Golf course construction is getting back to basics -- affordable facilities minus many of the bells and whistles.

The 1990s began with a clarion call of opening a golf course a day in the U.S. to handle the game's population boom. The courses came, but some did not serve the purpose; they were too expensive or too difficult, or both. Recently, the game's leaders renewed the call for "affordable" and "accessible" courses to spread the game deeper into the grass roots. This 18-page "Back to Basics" section presents three examples of courses built with that philosophy, one that can be transferred to virtually any facility being planned. The people who planted these flagsticks used their heads, hearts and hands to realize that original vision: a place to learn and enjoy the game. The gentle green hills that roll east from Sioux Falls, S.D., carry the promise of a golf course over every ridge. So when a group of 29 investors led by the late Steve Slack, a local businessman, decided to build one there a few years ago on a $1 million budget, they had no shortage of potential sites.

It is technically possible to put a golf course almost anywhere, of course, if you have the money to create topography, put water where there isn't any and construct a powerful drainage system. But Slack and his group quickly learned that a limited budget mandates a ready-made location, a golf course waiting to happen.

That's how America's most impressive new low-cost facility, the Ben Crenshaw-designed Sand Hills of Mullin, Neb., came into being: as the product of a search for an optimal site. "I'm not smart enough to make one of these things," says Dick Youngscamp, the managing general partner at Sand Hills. "I am smart enough to find one."

What Youngscamp found was an undulating field in the midst of nothingness, more than an hour from the nearest commercial airport. Yet the No. 1 criterion for site selection, according to the American Society of Golf Course Architects, is population within a 20-mile radius. Some days go by at Sand Hills without a dozen golfers on the course. The Sioux Falls investors -- who each contributed $10,000 to their own project -- couldn't afford such languor. Not with loan payments looming.

After several false starts, the investors settled on an area of soybean, corn and alfalfa fields overlooking the Sioux River, near the Iowa border. It was old Indian ground not far from Blood Run, where as many as 100,000 tribesmen lived in the 14th and 15th centuries, a peaceful 15-minute drive from the city center. Most important, the site they named Spring Creek -- after a stream that runs through what is now the 12th hole -- had varied terrain and plenty of ground water.

"The lay of the land today is pretty much as it was," says farmer Loren Long as he looks out at the first tee from behind a chicken sandwich in the Spring Creek clubhouse bar. Long should know; his family owned the land and sold it to Slack and the partners for a sum of cash and a stake in the project. "We'd always talked about putting a golf course out here because it seemed like a natural place for one," he says. "We never actually believed it would happen, but it did."

Spring Creek, opened in 1995, is one of a new generation of low-budget, high-quality 18-hole courses built for around $1 million, which is less than half the average cost of a golf course in America today. (Estimates for a typical 18-hole course range from $2.5 million to $5 million.) The green fee at Spring Creek runs $14.90 on weekdays, $16.90 on weekends, among the lowest of the half-dozen public courses in the area, and business is booming. "This place has been successful from day one," says Gerry Summa, the teaching pro.

Some 37,000 rounds were played at Spring Creek in 1996, bettering initial projections by 50 percent. In stark contrast, Prairie Green, a course built by the city of Sioux Falls for three times the price, sits a few miles away, a handsome but under-used facility. Someone has to pay for the $3 million investment, so green fees are $21. "The math is simple," says former ASGCA president Denis Griffiths. "The less it costs to develop a course, the less it costs to play it." Spring Creek won't win any design awards, and no national tournaments are coming anytime soon. That's not the point to building a $1 million course -- and if it is, the hard realities will become apparent. "You need an awareness on the part of the owners that they're not getting Augusta National," says Marengo, Ill.-based designer Bob Lohmann. Very few $1 million courses will have USGA[-spec] greens or computerized irrigation systems, and they'll rarely reach 7,000 yards. (Spring Creek is 6,300.) "If you're going to keep it to $1 million, you can't have all the bells and whistles of a $10 million course," says noted golf course architect and former ASGCA president Michael Hurdzan.

But most golfers don't need such amenities, and they sure don't want to pay for them. They'd rather have lower green fees and a playable course. "These days it's, Who can build the toughest, meanest-looking thing?" says Summa. "Yet the vast majority of golfers are marginal at best. They don't want to go out and lose a dozen golf balls and shoot 150. That doesn't make anybody feel good or want to keep coming back."

The creation of playable, affordable golf courses has become a pet project of an informal group of designers and builders. Its beginnings can be traced to 1990, when Hurdzan gave a talk at a National Golf Foundation meeting in Palm Springs, Calif., that angered some listeners and inspired others. Despairing over the growing number of monster courses and $100 green fees that are beyond the reach of the typical recreational golfer, he called for the construction of low-cost, low-budget facilities. More courses were needed, he said, and they had to be cheaper. "The two things that can kill this golden ride we're on are how long it takes to play a round of golf, and how much it costs," he said. Big-name architects, whose fees alone can approach $1 million, were not amused by such a mission statement.

That $1 million, exclusive of land costs, was where Hurdzan set the bar. The figure is attainable in places such as South Dakota, but pure fantasy in others. Constructing a course in the South typically costs more because bridges must be built over water and swampland, and much of the elevation has to be created. In the desert of the Southwest, irrigation becomes a costly problem and greens are difficult. On the other hand, the golf season there is 12 months long, double some parts of the Rust Belt, and that steady flow of income can help reduce green fees.

In the nation's heartland, $1 million courses in the right locations are feasible. Steve Sanders, a pro who owns and operates the Great River Road course in Nauvoo, Ill., bought nine holes and added nine more for a total cost of about $500,000. He's thrilled with his fairways and greens, though he wishes he'd spent more on the tees. Still, he's able to offer golfers 18 holes, one of which includes a dramatic vista of the Mississippi River, for only $11, and he does it by filling foursomes from dawn until dark. "People don't want flair, they want practicality," he says. "They want a well-maintained golf course. And they don't want to pay $110 for four hours of recreation."

For certain, there's a place in the game for perfectly sculpted, state-of-the-art, championship-level courses. But that place probably isn't Sioux Falls, despite the city's expectations for Prairie Green. When a skeptical loan officer wondered how it would be possible to build a course for $1 million when the city was spending so much more, Slack called Marty Johnson, who'd already built close to 200 courses in places like Freeman, S.D., Larchwood, Iowa and Montevideo, Minn.

Bringing Johnson on to design and construct the course would convince the bank that the project was sensible. "Besides," says Jeff Haberman, a past-president of Spring Creek's board of directors, "we figured he was the only one who'd fit our budget." The partners paid him $500,000, by far their single biggest investment, which left them about $500,000 for . . . everything else. They started construction behind schedule, delayed by the wettest summer weather in memory, but other things were breaking right. The site turned out to be more than three miles from the Sioux Falls city limit, which meant the liquor license for the restaurant they were planning wouldn't cost the budgeted $100,000, but $1,200.

The hot months of 1994 will be remembered among a dozen or so of the partners as the summer they built the golf course. Haberman estimates that what he calls "sweat equity" -- investors spending nights, holidays and weekends with spades and shovels and rakes for as long as six months -- saved them $500,000 to $750,000 in labor. It became a second full-time job to some. They kept spare clothes in their cars and changed after work, then dug ditches or put down sod until dark. They'd pick up where the contract workers left off. If the $6-an-hour daytime workers had laid the pipe, the volunteers would cover the trenches. "It was like a tag team," says Haberman.

With interest on the loan accumulating, they needed to get the course finished so they could get some players and cash coming in. They saved money on soil displacement, which generally costs $1 a yard, and got lucky when one of the investors donated sod. They spent $20,000 on trees to dress up the holes and, on Johnson's advice, far more than the average cost on greens. Huge greens are a Johnson trademark and the one luxury the group decided it could afford. "Everyone wants to say, ÔI made the green in two,' " says Haberman. "Never mind that once they get there, they have to putt 40 feet."

They also chose better irrigation pipe than they had originally figured on because they'd saved so much on labor. Jeff Brauer, an Arlington, Texas-based course architect, estimates irrigation at a typical site costs at least $350,000, but in some instances could run as much as $1.5 million, depending on the site. At Spring Creek, the $50,000 in materials paid for almost all of it, and the high-quality pipe will save on maintenance.

They should have upgraded the drainage system, too. Hurdzan, who often lectures on low-cost course construction, says a poorly drained site will cost a course as much as $400,000 annually. Additional dollars spent on contouring the land up front would have been a wise investment. As it is, Spring Creek's drainage isn't optimal. Water sometimes stands in the middle of tee boxes; at some point, they'll have to crown them. Another mistake was miscalculating the space allotted for a driving range: there isn't room between two fairways to make it work. Instead, that area is designated for Summa to teach, which leaves the course with no practice range. "If we ever do a second course," says partner Mike Garry, "it'll be a lot easier. We'll know a lot more."

The idea of building a second course generates mirth around the lunch table. All the partners get free golf for life as part of the investment agreement, so why would they ever need another? But when the laughter dies down, Haberman speaks softly. "We know it can be done now," he says. "We know that it's a possibility." Indeed, Spring Creek is up and running, a $1 million golf course that's making money and developing a devoted following. It all goes back to choosing the right land, a point the partners realize every time they sell one of the housing lots contiguous to the course.

These days, those lots go for as much as $75,000 each, which will mean homes with a half-million dollar book value -- half as much as the entire course cost to construct. Nobody who looks at the rolling fairways will care that the course was built on a budget, and they'll be thankful when they make that short stroll to the clubhouse to play a round. After spending $500,000 for a house, getting a round of golf for $14.90 is a welcome surprise.

Bruce Schoenfeld is a freelance writer living in Boulder, Colo.