About Ambush at Marcella Club near Park City, Utah
Ambush is the second eighteen at Marcella Club, and it is a genuinely thrilling commission. Rob Collins, Tad King and Trevor Dormer — working together as King Collins Dormer — broke ground in the summer of 2025 on a ridgeline high above the Heber Valley, a short walk from the Skyline first tee.
This is the team behind Sweetens Cove: nine holes on flat Tennessee farmland that became one of the most beloved courses of the last decade on the strength of its greens and its imagination alone. Hand that group genuinely dramatic mountain ground and the possibilities open right up.
Sweetens was the spark. What followed has turned into a bonfire. Landmand arrived in Nebraska in 2022 — an audacious eighteen on rolling farmland that put King Collins on every serious golfer’s list — and Red Feather in Texas, the reversible Crossroads at Palmetto Bluff and the Bounty Club in Nashville have come since. Trevor Dormer brings Cabot Cliffs, Cabot St Lucia and Torch Cay to the partnership.
Then in 2025 came the commission that says it all: Royal Dornoch, whose Championship links sits tenth on GOLF’s Top 100 Courses in the World, appointed King Collins Dormer to masterplan its future — an entirely new eighteen on Scottish linksland, a rebuilt Struie, a par-3 course and a practice facility. Their first project in the UK. They are building the second course at 7 Mile Beach in Tasmania at the same time.
Since Sweetens Cove they have built Landmand in Nebraska, been handed the master plan for Royal Dornoch in Scotland, and been commissioned for new courses at Kohler in Wisconsin and 7 Mile Beach in Tasmania. Trevor Dormer joined Rob Collins and Tad King in 2024 after a decade shaping for Coore & Crenshaw at Cabot Cliffs and Cabot St. Lucia. That is the team on a ridgeline fifteen minutes from Park City.
Architects who turned nine flat holes in Tennessee into a pilgrimage, now working a ridgeline above the Heber Valley. This is the most exciting thing happening in Utah golf.
— The Park City Golf AuthorityThe club calls the terrain otherworldly, and standing on it you understand why — the ground tumbles and folds in ways no one could draw from scratch. This team has always let the land lead rather than flattening it into submission, so expect width, expect green complexes with real personality, and expect the walk between shots to be part of the pleasure.
Both Marcella courses sit on Jordanelle Ridge with their opening tees within about a thousand yards of the clubhouse, so the club will play as a true thirty-six-hole property rather than two separate outings — two very different eighteens, a few minutes apart.
What Stands Out
Par, yardage and an opening date will follow as the routing settles, and this page will be updated the moment they are announced.
Whatever the numbers turn out to be, Ambush is one to look forward to — and together with Skyline it gives Marcella one of the most interesting thirty-six-hole pairings anywhere in the mountain west.
