Scott Laffin

Principal

I grew up in suburban Chicago and became introduced to the game through summers spent caddying at a local country club, and playing countless rounds at municipal courses. While working towards my BS of Landscape Architecture at the University of Kentucky (2013), I spent summers working on grounds crews, and landed an internship working for Oliphant Golf, initially as a grounds crew member at the Golf Courses of Lawsonia, and eventually on construction crews in Texas. After college, I worked as a project coordinator and estimator on the construction side of golf for 3 years, including the early stages of development at Sand Valley resort in Wisconsin.

I left the golf industry for a few years to start a family, and worked for multi-disciplinary design firms in Chicago and Cincinnati, surrounding myself with landscape architects, architects, civil engineers, and surveyors. During my "time away" from the golf industry, I was fortunate enough to maintain strong relationships with my golf contacts and perform contracted work for irrigation and golf course designers.

I founded Feature Golf as a consulting firm in 2020, and have had the unique opportunity to consult with some of the industry’s best minds, allowing us to eventually get our own projects (while happily maintaining our collaborations/consulting!). As Feature Golf Design grows, it is important to me to preserve and maintain the highest standards of golf design on all of our projects, no matter the scope. We aim to respect the heritage of the game and profession, while trusting our design principles to drive innovative solutions catered to each individual client.

While building fun, challenging, strategic golf, I strive to enable strong relationships between the built facilities and their surrounding environments.

My wife Hillary, daughters Millie, Heidi, Whitney, and I currently live in Cincinnati, Ohio. Though there's not much free time these days, we enjoy playing golf, hiking (near and far), running, and a good, long walk with our dog, Findlay.