Mark Rathert

Mark F. Rathert is a golf course architect who grew up in Marion, Kansas. A 2008 piece in the local Marion County Record records that, apart from a spell in Wichita during grade school, he spent most of his boyhood in Marion and graduated from Marion High School in 1971. He took an associate degree at Butler County Community College in 1973 and a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture, with honours, from Kansas State University in 1977. While still a student he entered a golf course design in the national student competition of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and won it. That one student project is what set him on the path to designing golf courses for a living.

In 1977, the year he graduated, he joined Robert Trent Jones Jr.‘s office in California and learned the practical side of the work. He went on to work with J. Michael Poellot, founder of JMP Golf Design Group, before setting up on his own in 1989 as Rathert International Golf Design. He has belonged to the ASGCA since 1981. By the society’s account he has built more than 80 courses in ten countries and fourteen American states, spending over 250 days a year on the road for fifteen years and flying more than two million miles in all. He works today from Greenwood Village, Colorado, on the edge of Denver.

On his approach, the ASGCA describes him as an architect who begins not with a design formula brought in ready-made but with an understanding of what the client is after. Rathert himself says he values playability, ease of maintenance and the golfer’s enjoyment ahead of whatever gimmick happens to be in fashion. Boulder Creek Golf Club at Boulder City, Nevada, taken as his best-known work, is a 27-hole municipal layout on which he built three separate landscapes — desert, arroyo and a waterside oasis — within the one site. The aim, in his words, was to give the municipal golfer the feel of a private club in Las Vegas. He also carried out the large-scale renovation of Las Vegas Country Club, originally designed by Ed Ault in 1967. His work in Asia has been extensive: GolfPass’s list of his courses runs to Clearwater Bay Golf & Country Club and Discovery Bay Golf Club in Hong Kong, several courses in Japan including Caledonian Golf Club, and Lakewood Country Club in Thailand. It is worth noting that the same list takes in courses he worked on at his previous firm, before he went out on his own.

Two of the courses on GoGolf are Rathert’s, one in Indonesia and one in Thailand, and both can be booked through GoGolf. Palm Springs Golf & Country Club Karawang Course, at Karawang in West Java, is credited to him by GolfPass and opened in 1996; it was originally called Sedana Golf & Country Club. Waterford Valley Chiang Rai, in the northern Thai province of Chiang Rai, opened the same year, and its GoGolf course page gives the design to Rathert International Golf Design. It is a parkland course, a par 72 of 6,961 yards from the back tees.

Rathert courses you can book on GoGolf

• Palm Springs Golf & Country Club Karawang Course (Sedana) (Karawang, West Java, Indonesia) — a par 72 opened in 1996. Formerly Sedana Golf & Country Club
• Waterford Valley Chiang Rai (Chiang Rai, Thailand) — a par 72 of 6,961 yards opened in 1996. An upland parkland course ringed by mountains

Tee times and rates for a given day can be checked on each course page or in the GoGolf app.

See the other golf course architects here.