly aggressive, then they might get into a spot of bother on the next shot. 

From the beginning, you have said it was your plan to try to create something for the public that would offer that same kind of architecture and same kind of playing experience as at other top-tier courses California courses designed by the likes of Alister MacKenzie. How do you think it all resulted?

When I had the opportunity to go out and see the site, I fell in love with the property and firmly believed that the property was special enough to give us the opportunity to craft a golf course that would stand up amongst the very best in California and beyond. 

The goal that I would have is that if a golfer comes off the golf course, I would love to hear three adjectives come out of their mouth: That was a ton of fun, that was really unique and that was really beautiful. The highest compliment you can ever have is if somebody comes off the 18th green and they want to go again – “Let me back out there, I can’t wait to go back there again.” And so those were the things that we were trying to achieve. 

I think we did it. I’m really excited about this. We had our preview day with the NCGA, and we heard a lot of those words being uttered. And so we’re really, really eager to let the public get out there and experience it for themselves. And we hope that they love it as much as we loved pouring our heart and soul into it.