How Are Mini Golf Courses Designed, Built, and Drained?

Mini golf courses are engineered with site grading and drainage design, ADA-compliant accessible routes, structural foundations for themed features, recirculating water features, and durable surfacing and lighting systems. The longevity factor is what separates engineered courses from themed ones. A course is outdoors, walked on by thousands, rained on, and baked by sun. The surfacing system, the drainage beneath it, and the structural durability of every feature determine whether the course looks good in year ten or year two.

Civil design carries the project: grading plans that balance cut and fill while creating the hole topography, drainage that keeps every surface playable after rain, and the accessible routing woven through the theming. Water features get their own engineering — recirculation, filtration, waterproofing, and make-up water — sized like the small aquatic systems they are. Structural design covers everything vertical: themed feature structures with real foundations and lateral design, pedestrian bridges, shade pavilions, the clubhouse, and site retaining walls. The MEP is modest but real: course lighting, irrigation, the clubhouse systems, and any food service. I coordinate it all so the themed experience sits on infrastructure that works invisibly.

Mini golf projects are often owner-built with big creative ambitions, so the engineering role is to make the creativity buildable and durable. Here's what I prioritize on mini golf work.

• Engineer drainage like infrastructure: positive drainage on every surface, verified in the grading plan
• Design accessibility in from the start: routes, grades, and accessible holes before theming is detailed
• Give every feature a real foundation: themed structures get structural design, not just decoration
• Separate the water systems: recirculating features, irrigation, and stormwater are three different systems
• Design lighting for play: illuminate the holes for evening revenue without glare