This rookie course designer’s advice for aspiring architects is disarmingly simple

Golf rewards early dedication. Most elite players are prodigious talents who started young and stayed committed, progressing from the junior circuit to college programs and then on to the professional game. Of course, a few take detours. But there’s one main road, and it’s long and narrow.

Golf course architecture could hardly be more different. For every great designer who took to doodling golf holes when they were still in diapers, there are others who fell sideways into the field. Alister MacKenzie was a surgeon in the British army long before he routed his first course. Kye Goalby worked in finance. Bill Coore studied classics in college, with an eye toward becoming a professor.

Then there’s Mike Koprowski, among the most unlikely stories of them all.

Though Koprowski played golf in high school, he never considered the game as a career. At the University of Notre Dame, he enrolled in ROTC and, after graduation, served as an Air Force intelligence officer overseas. He went on to stack degrees from Duke and Harvard and built a résumé in public policy and education. Golf architecture filled a quieter corner of his mind: a fascination, not a plan, and certainly not a way to make a living.

Eventually, in a move that felt equal parts reckless and inevitable, Koprowski turned his back on Beltway stability and cold-emailed the architect Kyle Franz, which led to an apprenticeship in the Sandhills outside Pinehurst. He learned the craft from the dirt up — shaping, clearing, studying soils — and, before long, did something even bolder: He bought a rumpled stretch of sandy ground outside Columbia, S.C., and set about building his own course.

The result is Broomsedge, set on 197 acres of blowy terrain, its fairways stitched between native grasses and sandy scrapes. It is, by any measure, an improbable achievement.

A few weeks ago, the Destination Golf podcast team visited  Broomsedge, where we recorded an on-course episode with Koprowski. You’ve heard of playing lessons. This was a playing interview. During the round, Koprowski talked about his unlikely path into architecture and the hard lessons that came with betting on himself. There were moments, he admitted, when the bank balance was bleak and his pie-in-the-sky project appeared doomed. But the vision held.

Others have taken notice. With Broomsedge up and running to rave reviews, Koprowski is fielding opportunities for additional work. One project, Candyroot — a destination resort in the works at the edge of the Carolina sandbelt — is still under wraps, with details to be unveiled soon. For a guy who once wondered how anyone breaks into this business without inherited land or inherited wealth, the irony isn’t lost.

Koprowski says he almost has to pinch himself when someone asks him to price out his services.

“I have a really hard time knowing what I should charge, because I’m having so much fun, I’d probably do it for free,” he says.

As for advice to aspiring architects? It’s disarmingly simple. Read books on design. Travel to see as many great courses as you can. Study the ground. And then, he says, offering counsel that applies well beyond golf, “throw caution to the wind.” 

Life, after all, is like a twilight golf. You only go around once. You can watch the entire episode on Spotify here.