Month: March 2025

with loksand, bunker faces and edges ‘aren’t going anywhere’

 

JUPITER, Florida (March 20, 2025) — LOKSAND Global has announced North American availability of the stabilization product LOKSAND in addition to a brand new rep office here in Jupiter, Florida, to support the business.

LOKSAND Global President Danny Potter — a former superintendent and founder of Centaur, one of the largest distributors of golf products in Asia-Pacific — also announced the LOKSAND’s first U.S. installation at Miakka Golf Club, an original Fry-Straka design taking shape 30 minutes east of Sarasota. 

LOKSAND is a soil amendment featuring interlocking, crimped fibers that bind and stabilize soil and sand profiles, especially those supporting steep bunker faces in heavy rainfall regions. 

Deployment of the LOKSAND soil amendment also allows superintendents, contractors and architects to tackle the problem of poor turf quality in heavily trafficked areas. According to Potter, LOKSAND protects and strengthens fairway cart-path entry and exit points, walkways and green exits — without resorting to repair or hardscape options. 

“We can honestly build nearly anything with LOKSAND,” Potter said. “We’re still establishing the limits of what it can do. We’ve used it to build stunning vertical bunker faces 3-feet high. It perfectly stabilizes the steep noses of bunkers that dive into bunkers. Whether it’s a rolled-over edge, high verticals or slopes where golfers enter and exit bunkers, LOKSAND and its binding abilities keep everything in place without compromising percolation in any way. What’s more, LOKSAND can be mixed using whatever soils and sands you have on site. No need for any expensive import of particular sand mixes.” 

LOKSAND has been vetted by course architects, contractors and superintendents in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific region. It’s now available in North America from the firm’s new Jupiter office. 

 “We believe in this product enough to distribute here ourselves,” said Potter, who founded his international distributor business after 20 years working as head superintendent at Khao Keow Country Club in Thailand, Laguna Bintan Gof Club in Indonesia and multiple courses at the Mission Hills Resort in southern China. 

“It’s the crimp in the fiber that make the difference,” Potter added. “The crimp is what zigzags through the soil/sand particles and holds them all together. By adding the fibers, we’re able to safely build bunkers with steeper angles of repose, in more dramatic shapes, without collapsing. The addition of LOKSAND also provides those faces better, more stable and predictable drainage and percolation, which invariably leads to better root structures — which ultimately stabilizes these steep areas that much better, over time.” 

The LOKSAND technology first proved itself — to Potter and course clients — in one of the wettest environments on Earth: equatorial Southeast Asia. During his 2023 renovation at Singapore Island Country Club, architect Graham Marsh grew frustrated with constant erosion damage to the bunkers under reconstruction. Shapers would prepare new bunkers that, according to Potter, “were pretty gnarly, with quite high faces.” 

Every time Marsh returned to check on construction progress, many had invariably eroded and collapsed. 

“I’ve worked with Danny for years and told him we needed a solution,” Marsh said. “I could tell immediately that this stuff was holding. The bunker face was accepting it and the sand was staying in place. After several days of heavy rains — and nowhere in the world does it rain like Singapore — it remained in place. For me, LOKSAND is a sort of missing link in creating the perfect environment in which to build a bunker. It’s a big deal for the golf industry if you can build something so steep that will last.” 

Added Potter: “There are many different ways to build a bunker, obviously, many different styles. LOKSAND is the license to build anything.” 

That’s the storyline at Miakka GC, where Fry/Straka Global Golf Design and the owner made the decision to design and build North America’s first authentic Australian Sandbelt-style bunkers, complete with anywhere between 4 and 40 inches of exposed LOKSAND-amended soil separating the sand face from the turf profile. 

The LOKSAND technology, for use in construction, was only hit upon in 2019. Potter freely admits that superintendents, contractors and architects are still determining what exactly LOKSAND can do. Clients in the sports field sector, for example, first discovered its ability to reinforce and improve damaged turf in high-traffic areas. Golf clients in Asia first hit upon LOKSAND’s utility in creating and maintaining waste areas. 

 “A lot of architects these days are looking for that natural look, native scrub areas that may or may not transition into a sand bunker,” Potter said. “Any course builder will tell you it’s difficult to get the stability you need in those native areas. Sands will move and migrate without an enormous amount of vegetation, which presents its own playability and maintenance issues. That unsecured environment also tends to shift; golfers are continually walking through it, up and down — the way golfers get in and out of bunkers. 

“What we’re able to do with LOKSAND is stabilize those native areas during construction. You’d never know it or see it: They still look completely natural. And you don’t need to over landscape those areas because the shapes created — and the sand supporting those shapes — aren’t going anywhere.” 

“Honestly, North American architects are going to love LOKSAND. They painstakingly paint and cut bunker lines to reflect their creativity and style. Using LOKSAND creates an edge that remains in place. Even if the turf grows beyond the edge and the original line is lost, it is easy to get that line back to the LOKSAND edge. Many architects are now looking for bunkers that ‘evolve’ over time — to give them a very natural look. But with LOKSAND they can create those naturally evolved edges from the beginning and keep them in place, as intended, for many years to come.”

Media Contact:  

Jay Morgan
863.266.8473
jay@loksand.com

To demonstrate to attendees at the 2025 GCSAA Conference and Trade Show in San Diego what Loksand is capable of, the company invited attendees to kneel down, grab a handful of bunker sand and pick it up. Most of it would immediately fall out of their hand; the only sand that stayed was what was firmly in grasp.

Then, they’d ask attendees to grab a handful of sand treated with Loksand — a crimped fiber that can be added to any sand or soil. Much more sand stays in one’s hand, like pulling a core from a green and seeing the dirt and sand attached to the roots.

“It’s a little bit of a black magic product, to be quite frank,” says Danny Potter, founder, owner and director of Centaur Asia Pacific, which represents products for golf, sports turf, nursery and lawn worldwide. “You don’t get compaction. You get drainage … you get firmness.”

The product is 15 years old but has been sitting on the shelf until recently. Previously, it was used for soccer fields in the United Kingdom or on roads for overflow dirt parking lots. Now, the folks behind Loksand are eager to show superintendents how it can help alleviate trouble areas on golf courses.

The golf-Loksand connection began when Australia’s Graham Marsh, a former touring pro with a host of wins worldwide, was designing the New Course at Singapore Island CC in 2019. He asked Potter if he had a solution to keep the tops of bunkers from collapsing after heavy rains during the wet season.

“To be fair, you would need a crew of 10 running around with fly mowers to maintain these bunkers,” Potter says. “They have these big, gnarly noses. I knew (about Loksand) and just thought outside the box.”

Potter showed what LokSand could do by building a steep bunker with it and one without. Marsh walked along the top of the bunker without Loksand, and the top caved in. Then he walked along the top of the bunker constructed with Loksand.

“He’s like, ‘What the (heck) is going on here? What have you done?’” Potter laughs. “He jumped up and down on it, and it didn’t move. It worked. Then he went and ordered two tons of the product and did all 27 holes of bunkers with it.”

To be clear, LokSand is not meant to be hit from — a golfer would break their club, or worse, their wrist. It is meant to be a stabilizing material for areas that typically crumble based on gravity, wash out or struggle with perennial wetness.

“The things you could do with it are amazing,” says Wayne Branthwaite, a former superintendent who has been the longtime vice president of Nick Price Golf Course Design. “It’s not just a bunker edge product. It’s a cart path product. It’s a solution for hardscapes. It doesn’t compact. You don’t get all that dust like you do with coquina or concrete.”

Potter says LokSand was recently used to build a playground in Melbourne, Australia, to solve the constant wear areas around the slides and swings. It was also used on a driving range near Brisbane Airport, built on a floodplain. When the tide comes up, it gets wet. The wet areas were replaced with rectangles of Loksand so grass could grow.

“It’s like a ready-made root system. When the grass grows into it, because of those pore spaces, the roots can grow quickly through this and intertwine through the fibers,” he says. “It’s not just binding the soils together. It’s giving the roots structure.”

One American course utilizing Loksand is Miakka GC near Myakka City, Fla. A Fry/Straka Global Golf Course Design project in conjunction with Paul Azinger, construction of the course is ongoing. The bunkers emulate Australian bunkering using Loksand for the vertical face. If a shot hits into the vertical face of the bunker, the ball falls rather than ricochets.

“It’s great to get a big project like Miakka,” Potter says. “(But) that’s only going to be one to five percent of the projects that we are going to do. The rest are going to be grass-covered steep faces, even straight faces. I see it helping the average Joe, the average golf course that comes back every year and keeps trying to find ways to grow grass on their bunkers and stabilizing those edges.”

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