The Economics of Sand
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Bunker Count as Operational Liability
How the 1990s design boom created a sandy headache.
The number of bunkers on a golf course has never been a neutral figure. During the construction surge of the late 1980s through the mid-2000s, when the golf industry averaged 400 course openings per year throughout the decade, peaking in the year 2000, bunker count became a marketing instrument. Courses regularly boasted the number of bunkers their architects were able to scatter as a signal of ambition and prestige. In the early 2000s, it wasn't unheard of to see 200,000 square feet of bunkers going into a single property. The number on the marketing sheet implied rigor, challenge, and design seriousness. What it actually implied was a maintenance commitment that would compound for decades.
That bill is now being paid.
What Bunkers Actually Cost
A single bunker is not a fixed asset. It is a recurring operational obligation. Sand migrates, contaminates, and hardens. Drainage systems beneath bunkers fail over time and require excavation to repair. Edges wash and need re-cutting after significant rainfall. Faces erode and must be rebuilt. The labor required to rake a bunker after every round of play, multiplied by the number of bunkers, multiplied by the number of rounds, accumulates into a meaningful share of a course's annual maintenance budget before a single structural repair is added.
At Hazeltine National Golf Club in Minnesota, a Robert Trent Jones design carrying 107 bunkers, the financial arithmetic arrived well before the 2016 Ryder Cup. Superintendent Chris Tritabaugh estimated the club was spending $50,000 per year in labor costs associated with fixing bunkers following rain events alone, the equivalent of the salary of nearly four full-time seasonal employees. That figure covered only storm recovery. It did not include daily raking, edge maintenance, or sand replenishment. Tritabaugh presented these bunker-related metrics to Hazeltine's membership, noting the club was spending somewhere between a third and maybe even half of what a full renovation would cost, year after year, without addressing the underlying infrastructure problem.
Hazeltine had the budget and the championship mandate to renovate. Most courses built during the same era do not. For a facility carrying 90 bunkers with infrastructure now 25 to 30 years old, the renovation cycle on those features has arrived or is arriving now. The original drainage is reaching the end of its designed service life. The sand, if it has not been managed aggressively, has migrated into the subgrade and lost its performance characteristics. The course is not facing a maintenance decision. It is facing a capital decision. And the capital required to restore those features to specification exceeds what most mid-market facilities can deploy without restructuring other parts of their operation.
The response, increasingly, is removal.
The Removal Trend
At Totteridge Golf Club in Greensburg, Pennsylvania a course with approximately 70 bunkers totaling nearly 4 acres in the original design superintendent Brian Fritz was faced with difficult decisions when the bunkers needed renovation after more than 20 years in play. The sand had become contaminated, leading to poor playability and drainage. The renovation cost was prohibitive for an operation that had already reduced its staff due to budget pressure. The solution was reduction. The total area of bunkers was cut by approximately 50 percent, and labor requirements for regular maintenance were reduced by about the same amount. Regular raking time dropped from eight to ten labor hours per day to four or five. Time spent pumping bunkers and repairing washouts after a storm fell from 24 to 40 labor hours down to 12 to 20. The resources recovered were reallocated to putting greens, tees, and fairways.
Totteridge is not an outlier. Brookside Country Club in Northern California opened in 1991 with 73 bunkers. After renovation work by Golfplan, it now carries 64 — but the more significant change was in area. The course had 37 greenside bunkers covering a combined 56,240 square feet. It now has 32 greenside bunkers covering 27,300 square feet: a 51 percent reduction in total sand area despite removing only five bunkers. The operational benefit was not primarily in bunker count but in square footage the maintenance cost driver that course marketing materials never acknowledged.
Reducing bunker area by 30 to 50 percent is now common practice in renovation projects, and a growing number of recent projects have eliminated bunkers entirely, creating strategic interest through contours alone. The industry publication framing is usually about playability or course character. The operational driver behind almost every one of these decisions is the same: the features cost more to maintain than the facility can sustain at the standard the original design requires.
The Design Philosophy That Created the Problem
The architects who produced these courses were responding to a market that rewarded visual complexity. More than 40 percent of courses built during the boom were tied to master planned communities and were leveraged to sell real estate at premium prices. Everything in the 1990s and early 2000s was tied to selling real estate. Bunker density was not a design argument in those projects. It was an amenity signal a visible marker of prestige that showed up in photographs and sales brochures before a single round was played.
Tom Fazio, whose firm produced more credited designs during this period than any other living architect, identified the underlying tension plainly in a Golf Digest interview. "The whole world, where we are right now, the most important issue is the economics of any project and any golf course," he said. "Economics are a factor. What can you get built for a reasonable cost. The cost is a major factor on what can be done and how it can be done. The days of being able to do whatever you want to do are not logical and practical anymore." That is an architect describing the operational consequence of the era his profession helped build.
The problem was not the bunkers themselves. The problem was the gap between the maintenance model those designs assumed and the operational reality of the facilities that carried them. Courses built for developers whose pro forma was funded by lot sales operated on a different financial logic than courses expected to sustain themselves on green fees and memberships. When lot sales ended and the real estate subsidy disappeared, the maintenance obligation remained. Hundreds of courses lined by rows of homes sprang up; many ultimately closed while many of the survivors faced new, more austere operational realities in the years after the dust finally settled. The ones that survived largely did so by spending the following decade rationalizing what the construction era had over-built.
Alister MacKenzie made the same observation a century earlier, before the boom that proved him right. MacKenzie wrote in 1920 that on many courses there are far too many bunkers, a statement that remains accurate a century later. The industry did not listen during the boom. The renovation calendar is the industry listening now.
What Removal Actually Signals
When a course eliminates bunkers as part of a renovation, the public framing is almost always about pace of play or playability for the average golfer. The operational framing, the one that drove the decision, is about labor hours, capital allocation, and the maintenance standard the facility can actually deliver.
The gap between the maintenance standard a bunker demands and the standard a facility can provide is not a design failure. It is an economic one. A bunker that receives proper drainage maintenance, correct sand depth management, regular edge work, and daily raking is a functional strategic element. A bunker that receives inconsistent sand replenishment, infrequent drainage attention, and edge maintenance only when the crew has capacity is a liability that penalizes golfers randomly and erodes the course's condition signal to every player who encounters it.
Better Billy Bunker, one of the renovation system manufacturers that experienced significant growth during the renovation surge of the mid-2010s, described the situation plainly: "It's the one area of a golf course that has had a Band-Aid put on it time and time again. It's gotten to the point where it's costing more to put a Band-Aid on it than if you go ahead, bite the bullet and do it right." The courses that can afford to do it right are renovating. The courses that cannot are removing them.
A golf course is an operational system. Every feature on it carries a maintenance cost, a labor requirement, and a capital replacement cycle. When those figures are measured against rounds revenue and available budget, the design question and the operations question converge. The courses that understood this during the boom built fewer bunkers and maintained them better. The courses that treated bunker count as a marketing variable rather than an operational commitment are now paying a different kind of green fee, one their original pro forma never priced, and one that no amount of sand can cover.