Author: dev-loksanddec

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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3 super solutions for common golf course issues | Golfdom

miakka golf club to shine along a florida river, but another course feature comes from down under

Full article taken from Golf Week written by Jason Lusk  |  USA TODAY Sports

MYAKKA CITY, Fla. – The under-construction Miakka Golf Club has a lot going for it. A wide-open parcel of land with several interesting features. Two miles of frontage along a pastoral river. A former Ryder Cup captain as consultant. A successful developer with a proven track record, big plans and deep pockets.

Forget all that for a minute, and indulge this golf architecture nerd to geek out about one particular aspect of the work taking place inland between Tampa and Fort Myers on the western side of Florida’s peninsula. Because if all goes to plan, the private Miakka might have some of the coolest bunkers found in the United States.

Yes, after a tour of the property in its raw-dirt form, it was the bunkers that caught my eye. That’s because some of the best bunkers in the world caught the eyes of course architects Dana Fry and Jason Straka, who plan to model their traps at Miakka in the form of Australian Sandbelt courses.

Citing the style of bunkering at such international heavyweights as Royal Melbourne, Victoria, Kingston Heath and Peninsula Kingswood, Fry and Straka plan to build traps that reach deep into greens with the putting surfaces seemingly suspended in air above the sand.

Fellow architecture nerds are granted a gasp at the daring.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Straka said with a smile during a tour of the property.

The traps in Australia’s Sandbelt around Melbourne are largely the creation of or inspired by Alister MacKenzie, the famed designer of Augusta National and Cypress Point, among others. It was on a working tour of Australia nearly a century ago that MacKenzie introduced some of the best bunkers in the world to several courses.

The best Sandbelt greens and traps are split by a knife’s edge with no fringe, no separation. With graceful curves etched directly into the putting surfaces, they are among the most beautiful and frightening sand traps in the world, often falling back into a more rugged and natural design on the far sides of the traps.

But it’s almost impossible to build such traps at most locations. The Melbourne Sandbelt is graced with dense sand, which helps the traps retain their shape. They wouldn’t work at most American courses, as the edges of the bunkers would crumble under the weight of golfers and mowers on the surfaces above – such construction would be a liability and a maintenance headache. Instead, American bunkers are normally kept at least several steps off a putting surface. Us lot have grown accustomed to the American style, most of us never realizing what we’re missing Down Under.

Fry and Straka plan to utilize a modern construction method to change all that at Miakka.

The design team will lean on Loksand to construct bunker edges. With offices in Asia and Australia, the company Loksand has created a crimped fiber product that allows grass to grow atop it while resisting compression or shifting. The company’s methods provide the hardy bunker walls Fry and Straka need to carve Sandbelt-style traps into greens in Florida, where native sand is normally much looser.

Showing off a Loksand test bunker at Miakka, Straka threw a golf ball into the wall of the trap. It bounced off in a natural way, not some weird rebound that would be a turn-off to golfers. The Loksand bunker also supports plenty of weight. The company provided a green light for Fry and Straka to make bold choices.

“We had looked at the Sandbelt course and wanted to find a way to build bunkers like that, and this gave us that chance,” Straka said during our tour. “We tried several other options, and this just works.”

For the golf architecture nerds who have had the good fortune to play in the Sandbelt, it’s an inspiring choice.

But the property’s developer, Florida-based entrepreneur Steve Herrig, was not originally inspired by golf at all. This all started with horses.

Miakka Golf Club sits next to Herrig’s TerraNova Equestrian Center, which he built to accommodate the growing passion for horses shown by his daughter. Starting with small plans for a barn and a place to ride, TerraNova has grown into a world-class equestrian center capable of holding national events. Herrig has laid out plans for a horse-themed community adjacent to the equestrian center, with lots ranging from five to 20 acres, each with a private barn.

A frequent participant in golf games at Gator Creek Golf Club in nearby Sarasota, Herrig – who has built profitable businesses in insurance and human resources – said he was told by friends that he should add a golf course. “Here we are now,” he said at lunch before setting out to check on construction of his Miakka Golf Club.

One of those friends from the Sarasota club – known simply as Gator by locals – just happened to be Paul Azinger, winner of 12 PGA Tour events including the 1993 PGA Championship. He went on to captain the victorious 2008 U.S. Ryder Cup squad and feature as a prominent voice in golf broadcasting for 15 years. Herrig brought on Azinger as a design consultant at Miakka.

The property has a lot going for it. The course and its facilities will sit on 1,100 acres away from the planned homes. Overall, the land tilts on a plane dozens of feet down toward the Myakka River, and there’s a twisting creek bed that will be interlaced with fairways. Some 3 million cubic yards of sand will be pushed into landforms atop the site, that sand having been mined from an area that will become a lake nearer a rural highway that passes the course and sprawling clubhouse. Plans include  a 12-hole par-3 course, a huge circular practice facility, cabins and a lighted putting course.