2013 Golfweek's Best Courses: Next 100, Modern
101. Nanea Golf Club 7.77
(No. 101 in 2012, p) Kona, Hawaii
2004, David McLay Kidd
102. *Clear Creek 7.62
(Not ranked in 2012, p) Carson City, Nev.
2009, Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw
103. Pumpkin Ridge (Witch Hollow) 6.91
(93 in 2012, p) Cornelius, Ore.
Bob Cupp, John Fought
104. Hudson National GC 6.90
(137 in 2012, p) Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.
1996, Tom Fazio
105. Briggs Ranch Golf Club 6.90
(94 in 2012, p) San Antonio
2001, Tom Fazio
106. Black Rock 6.89
(110 in 2012, p) Hingham, Mass
2002, Brian Silva
107. *Boot Ranch GC 6.89
(NR, p) Fredericksburg, Texas
2006, Hal Sutton
108. Eagle Point Club 6.88
(107 in 2012, p) Wilmington, N.C.
2000, Tom Fazio
109. Squire Creek 6.88
(108 in 2012, p) Choudrant, La.
2002, Tom Fazio
110. Old Memorial 6.87
(119 in 2012, p) Tampa, Fla.
1998, Steve Smyers
111. Robert Trent Jones Golf Club 6.87
(115 in 2012, p) Lake Manassas, Va.
1991, Robert Trent Jones Sr., Roger Rulewich
112. Victoria National Golf Club 6.87
(99 in 2012, p) Newburgh ...
2013 Golfweek's Best Modern Courses
d–daily fee; p–private; r–resort; NR–not rated
*–first time in top 100
^–returns to top 100
1. Sand Hills Golf Club 9.28
(No. 1 in 2012, p) Mullen, Neb.
1995, Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw
2. Pacific Dunes 8.96
(2, r) Bandon, Ore.
2001, Tom Doak
3. Whistling Straits (Straits) 8.58
(4, r) Kohler, Wis.
1997, Pete Dye
4. Friar’s Head 8.54
(5, p) Baiting Hollow, N.Y.
2003, Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw
5. Old Macdonald 8.46
(3, r) Bandon, Ore.
2010, Tom Doak, Jim Urbina
6. Ballyneal 8.44
(6, p) Holyoke, Colo.
2006, Tom Doak
7. Sebonack Golf Club 8.30
(8, p) Southampton, N.Y.
2006, Tom Doak, Jack Nicklaus
8. Bandon Dunes 8.27
(7, r) Bandon, Ore.
1999, David McLay Kidd
9. Pete Dye Golf Club 8.20
(9, p) Bridgeport, W.Va.
1994, Pete Dye
10. Shadow Creek Golf Club 8.12
(10, r) North Las Vegas, Nev.
1990, Tom Fazio
11. Muirfield Village Golf Club 8.09
(12, p) Dublin, Ohio
1974, Jack Nicklaus
12. The Golf Club 8.06
(11, p) New Albany, Ohio
1967, Pete Dye
13. Old Sandwich Golf Club 7.98 ...
2012 Golfweek's Best Modern Courses
d–daily fee; p–private; r–resort; NR–not ranked
- First time in top 100 Returns to top 100
Note: Ties broken through decimal points
1. Sand Hills Golf Club 9.27
(1, p) Mullen, Neb.
1995, Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw
2. Pacific Dunes 9.10
(2, r) Bandon, Ore.
2001, Tom Doak
3. Old Macdonald 8.66
(3, r) Bandon, Ore.
2010, Tom Doak, Jim Urbina
4. Whistling Straits (Straits) 8.61
(4, r) Kohler, Wis.
1997, Pete Dye
5. Friar’s Head 8.47
(5, p) Baiting Hollow, N.Y.
2003, Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw
6. Ballyneal 8.39
(6, p) Holyoke, Colo.
2006, Tom Doak
7. Bandon Dunes 8.31
(7, r) Bandon, Ore.
1999, David McLay Kidd
8. Sebonack Golf Club 8.26
(8, p) Southampton, N.Y.
2006, Tom Doak, Jack Nicklaus
9. Pete Dye Golf Club 8.21
(10, p) Bridgeport, W.Va.
1994, Pete Dye
10. Shadow Creek Golf Club 8.12
(11, r) North Las Vegas, Nev.
1990, Tom Fazio
11. The Golf Club 8.10
(9, p) New Albany, Ohio
1967, Pete Dye
12. Muirfield Village Golf Club 8.07
(12, p) Dublin, Ohio
1974, Jack Nicklaus
13. Old Sandwich Golf ...
2011 Golfweek's Best Modern Courses
No. Name
Raters average
(2010 rank) Location
Year, architect
Note: d–daily fee; p–private; r–resort; * First time in top 100
• Click here to see The Next 100
1. Sand Hills Golf Club
9.36
(No. 1 in 2010, p) Mullen, Neb.
1995, Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw
2. Pacific Dunes
9.19
(2, r) Bandon, Ore.
2001, Tom Doak
3. *Old Macdonald
8.84
(NR, r) Bandon, Ore.
2010, Tom Doak, Jim Urbina
4. Whistling Straits (Straits)
8.75
(3, r) Kohler, Wis.
1997, Pete Dye
5. Friar’s Head
8.40
(9, p) Baiting Hollow, N.Y.
2003, Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw
6. Ballyneal
8.36
(5, p) Holyoke, Colo.
2006, Tom Doak
7. Bandon Dunes
8.29
(4, r) Bandon, Ore.
1999, David McLay Kidd
8. Sebonack Golf Club
8.26
(6, p) Southampton, N.Y.
2006, Tom Doak, Jack Nicklaus
9. The Golf Club
8.20
(7, p) New Albany, Ohio
1967, Pete Dye
10. Pete Dye Golf Club
8.15
(8, p) Bridgeport, W.Va.
1994, Pete Dye
11. Shadow Creek Golf Club
8.07
(10, r) North Las Vegas, Nev.
1990, Tom Fazio
12. Muirfield Village Golf Club
8.06
(11, p) Dublin, Ohio ...
Golfweek's Best: Next 100 Modern Courses
Ever wonder who almost made the Top 100? So do we.
Every year, Golfweek’s network of course raters scours the country evaluating courses for our annual Golfweek’s Best Top 100 Classic and Top 100 Modern courses. The results have been tabulated and are profiled in Golfweek’s March 11 issue.
If your course didn’t make the Top 100, perhaps you might find some consolation in this list. We call it The Next 100.
Take a look and see whether your course might be on the cusp of cracking the Top 100.
Here are The Next 100 Modern courses with 12 or more votes. This year, it took 15 votes and at least a 6.86 average to qualify for the Top 100. (* not enough votes to be ranked)
101. Dormie Club
West End, N.C.
7.27*
102. Madison Club
La Quinta, Calif.
7.05*
103. Austin Golf Club
Austin, Texas
7.00*
104. Black Rock
Hingham, Mass.
6.96*
105. Vineyard Golf Club
Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.
6.96*
106. Iron Horse Golf Club
Whitefish, Mont.
6.88*
107. Robert Trent Jones Golf Club
Lake Manassas, Va.
6.85
107. McArthur Club
Hobe Sound, Fla.
6 ...
2006: America's Best courses - Continental shift
For the first time in the 10-year history of our America’s Best course ratings, there has been a change at the top. There is a new No. 1 on the list of Top 100 Classic Courses. Cypress Point Golf Club has displaced perennial front-runner Pine Valley Golf Club by the narrowest of margins.
How tight is it at the top? Not as tight as it is farther down the elite list of top-100 courses. The difference between Cypress Point in California and Pine Valley in New Jersey is a tad more than two-tenths of a point (0.21078, to be exact). Farther down the list, the difference between the No. 82 course, Point O’Woods Golf Club in Benton Harbor, Mich., and No. 101, which is off the list, is 0.18.
If small margins of difference evoke loud disagreements, that’s simply the inherently controversial nature of subjective ratings when choosing among 16,500 layouts.
Dividing the courses into two lists – Classic (pre-1960) and Modern (1960 and after) – helps our national team of 400 raters sort through some basic differences. But with new courses coming on line at the rate of roughly 125 per year, and older courses ...
2006: New Mexico’s natural beauty paints backdrop ...
The Madrid Chile Festival is the perfect start to any New Mexico vacation. • Green chile is why the Land of Enchantment has such a distinctive cuisine. And Madrid, a 400-person artists’ enclave located about 30 miles south of Santa Fe, represents the flavor – in taste and the less-definable New World tone – that locals and visitors have come to know so well.
Problem is, there is no such celebration. The signs are props for a John Travolta movie being shot in the town, one of several recently filmed in the area.
“If you’re not from around here, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not,” said Suzy Kelly, owner of Color & Light art gallery. (The signs advertising volunteer fire department meetings every Tuesday at 7 p.m. are authentic.)
That sentiment holds true about a lot of things in New Mexico. Jerry Rightman, my guide on a walking tour through Santa Fe, advised our group to spend modestly for any jewelry that caught the eye, but not to empty pocketbooks for fear of fakes.
This is one of the poorest states in the country, owing in part to New Mexico’s large Native American population. But ...
2005: Seven Canyons a stunning test
Sedona, Ariz.
Up here in Red Rock country, golf presents a whole new aura.
For years, the central Arizona plateau around Sedona, 100 miles north of Phoenix, was a sweaty outpost for ranchers and miners.
Today, Sedona is an odd juxtaposition of energy and lifestyles, with hangouts ranging from cafes, gem shops, alpaca sweater stores, mining museums, motorcycle garages and private airplane landing fields. All Sedona lacked was decent golf. Well, it had two courses, but they were mundane and depended exclusively upon their surrounds for what little interest they provided.
With the opening of Seven Canyons in 2003, Sedona has a course that’s solid tee to green and up to the standards of the area’s natural beauty. There are few places in the world that can offer the stunning imagery of the Mogollon Rim. At Seven Canyons, it’s like playing classic golf in the basin of the Grand Canyon.
The 200-acre course and real estate development is ensconced in its own dramatic stage, circled by 100,000 acres of protected refuge – Coconino National Forest and Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness. Exposed rock is everywhere, much of it topped by ponderosa and chaparral pines. Those looking for ...
2004: PGA from the couch
Mosel, Wis.
This year’s PGA Championship will give home viewers a welcome chance to see one of modern golf’s finest courses. Of the nearly 2,500 courses opened during the boom-boom ’90s, the Pete Dye-designed Straits Course at Whistling Straits is the first one to hold a men’s professional major.
Here’s a couch potato’s guide to what you’ll see and hear:
Players complaining. PGA Tour pros are really, really good at griping. They’re used to receptive fairways, readily visible lines of play and predictable conditions. That’s why they’ll be squirming at The Straits.
To start with, they will struggle to see the fairway landing areas. Dye does what no other modern course architect would dare: he makes the landing areas less visible from the championship tees than from the forward or middle tees. How? Simply by building them lower, not higher, thereby reducing sight lines so that crack golfers face additional uncertainty along with extra real estate.
Practice rounds will be slow as players align themselves with whatever it takes – dunes, distant silos or fleeting clouds – to get a fix on the target. And if there’s any wind (as there ...
2004: Opening arguments begin with rankings
By Bradley S. Klein
Last time we published our America’s Best lists I was deposed by a city of Boston attorney asking to account for why their municipal golf course had dropped three spots in the state-by-state public access rankings. Seems they were being sued by the course operator and were looking for evidence of mismanagement.
Not every course rating involves a lawsuit. Judging by how my phone usually rings off the hook in the weeks after, however, there does seem to be a lot of passion about the outcomes. Which is why we take special care to collate the results from our rater team and explain what trends they suggest.
Our eighth annual survey of America’s Best Courses gives Golfweek readers a chance to contemplate – and perhaps to fantasize – about the merits of old and new designs.
Our perennial front-runners retain their respective leads, barely. Our No. 1 Classic course, Pine Valley Golf Club in Clementon, N.J., is challenged by the Cypress Point Club in Monterey, Calif. On the Modern side, Sand Hills Golf Club in Mullen, Neb., narrowly keeps its advantage over Pacific Dunes in Bandon, Ore. But the competition is tight, especially on the ...
Barona Creek: Picture of patience
The elements of a fine golf course design don’t emerge suddenly; they evolve, and only during repeated site visits and reworking of the original plan. Daily-fee golfers at Barona Creek Golf Club, 25 miles northeast of downtown San Diego, can be excused for thinking that the daily-fee/resort course they play earned its ranking of No. 82 on Golfweek’s America’s Best Modern Courses list thanks to its native site features. But the design team that created the course in the late 1990s knows better.
Veteran architect Gary Roger Baird had some concerns when he first visited the large valley that the Barona Band of Mission Indians had destined for a casino and golf resort.
“I like to see gently undulating terrain,” Baird said. “But that was lacking. What we did see was a lot of exposed rock and good, mature oak trees. But I knew it would not be easy fitting holes into a long, gentle slope that didn’t have interior contours. It was a big canvas to fill.”
The 240-acre parcel of the Barona Valley offered dramatic long views and plenty of slope – almost 200 feet along its northeast to southwest axis.
A creek bed ...
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