Czech Golf Design

This golf course located at Zbraslav, Czech Republic, has a great potential to become a successful commercial course owing to its position and easy access. The fact, that towards the end of 2010 a new Prague loop will be opened only 2 km (1.25 miles) from the course, makes the course even more attractive and easily accessible for players. The preparatory stage of the project took a number of years during which a number of foreign and local investors changed hands. This fact influenced rather negatively the prepared design of the golf course layout, but the authors of the final concept according to which the course has been built, members of a group fronted by Alex Čejka, managed the issue. Important team member actively involved in designing the course was a Scottish shaper Mick McShane. His script can easily be recognised from the final design of the course. Czech Golf Development was in charge of several key functions – the daily technical and on-site supervision on behalf of the investor foremost, but it also played its role in the choice of construction materials and coordination of the material supply. There had been some difficulties due to the fact that a contract concluded by and between the investor and Alpie-Golf as a supplier existed prior the investor decided to work with Czech Golf Development Ltd. These included e.g. lack of links to local key suppliers of construction materials which made the management of orders and requested administrative supervision fairly specific.

Czech Golf Development was also in charge of digging all water reservoirs with the total area of 4 hectares (almost 10 acres) and the construction of gravel drainage fractions. Digging the water hazards in areas covered in water required use of particular construction machinery and application of special technologies. The extracted material, mostly of gravel structure, was consecutively processed on-site and used for the required fractions at the rest of the golf course. All materials were also certified by USGA accredited laboratory ETL in Scotland.

Next important area of cooperation consisted of professional consultations and data collection for negotiations with relevant state offices involved in the process of calculating fees for exempting the lots of land for the construction site from the Czech agricultural land resources. This is in general a complicated area of the Czech Administration where various methodologies are applied within different areas of expertise by the relevant state offices. The specific of the Zbraslav lots to be exempted was the fact that the entire project is located in a flood zone, both active and inactive.

The overall links character of the golf course design is atypical in the Czech Republic, but it has been carefully fitted in the surrounding landscape. A number of water areas and large sandy-waste areas are in such height that should flooding occur, these areas would be covered in water first, before the rising water reaches the fairways, teeing areas and greens. These active play areas have been artificially elevated above the level of a “20-year flood”.