Landscape Architect Articles

LASN Stewardship October 2009: The First Tee of Cleveland, Certified Gold Audubon International Signature Sanctuary Golf Course10-01-09 | News

The First Tee of Cleveland Certified Gold Audubon International Signature Sanctuary Golf Course

By Brit Stenson, ASGCA, ASLA

Three participants of The First Tee of Cleveland with a volunteer coach

In early 2000, a former Cleveland Indian, Andre (Thunder) Thornton, put together a board of avid Cleveland golfers to establish a Cleveland chapter of The First Tee, the national program that teaches children valuable life skills through the game of golf.

They called on Brit Stenson, landscape architect and IMG’s golf course design director. Cleveland is the home of IMG, the world’s leading sports management company, supporting its major golf clients as signature course designers. Brit volunteered to find a site and design the golf course.

The adjacent steel mill looms over the 4th green. Enhanced wetlands and habitat earned Audubon International recognition.
Photos courtesy of Brit Stenson

The City of Cleveland indicated it would support the idea provided the site was close in to the city, and so the search began. Several sites emerged, but one in particular seemed promising. It was 35 acres of vacant and abused land adjacent to a steel mill, just off I-77, less than 4 miles from downtown Cleveland. The site was the unused part of the Washington Park Horticultural Center, a former school that had been converted into a facility offering a two-year horticultural concentration through Cleveland’s South High School. In fact, the original idea of the horticultural center had included building two golf holes on that part of the site in the hopes of including some agronomics education as part of the program. The center never had the budget to build the golf holes, but the director, Joanne Scudder, quickly saw the potential synergies and gave the support of the school board that held the long-term lease of the land from the city

Coming Together to Design, Restore and Create

The eventual five-party venture took several years and many lawyers to complete. It involved The City of Cleveland, the School Board, and Newburgh Heights (which had partial jurisdiction) donating the land, The First Tee of Cleveland raising the three million dollars to build the facility, and Cleveland MetroParks assuming the operation of the facility.

Brit, through IMG, designed the golf course pro bono and established a close relationship with MetroParks as the eventual operator. Together, they involved Audubon International in the design process from the beginning, helping to restore and create wetlands and wildlife habitat. Last year The Washington Reservation & Golf Learning Center became the first Certified Gold Audubon International Signature Sanctuary course in Ohio.

The facility is now a fine practice facility, a challenging nine-hole par 29 golf course and a learning center. The First Tee of Cleveland participants, who number over 300 a year, have priority access at all times and the facility is open to the public the rest of the time. The Horticultural Center at last offers an agronomy segment in their program and several of their students intern at the golf course.