Even when it looked like nothing but dirt, he says, “there wasn’t a whole lot of skepticism” about what it was going to become. Lee was on site at Southern Highlands from the beginning of construction. “In the normal course of duties, Andy focuses on turf issues, and I focus on the upkeep of the irrigation system and the business side.” “We turned three jobs into two,” reports Randy Lee, who now shares the role with Andy Hawkins. Stottern left to return to his native Utah in 2004, but course maintenance didn’t miss a beat, as the two assistants who had worked under him were promoted to be co-superintendents. Working with the club’s initial Superintendent, Riley Stottern, a third-generation industry veteran and former President of the Golf Course Superintendents Association, the design and grow-in had such an immediately spectacular impact that Southern Highlands quickly earned accolades as the West’s best new course and attracted PGA Tour events that showed off its 225 acres of rolling, immaculately landscaped terrain and creative water features. It all started with the golf course, designed through a rare collaboration between the father-son team of Robert Trent Jones Sr. And it’s certainly arguable whether the other properties that have followed the same “formula” have come close to creating the same effect. There’s nothing common, though, about the approaches that Goett and the management team of Southern Highlands Golf Club have taken to put, and keep, their property on the map, not only in Southern Nevada but on a national scale. “The success of Southern Highlands has caused others in the area to emulate the winning formula of golf and luxury.” “What’s now commonplace throughout Las Vegas and its outlying areas began with one man and one idea,” Links wrote of Goett. What it became, in fact, led Links magazine in 2006 to cite Olympia Companies’ President, Garry Goett, as a “Vegas Visionary,” for bringing the concept of “high-end golf real estate” to Las Vegas through Southern Highlands. “But as they kept moving massive amounts of dirt, creating elevation changes, building waterfalls, and planting tens of thousands of trees and flowering shrubs, it became something that had never been seen in this area before.” “Coming from a lush place with unlimited water like Florida, it was hard to visualize that anything like that could be created here,” she recalls. in 1998 to be the first employee of the golf club being developed as part of a master-planned community by Olympia Companies. “It was literally all just dirt when I first saw it,” says Caiazzo, a former membership and marketing manager for ClubCorp who came from West Palm Beach, Fla. Quiet as in desert quiet-but while the property still features the calm and peacefulness of the desert scrubland that it was until the end of the 1990s, anyone now dropped blindfolded onto the golf course or club grounds would be hard-pressed to think “Mojave” as soon as their mask was removed. “If you want all the hubbub and action, it’s easy to get to it. The Strip is “literally 10 minutes” from Southern Highlands Golf Club, says Shelley Caiazzo, the club’s Director of Marketing. Co-Superintendents: Andy Hawkins and Randy Lee.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |