After returning to Oregon, Hixson settled into life as a club professional, ultimately landing one of the region’s top jobs — head pro at historic Columbia-Edgewater. It’s only natural, then, that he raised a few eyebrows when he announced he would leave his post to pursue a career in golf course design and renovations.
“Looking back on it, I can see why some people might have thought I was a little nuts, but course work was what I had always wanted to do. And the PGA experience gave me a good perspective on design. I understand how course design fits into the overall operations of a facility. I understand maintenance budgets and issues, and membership issues. Granted, none of that understanding had people beating a path to my door, but I got some work here and there.”
That work came in the form of what some might call “routine” maintenance — new tee boxes, reworks of troubled putting surfaces, the occasional short game area. Hixson’s relationships with club pros and superintendents kept his fledgling business off the ground. He finally won a commission for one original 18-hole course and worked up a design, only to have the development fizzle out.
“It was a little frustrating,” Hixson confesses. “There’s a big difference between plans for a golf course and an actual golf course.”
Finally, in 2005, the phone rang, announcing the call that Hixson had waited for since he was seven years old. It was Rex and Carla Smith, and they identified themselves as Eugene natives who had purchased 360 acres of prime coastal forest and meadows just south of Bandon.
Yes, that Bandon.
The coastal burg had become ground zero in a new movement of American golf design — minimalism. David McLay Kidd, Tom Doak and the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw had worked their magic on the coastal lands of visionary developer Mike Keiser. Now the Smiths saw an opportunity to provide another golf option, separate from the Bandon Dunes resort but connected by geography and philosophy. They arranged a meeting, and within an hour of the formal introductions, Hixson had won the job. Working with Tony Russell, who had been integral to the construction of the courses at Bandon Dunes resort, Hixson went to work.
“All I could really say was, ‘wow,’” Hixson notes. “The site itself was just beautiful. A wonderful palette of native grasses and cedars, hemlocks, fir, rhododendrons. The property had so much color and so much character. “
Hixson’s Bandon Crossings opened in 2007 to wide acclaim. Golf writers dropped by during visits to Bandon Dunes, and they praised Hixson’s work as an ideal of minimalist design. Links magazine ran a feature on Bandon Crossings. Golf magazine designated it as one of the “Top-10 New Courses You Can Play.” Golfweek’s prestigious ratings panel listed Bandon Crossings seventh among all public access courses in Oregon.
“It’s funny,” he says. “Bandon Crossings proved to me that you don’t have to have a huge budget and spectacular features to provide a great golf experience. At Bandon, we had a wonderful piece of land, and we just worked out how to play golf on it. We did five routing plans. We used the natural features and bled the course into them whenever we could. And people have loved it.”
Dan Hixson’s lifelong journey was “suddenly” going places. Next stop: the sleepy hamlet of Walla Walla, where work was commencing on Wine Valley Golf Club.
Physically, you could hardly ask for two more disparate properties. The coastal clime of southwestern Oregon is an entirely different world from the wine-producing valley in the rain shadow east of the Cascades. Where Bandon Crossings slipped from verdant meadows into the forest, Wine Valley delivered more of an old-world challenge — find the continuity on a property of massive scope and scale.
“I had been visiting the property for some time,” Hixson says of Wine Valley. “I knew we would have to make bold bunkers and features. It was exciting to have such a different project coming right on the heels of Bandon.”
At Wine Valley, Hixson worked with shapers Brian Cesear and Kye Goalby; Dan Protcor, one of Coore and Crenshaw’s regulars, spent some time on site later in the construction process. Finding the balance between letting such experienced shapers work, while still focusing on the overall strategic design goals of the golf course, became a new kind of field challenge.
“I’m real thankful for our shapers on this project,” Hixson says of Wine Valley. “Because the land presented such an open canvas, their experience and input was even more vital. Together, we took the base plans and went to work. We knew we had some good ideas and land that was perfect for classic links-style golf, with lots of roll and bounce and randomness. The scale was going to be huge, so we had to adapt to that in construction.”
As construction progressed, Hixson transitioned from the role of “writer” of the plans to “editor” of the building process.