The KPMG Girls’s PGA Championship is about to begin on June twentieth, and it’s returning to the Sahalee Nation Membership after 8 years. The final time it was held right here was in 2016, and the Canadian professional, Brooke Henderson received the $3.5 million main.
Positioned in Sammamish, Washington, a suburb east of Seattle, Sahalee Nation Membership is legendary for its slender fairways. The feminine golfers will descend on the greens for the fourth main of the season after the powerful 2024 US Girls’s Open at Lancaster Nation Membership. However how troublesome and totally different will the Sahalee Nation Membership be? Allow us to dive into its historical past.
The beginnings of a golf membership whose bushes attain to the heavens
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Sahalee Nation Membership’s origins embrace a sequence of deal breakers when its founders tried to ascertain the golf membership in 1965. Nonetheless, it was solely in June 1967 {that a} dinner was hosted with 50 members to debate and set up the membership.
In line with Historical past Hyperlink, “more than 50 people attended the dinner and were offered limited partnerships for $5,000, which entitled them to a $1,500 golf club membership and a fairway lot for $3,500.” A couple of weeks later, about 100 such memberships had been offered, and the membership purchased its first 320 acres that summer time.
By September 1967, the membership was named Sahalee, a Chinook phrase. In Chinook, it interprets as ‘high heavenly ground’. Having its course carved from a Pacific Northwest forest of a number of bushes like cedar, spruce, fir, and pine, many individuals wish to assume that its towering bushes appear to achieve the heavens.
Ted Robinson’s calls for had given the golf course further house as he constructed a 27-hole design over 400 acres in comparison with its beforehand deliberate 18-hole design inside 320-acre limitations. Nonetheless, the golf course wouldn’t have been capable of stand as it’s at the moment with out the contribution of the engineer, James “Jim” Porter, who signed up because the venture supervisor. Claims had been made that Porter labored 18 hours a day, overlooking the entire venture. In 1971, he died in his early 40s. Hypothesis has prompt that he may need overworked himself to demise.
Earlier than the PGA Championship in 1998, the nation membership was renovated by Rees Jones. And at current, it has a whole lot of surprises in retailer.
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What do the loops of Sahalee Nation Golf Membership appear like?
The Sahalee Nation Golf Membership’s golf course has three loops: east, north, and south. The East 9 begins on a dogleg proper par 5, 536 yards from the again deck. In line with Past the Contour, “The East feels like a warm-up for the tournament 18, composed of the North & South nines. A couple dogleg lefts, a few dogleg rights, a couple straight holes—the The East forces you to hit it all.”
Whereas the primary tee of South 9 feels extra “claustrophic”. Its fourth tee is taken into account the course’s tightest. “The hole is relatively short at 386 yards, but with a tree right side fairway and a big tree left side that limits shot options off the tee, the player is forced to hit a fade to find the fairway,” stated Andrew Harvie six years in the past in his evaluation.
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Nonetheless, the North 9 has one of the best holes in your complete course. It has some nice moundings and bushes lining the fairways, which makes it a bit troublesome for a easy shot. The fifth tee there, nevertheless, is the shortest gap on the course. Nonetheless, at 377 yards, it has 2 bunkers inside and a couple of exterior of the nook of the dogleg left, making the shot fairly strategic.
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