Golf rewards early dedication. Most elite players are prodigious talents who started young and stayed committed, moving from the junior circuit to college programs and then to the professional game. Of course, some take a detour. But there is one main road, and it is long and narrow.
The architecture of the golf course could hardly be different. For every great designer who started drawing golf holes while 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 took his first course. Kye Goalby worked in finance. Bill Coore studied classics in college, intending to become a professor.
Then there’s Mike Koprowski, one of the most unlikely stories of all.
Although 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 overseas as an intelligence officer in the Air Force. He then piled up degrees from Duke and Harvard and built a resume 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.
Finally, in a move that felt both foolhardy and inevitable, Koprowski turned his back on the stability of the Beltway and cold-emailed architect Kyle Franz, leading to an internship in the Sandhills outside Pinehurst. He learned the trade from scratch – shaping, clearing, studying soils – and soon he did something even bolder: He bought a rumpled plot of sandy land outside Columbia, S.C., and began building his own course.
The result is Broomsedge, situated on 197 hectares of windy terrain, with fairways between native grass and sandy areas. Regardless, it’s an unlikely feat.
A few weeks ago the Destination wave podcast team visited Broomsedge, where we made a recording course episode with Koprowski. You’ve heard of play lessons. This was a play interview. During the round, Koprowski talked about his unlikely path to architecture and the hard lessons that came with betting on himself. There were times, he admitted, when the bank balance was bleak and his heavenly project seemed doomed. But the vision endured.
Others have taken note. Now that Broomsedge is working to rave reviews, Koprowski is seizing opportunities for additional work. One project, Candyroot – a destination resort in the works on the edge of the Carolina sand belt – is not yet completed and details will be revealed soon. To anyone who ever wondered how someone broke into this business without inherited land or wealth, the irony is not lost.
Koprowski says he almost has to pinch himself when someone asks him to praise his services.
“It’s really hard for me to know what to ask for because I’m having so much fun that I would probably do it for free,” he says.
As for advice to aspiring architects? It’s disarmingly simple. Read books about design. Travel to see as many great courses as possible. Study the ground. And then, he says, offering advice that goes far beyond golf, “throw caution to the wind.”
After all, life is like a twilight wave. You only go around once. You can watch the entire episode on Spotify here.
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