Toughest Place To Book A Tee Time Is A Golf Course In Rural Nebraska


Josh Gardner was ready. It was the morning of New Year’s Eve, and the 50-year-old insurance professional from Sheridan had his laptop open and his finger hovering over the refresh button.

He knew the drill: Landmand Golf Club, the improbable public course carved into the Loess Bluffs of northeast Nebraska, would release its entire 2026 season of tee times at once.

Gardner didn’t care about the date. He didn’t care about the month. He just wanted in at the toughest public golf course tee time to book.

“I was online because I knew that that’s what you had to do, and it just kept refreshing and I was getting the dial thing on the screen,” Gardner said. “I couldn’t get into the site, couldn’t get into the site, and then it just popped up and said, ‘All times are gone. Please inquire back next year.’”

He never even saw a calendar. All 11,000 tee times were gone in 45 minutes.

Gardner, still on the Landmand website — figuring he’d at least buy a hat from the pro shop — noticed an unfamiliar tab. It said, “The Heartbeat.”

He clicked.

What he found was a description of an inaugural golf tournament, a collaboration between Landmand and 5 Clubs Golf, the Golf Channel morning show hosted by veteran broadcaster Gary Williams.

The format was unlike anything on the national amateur scene: 52 two-man teams, one representing each of the 50 states, one for Washington, D.C., and one wildcard. Three tournament rounds plus a practice round.

All-inclusive — lodging, food, drink, shuttles, player gifts. The whole package for $7,000 per team.

Gardner reached out to his golf buddy Jared Stiver.

“I ran the dates by him and he was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not doing anything yet in August,’” Gardner said. “So I signed us up.”

Then he kept his mouth shut.

“I didn’t tell anybody else about it because I didn’t know how many people from Wyoming knew about it, but I knew if I told people about it, it was going to lessen my chances to get drawn,” he said. “Except I told people from other states. I told people from Montana and from the Dakotas.”

In February, the email arrived. Gardner and Stiver had been selected to represent Wyoming at The Heartbeat, scheduled for August 2–5, 2026. Four rounds at the course the Wall Street Journal called America’s toughest tee time.

“I was super pumped,” Gardner said. “Because I can’t get a tee time at the place, but I got drawn in a lottery to go play it.”

Stiver, 42, who runs a drilling fluids company in Sheridan, had a simpler read on the situation. He’d heard about Landmand for years from golf buddies in Denver who had tried and failed to get on. He figured the lottery was a long shot.

“I didn’t think there was any chance that we were going to get selected,” Stiver said. “And then I got an email that we were representing Wyoming and the fact that we were going to get to play four rounds there was outstanding.”

Farmer’s Course

How did a course carved out of the windswept bluffs of northeast Nebraska become one of the hottest destinations in golf?

Landmand founder Will Andersen is a fourth-generation Nebraska farmer whose great-grandfather Carl left Denmark in 1913 and settled in the northeast corner of the state. The family built a major ag operation — Will’s father was working 12,000 to 13,000 acres. But there was this one stretch of ground, 588 acres of dramatically steep loess hills near Homer, Nebraska.

“Landmand” is Danish for farmer, and loess refers to loosely compacted yellowish-gray deposits of windblown sediment.

Like the Pacific gusts at Pebble Beach in California and the salty gales at St. Andrews, Scotland, this windy bluff country in Nebraska called out to a golfer’s heart.

Andersen learned golf as a kid from his grandfather Bill Zellmer, smacking balls across a soccer field. He went on to play competitively, qualifying for the 2015 U.S. Mid-Amateur. After a stint working at a private club in Chicago, he came home and helped the family renovate a local nine-hole course. But his eyes kept drifting to those empty hills.

“I thought it was an amazing piece of ground,” Andersen says in “Anything But Little,” the Golf Channel documentary about the course’s origins. “I’d been on it my whole life. It was probably high school is when I thought there could be a golf course out here.”

Several architects told him the land was too severe, the location too remote. Then a friend mentioned King-Collins, the design firm behind Sweetens Cove, the cult-favorite nine-hole course in Tennessee.

Designer Rob Collins got Will’s email on a golf course and called him back the same day. Two weeks later, Collins and his partner Tad King were standing on the property.

“We got up there and no one’s really talking,” Andersen recalled in the documentary. “Tad just goes, ‘Holy crap. You own all this?’”

King-Collins found their routing in two days. Construction began in September 2019.

The course opened for public play in late 2022 with fairways stretching over 100 yards wide and the greens averaging more than 14,000 square feet.

According to coverage by the Wall Street Journal, Andersen set Landmand’s course fee at $150, “which is less than the cost of a caddie at Pebble Beach, the iconic public course where rounds start at $675. And he hasn’t jacked up the greens fees to keep up with the demand.”

“Golf Digest” ranked it No. 24 among America’s top 100 public courses. By New Year’s Eve 2024, when the 2025 tee sheet dropped, the entire season also sold out in under an hour.

“Like any living, breathing thing, Landmand continues to evolve year to year,” Andersen said when he announced The Heartbeat in January. “We hope, through The Heartbeat, to showcase this natural process as well as the people and community behind it.”

Wyoming Quest

Gardner and Stiver are not strangers to unlikely golf adventures. The two are members at Powder Horn in Sheridan and are currently in the middle of a quest to play every golf course in Wyoming with two other friends. They’ve knocked out 16 so far and have a couple more summers to finish.

They’re documenting the whole thing on a YouTube channel called Lowest Known Score — a riff on the “FKT” concept from extreme sports, where athletes chase the fastest known time on a trail.

Gardner and Stiver are chasing the lowest known score at every course in the state.

“It’s never been done before,” Gardner said with a laugh.

But it’s not clear if any course in Wyoming can prepare players for what’s waiting at Landmand.

“When you look at this thing online, there’s like zero trees, there might be one,” Gardner said. “There’s no water hazards. It’s just in the rolling hills of Nebraska, and they did very little to adjust the layout of the terrain. So whatever was there is kind of what you’re playing. Lots of knobs and little valleys and the green complexes are absolutely massive.”

He’s studied the flyover videos on YouTube. He’s ordered the green-reading book. He knows about the three-hole stretch golfers have named Cornfield Corner — Landmand’s answer to Amen Corner at Augusta. And he knows about the wind.

“The flags on the green, they’re windsocks, like what you’d see at an airport,” Gardner said. “I have to think that the wind just screeches there.”

Swapping Gifts

Both men have plans beyond just playing well. Borrowing a tradition from junior golf and the Olympics, they want to bring something distinctly Wyoming to trade with the teams they’re paired with each day.

“I want to do the same thing that kids do when they play national events — they trade something, a coin or a ball marker, something of significance from wherever they’re from,” Gardner said. He’s batted around ideas: ball markers made from a whiskey stave at Wyoming Whiskey, something that looks like a bullet casing from Weatherby. A divot tool carved from an elk antler. He’s open to suggestions.

“We’d need 10 of them,” he said. “Two for us and then we’ll play with four different twosomes. I just think that would be neat, but I don’t know what it is.”

Stiver sees the bigger picture. A latecomer to golf who didn’t really get into the game seriously until he was 30 after playing baseball as a younger man, he appreciates the improbability of what’s unfolding — a couple of guys from Sheridan getting drawn to represent Wyoming at a course built by a farmer on ground many dismissed as ever becoming prime golf country.

“It was a little bit of a ‘Field of Dreams’ type of situation,” Stiver said of Landmand’s origin story. “They built it and people are coming.”

Gardner thinks The Heartbeat tournament is going to grow into one of the most coveted draws in amateur golf.

“I think in four or five years from now, there’ll probably be more people putting in for that than for some hunting tags,” he said. “But we got lucky enough to be drawn for the inaugural one.”

As for what kind of competition, they’re walking into, neither man is under any illusions. They submitted their handicaps with the application, and they know they’re going to be in the field with some serious players.

“Josh and I are probably a little bit better than average,” Stiver said. “But there’s going to be some guys that probably played collegiate ball or better. There’s probably going to be some really good sticks there.”

The Heartbeat runs Aug. 2-5, 2026, at Landmand Golf Club in Homer, Nebraska. 

The final two days of the tournament will be broadcast live on 5 Clubs on Golf Channel. Josh Gardner and Jared Stiver are open to ideas for a Wyoming-themed trading item — readers can reach out through lowestknownscore@gmail.com.

David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.