Ban Rakat Club

Overview: Ban Rakat Club, known through its course identity as Ballyshear Golf Links, brings a links vocabulary to Bang Bo in Samut Prakan. Gil Hanse’s routing is laid out as a par 71, with the official concept page recording 3,644 yards for the front nine and 3,471 for the back. The broad, shaped ground invites strategic choices from the tee, but the design’s interest lies in how angles and approach lines matter after the drive. It is a deliberate contrast to Thailand’s more familiar tree-lined resort courses, with the landscape and the ground game given room to speak.

History: The club opened in 2021 as a new project by the BRC group, with Gil Hanse and Hanse Golf Course Design responsible for the golf course. Its name and design language are consciously tied to the history of golf architecture, yet the routing is not presented as a replica of an older course. Instead, the official concept describes a contemporary interpretation shaped by the memory of Charles Blair Macdonald’s Lido and by the links tradition that informed Hanse’s work.

Did You Know? The par is split unevenly between the nines, 36 going out and 35 coming home. That small detail is more revealing than it first appears: the closing nine is not simply a second copy of the first, and its shorter par total changes the rhythm of the round. The official concept material also names the Lido as a design reference, placing Ban Rakat within a very specific conversation about early American golf architecture.