There is a particular kind of courage in building something small at a resort that also offers something very big. Sand Valley, near Nekoosa, Wisconsin, is home to Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw's Sand Valley course and to David McLay Kidd's Mammoth Dunes, an expansive layout. Sedge Valley is Tom Doak's second course after the acclaimed Lido, and it chooses to go the other way. It plays to a par of 68 and measures 5,829 yards from the very back. It does not apologize for either number. The idea had been with Doak for a long time. In the 1980s he saw a handful of courses in the English heathlands that stayed with him: Rye, Swinley Forest, and the Addington. They shared something unusual. Each was shorter, each had a par under 70, and from an architectural standpoint each still felt world-class. They are the kind of places that show length and greatness are separate things. The lesson waited years for the right ground and the right partner. The partner arrived in the form of a phone call. When Michael Keiser rang Doak about this piece of property, he already had something smaller in mind. A developer and an architect rarely share the same concept, and these two did. Doak had also grown uneasy with where his profession had drifted. When he started building courses on his own with High Pointe, he deliberately made fairways wider to give golfers more room. It was one of the hallmarks of his early work, before others were doing it, and for 35 years the game kept moving that way. The best new course, he observed, is often the biggest new course. Eventually he found himself looking at certain new courses and thinking, "This is crazy wide." Too much room, Doak argued, invites everyone to swing for the fences, because they can still finish 60 yards offline and have a 9-iron into the green. He did not consider that good architecture, and he had been looking for a place to do something different. He did not want to do it on a project that was not going to be a big deal. It had to be somewhere that really attracted attention. Sand Valley was that somewhere. A sub par-70 course had not been built in modern golf architecture, yet the idea makes a great deal of sense at a big resort. The resort now holds a kind of argument in three parts. Mammoth Dunes sits at one end of the spectrum, expansive and broad. Sedge Valley sits at the opposite end, compact and short. The original Sand Valley course falls somewhere in the middle. Alongside them is Coore and Crenshaw's Sandbox, a 17-hole par-3 course built on templates such as Maiden, Road, Biarritz, Lion's Mouth and Redan. It channels famous holes from places like Royal St George's into a pure golf playground. What makes Sedge Valley stranger and more charming is the timing of its birth. Its construction coincided with Doak and Renaissance Golf's build of the Lido, and associates bounced between the two in the final days of the Lido. It is hard to imagine two more different golf concepts coming out of the same architecture firm at the same time. There is a practical side to the romance. Wisconsin summer days run long, and visitors often try to pack in as much golf as possible. A par-68 course lets you zip around in a way neither of the big courses allows. The best way to meet it may be first thing in the morning, before the day's longer rounds. Played that way, Sedge Valley becomes a reminder of what those English heathland courses showed Doak years ago: a short course can still be a great one.