How Interlachen Country Club reclaimed its fascinating Donald Ross greens and earned Best Renovation honors

Architecturally, the work completed at Interlachen, a Donald Ross design outside Minneapolis, is a restoration-renovation hybrid. Designer Andrew Green used Ross’ hole-by-hole blueprints from 1919 to guide the comprehensive redesign that touched every aspect of the property, restoring bunkers and putting-surface dimensions as closely as possible to what was first drawn. The green perimeter and revived bunkers at the stunning par-3 fifth, for instance, are faithful to what Ross envisioned, and Green’s shaping of the swale and crest of the putting surface gives life to what is one of the most fascinating greens Ross designed.

Brad Rempel

Brad Rempel

Brad Rempel

Brad Rempel

The team also used historical resources including photographs and old film to ascertain what was actually built that might not have not been presented on blueprints. Elsewhere, Green made alterations to better meet the demands of modern golfers and tournament play. These include a number of newly conceived or shifted greens, including the first, third, eighth, 13th and 16th. The green at the par-4 10th was actually moved 50 yards beyond its former location atop a newly extended embankment of land. The work, including the culmination of years’ worth of tree removal, has opened the landscape to better highlight Interlachen’s gorgeous natural ground movements, enabling gathering points like the ridges collecting the second and seventh greens (and subsequent tees) and the 12th green on the south section of the property, to become focal points even from a distance.

Since 2003, Interlachen, site of Bobby Jones’ 1930 U.S. Open victory, had slowly slipped in the Golf Digest rankings from 36th to 84th, losing some of its luster as one of the country’s great historic courses. Green’s ability to sharpen Ross’ architecture and highlight the best aspects of the land has the potential to reverse that trend.

This is Green’s first Best Renovation award to go with his 2021 Best Transformation award for Congressional’s Blue Course.

Take a closer look at the new-look Interlachen with the drone footage below, shared by the club’s content team: Brad Rempel false Private Interlachen Country Club Edina, MN 4.7 29 Panelists

• 100 Greatest
• Best In State

When Bobby Jones won the 1930 U.S. Open at Interlachen (completing the second leg of what would become the game’s first Grand Slam), fellow competitor Gene Sarazen insisted the course was tougher than everything but Oakmont. In the decades that followed a series of architects including Robert Trent Jones, Geoffrey Cornish and Brian Silva worked to keep Interlachen’s edge, but nothing could staunch the march of time. Enter Andrew Green in 2023, who was given the resources to strip back the layers and rebuild the course based on the blueprints Donald Ross developed in 1922 when he remodeled the course.

View Course America’s Best New Courses Golf Digest Logo The Covey at Big Easy Ranch winning our Best New course might be a surprise—until you see it SECOND PLACE OCEAN FOREST GOLF CLUB

Rees Jones designed Ocean Forest to considerable praise, finishing second in the 1996 Best New Private Course category. Located on the northern tip of the exclusive Sea Island, it’s an evocative design that slinks through a lowcountry setting of sea pines and wetlands with little interference from homes—the sense of isolation is complete. Though respected and highly ranked (it charted as high as No. 75 in America’s 100 Greatest Courses ranking and currently sits at No. 162), the club realized it was time for a design upgrade.

One of architect Beau Welling’s goals was to make the course more playable for members without sacrificing the high-level skill demands evidenced during the 2001 Walker Cup. He did that by lowering greens that tended to sit up high and expanding the putting surfaces to give golfers more space to play to, though to score you must be able to place approaches in the right quadrants. He also reduced the number of bunkers, but those he added have flashed faces to be more visible. The other goal was to better highlight one of the most unique coastal settings on the eastern seaboard. The site borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Hampton River inlet, with holes five, 13, 17 and 18 set directly on the shorelines. By removing excess trees and underbrush from the interior of the course, water views are now possible from deep inside the property. Formerly, the inland holes were akin to a parkland course, with traditional Bermuda roughs and Jones’ soft, upholstered bunkers. To infuse the design with a stronger seaside theme, Welling stripped away the grass and pine straw in out-of-play areas to expose the native sand, creating contrasting beach-like swaths that outline fairways and greens. In other words, the ocean has been brought into the forest.

Courtesy of the club false Private Ocean Forest Golf Club Sea Island, GA 4.5 20 Panelists

• Second 100 Greatest
• Best In State

Ocean Forest occupies one of the premier oceanside settings on the East Coast. Originally designed by Rees Jones, the fairways laterally traverse the site’s interior pines, skirting marshes and breaking out in memorable moments to the shore of the broad Hampton River inlet before finishing along the Atlantic Ocean at 17 and 18.

View Course THIRD PLACE OMNI LA COSTA RESORT & SPA (NORTH)

Formerly known as the Champions Course at this 36-hole resort north of San Diego, the North Course underwent a major $20-million renovation to prepare for becoming the home for the NCAA Division 1 Men’s and Women’s championships through at least 2028.

Reviving the 1965 Dick Wilson design (formerly the site of the PGA Tour’s Tournament of Champions and the WGC Match Play Championship in 1999) for collegiate match play was the organizing principle for Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. The primary thrust was to inject it with more temptation and strategic risk, in part by designing new greens where the line between a good shot and a miss into bunkers or chipping depressions is razor thin. They also tweaked yardages, adding extra length and introducing half-par holes like the par-4 11th and 15th, both around 350 yards, which will induce collegiate players to take shots at the greens with driver. The tone of the architecture is also a throwback, with the bunkers and design elements roughed up to look more aged along with naturalized waterways and native-grass areas.

Brian Walters false Public Omni La Costa Resort & Spa: Champions Carlsbad, CA 4 17 Panelists Just north of San Diego, this Carlsbad championship course has hosted 37 PGA Tour events since it opened in the 1950s, but four new holes were added during its 2011 renovation by Steve Pete, Damian Pascuzzo and Jeff Brauer. This layout meanders through the surrounding valley—providing an enjoyable setting with some history. View Course

Atlanta Country Club hosted the inaugural Tournament Players Championship in 1974 and the PGA Tour’s Atlanta stop from 1967 to 1996, and was among Golf Digest’s Second 100 Greatest courses until it fell out of the ranking in 2023. We’ll see if Beau Welling’s remodel propels it back into the top 200.

View Course false Brantford Golf & Country Club Brantford, ON, Canada Brantford is believed to be the fourth oldest golf club in North America, dating to the 1870s, though they didn’t move to their current location east of Hamilton, Ontario until around 1919. The first holes there were built by Nichol Thompson, brother of famed Canadian architect Stanley Thompson, and both Nichol and Stanley expanded and renovated the holes throughout the 1920s, as did Stanley’s associate Robbie Robinson in the 1960s. It added up to something of a hodge podge of design until the club hired Rod Whitman and Keith Cutten, the Canadian two-thirds of Whitman, Axland & Cutten (WAC), to implement a long range renovation plan that wrapped up in 2023. The property sits on two lovely parcels along the Grand River separated by a ridge, and the holes flow easily over the land. Whitman and Cutten installed new irrigation, created six new greens, rebuilt the tees and reconstructed and modified all the bunker placements while trying to imbue the design with a look and feel consistent with a course from the first decade of the 20th century. The entire budget for the design was just $5 million, an impressive feat considering the dramatic results and the fact that the irrigation system alone was $3 million. View Course false Private Cedar Rapids Country Club Cedar Rapids, IA 4.4 11 Panelists

• Best In State

For decades, Cedar Rapids Country Club had the feel of a classic parkland design, with sturdy rough bordering narrow, tightly tree-lined fairways. That began to change in 2014 when veteran architect Ron Prichard and then associate Tyler Rae were hired to renovate the course. Leaning into the tenets of its 1914 Donald Ross design (Ross had remodeled a course Tom Bendelow originally laid out), they thinned the forests, widened fairways and greens and rebunkered significant portions of the course. That got Cedar Rapids partly back to looking like it did 100 years ago. A major derecho—a system of violent, sweeping storms—in 2020 did the rest of the job by clearing out hundreds of remaining trees and damaging other parts of the property. Ultimately, once stitched back together by Prichard,  it was a benefit as holes that were previously buttoned up in dense woods now ramble through lovely portions of meadow and prairie. View Course Nathan Crace & John Winters false Private Colonial Country Club (South) Cordova, TN 4 9 Panelists

• Best In State

Colonial Country Club’s South Course was the site of the old PGA Tour Danny Thomas Invitation (now the WGC FedEx St. Jude’s Invitational) until 1988 when it moved to TPC Southwind. It was the longest course on the circuit at the time, and is where Al Geiberger shot the PGA Tour’s first 59 in 1977. A Joe Finger design, the course opened just northeast of Memphis in 1972 and is distinguished by its numerous doglegs and well-bunkered greens. In 2023 the club hired Watermark Golf/Nathan Crace Design to initiate a “restor-vation” that honored the original Finger elements of the course while updating the infrastructure, turf and bunkers for contemporary players. The bunkers were also reshaped and repositioned, and the new yardage after the addition of several championship tees is now 7,630. The entire project came in at under $3 million, a remarkably low cost for the scope of the revisions. View Course Russell Kirk/Golflinks false Private The Country Club of Naples Naples, FL 3.8 2 Panelists Architect Bill Diddel designed the majority of his courses in his native state of Indiana and throughout the Midwest, but he also ventured into Florida during different boom periods in that state. His first designs there were part of the original wave of courses that were developed along the coastal cities and railway lines in the 1920s. He returned as golf was exploding after World War II, first at the exclusive Jupiter Island Club in 1958, then to the Country Club of Naples five years later. Because his long career began during golf’s Golden Age of design, Naples possesses a look and feel that reads older than 1963. The holes move mostly north-south through an enclave east of Old Naples, mingling with several lakes and buffers of limbed up pines. In 2023, architect Drew Rogers updated the design, cleaning up the appearance, reimagining the green complexes and enlarging the shrunken putting surfaces, tees and bunkers. He also enhanced the classic Florida atmosphere by installing open sandscapes and transitions between the tees and fairways, creating essentially a new course in the old footprint. View Course LinksGems false Private Essex County Country Club West Orange, NJ 4.2 24 Panelists

• Best In State

Essex County Country Club has been touched by some of the game’s best designers, with A.W. Tillinghast routing a new layout on the current site in 1918. Seth Raynor kept seven of Tillinghast’s original holes (Nos. 1 through 6 and the ninth) during a 1925 redesign. Before construction began, Raynor passed away, leaving his associate Charles Banks to do the rest. Banks favored the template holes of Raynor and Macdonald and his brilliant renditions are still standouts today, including a Redan, Double Plateau, Alps, Punchbowl and Eden. A young Gil Hanse extended the course to 7,100 yards, added fairway bunkers and removed thousands of trees. In the fall of 2023, Hanse and partner Jim Wagner returned to perform some updates and sharpen features—most notably reinvigorating the dogleg-left opening hole—continuing the portfolio of great architects to have worked at this storied New Jersey site. View Course Peter Wong false Private Golden Valley Country Club Golden Valley, MN 4.2 14 Panelists

• Best In State

For most of its history, Golden Valley has been in a state of flux. The club’s first course was designed by Tom Bendelow. Golden Valley later hired A.W. Tillinghast in the 1920s to construct a new course. A number of his bunkers were removed in the 1930s to reduce maintenance costs (Tillinghast, by this time, was traveling the country on behalf of the PGA of America advising clubs on ways to cut costs during tight economic times), and others were tinkered with and modified in one way or another. A series of mid-century renovations took the design further from the one Tillinghast put in the ground, but recent work-first by Ron Forse, and, in 2023, by Kevin Norby-has gradually restored much of the architect’s ideology. Greens have been expanded to add new hole locations, trees have been thinned and Tillie’s lost bunkers have returned with their shapes redefined. This is a classic parkland expression of golf on a graceful property that demands drives be placed in the fairway and approach shots left below the hole. View Course Matt Majka false Private Grey Oaks Country Club: Pine Naples, FL 3.8 2 Panelists Architect Andrew Green has vaulted to the top of the design profession since 2017, primarily through his work renovating and restoring venerable historic courses like Inverness Club, Oak Hill East, Congressional, Scioto, East Lake and Interlachen. But he doesn’t just work on courses from Donald Ross and other classical masters. In 2023 he completed a significant renovation of the Pine Course at Grey Oaks in Naples, a 1993 Clifton-Ezell-Clifton design, one of the club’s three layouts. Every hole was redesigned in some capacity, with greens being shifted, bunkers added or subtracted and short grass chipping areas installed. Once considered the toughest of the Grey Oaks courses, Pine might now be the most flexible and approachable for both low handicap players and high handicap members. View Course false Private Hampton Hall Club Bluffton, SC 3.1 6 Panelists Located just off Hilton Head Island near Bluffton, Hampton Hall is an early 2000s Pete Dye design that winds out through a residential development with holes that border lagoons, wetlands and tracts of Lowcountry woods, the first nine circling clockwise and the second turning outward and back in the opposite rotation. It differs from most courses in the region in that the fairways are wide rather than constricted and the greens are prodigious and heavily contoured. Dye was reportedly ill during much of the construction process and wasn’t able to provide his usual detail and shaping oversight. When designer Nathan Crace was hired in 2022 to work on the course drainage, resurface the greens and renovate the bunkers, he discovered Dye’s forgotten hand-drawn sketches for each hole in the two relief stations. He used these to, in effect, complete the detailing Dye couldn’t originally get in the ground. These restorations included adjusting green dimensions and bunker depths, adding a fairway bunker on the third hole that Dye regretted not building and remodeling a long waste bunker on 18 to make it more visible from the tee. View Course Tremont Sporting Co. false Private Hudson National Golf Club Croton On Hudson, NY 4.3 36 Panelists

• 100 Greatest
• Best In State

Hudson National rests on dramatic bluffs high over the Hudson River valley, a breathtaking location that, back in the 1920s, had been the site of the ill-fated Hessian Hills Country Club. (The fireplace and part of the foundation of its clubhouse still exists near the fourth green.) Fazio paid little attention to the old routing, however, dynamiting more than 130,000 cubic feet of granite to fit his design into the rocky terrain. Greens are blazing fast, the primary rough is wispy fescue and bunkers are deep and numerous. Hudson National closed in 2023 as the Fazio team returned for a complete remodeling, finishing plans they weren’t able to execute the first time around. The entire course was re-grassed with modern bents, bunkers were shifted and reshaped, and greens were enlarged with several reoriented with new low-mow chipping areas as surrounds. The most notable improvements are the new larger and three-dimensionally sculpted fifth green replacing one of the most placid on the course and the new green at the par-5 14th set tight against a lake that’s been elongated and extended 25 yards to create more tantalizing back hole locations. View Course Jerry Rossi false Private Kenosha Country Club Kenosha, WI 4 2 Panelists One of only two Donald Ross-designed courses in Wisconsin, Kenosha’s holes crisscross over 175 acres a gently fractured land, leaping and sashaying along the ever-bending crooks of Pike Creek. To coincide with the 100-year anniversary, the club hired architect Drew Rogers to implement a long-range restoration plan to return the course as close as possible to its 1922 version, a process that included the removal of hundreds of mature trees to expand fairways and better emulate the property’s original meadow complexion. Roger slowly recaptured the green perimeters as first outlined by Ross and construction partner Walter Hatch, added and rebuilt bunkers based on firsthand sketches and 1920s photography (many bunkers had been filled in), and added prairie grass buffers for added color and texture. The result is a 2024 version of the course that might make Ross think that almost no time had passed, certainly not a century of growth and change. View Course false Private Lexington Country Club Lexington, KY 3.7 5 Panelists

• Best In State

This 1913 Tom Bendelow design is set in the quiet horse country northeast of Lexington with holes that move back and forth across a bucolic property. Architect and Kentucky resident Kevin Hargrave, who lives 20 minutes away and who previously worked for designer Keith Foster, has been consulting with the club for over a decade and recently complete a long-range masterplan. The renovation included the installation of new irrigation, the removal of approximately 200 trees and widened fairways. Hargrave expanded putting surfaces and rebuilt five greens, and also shifted and rebuilt each bunker. The creek that runs through holes 12 and 14 was also fortified and refurbished to prevent crawdads from burrowing into the banks. View Course Laurence Lambrecht false Private Loblolly Hobe Sound, FL 4.1 4 Panelists

• Best In State

Situated on a tight, triangularly shaped property about a mile from the Atlantic Ocean in Hobe Sound, Fla., Loblolly is a challenging Pete and P.B. Dye design. Golf course builder Jim Urbina, who worked for Dye in the 1980s, completed a full refurbishing of the course in 2023, painstakingly restoring the craft and details of the original design that had faded through the years.

View Course false Private London Hunt Golf & Country Club London, Ontario, Canada

• Best in Every Country

When London Hunt Club moved from its central location in the southern Ontario town of the same name in the late 1950s to a new 275-acre location five miles west, it did what clubs across the U.S. and Canada were doing: it hired Robert Trent Jones to build 27 new holes. The championship 18 opened in 1962 and has been the site of numerous prestigious Canadian tournaments through the years. Rees Jones renovated the course in 2000, and in 2022 and 2023, Ohio-based architects and father-son team of Michael and Chris Hurdzan completed another major remodel, the thrust of which was to improve drainage and replace aging bunkers, which were strategically shifted and moved in the process. Fairways were modestly widened and altered, and new turf went down throughout. Always a scenic, isolated property with several of Trent Jones’ water features and holes that run aside the appropriately named Thames River, London Hunt now has the course conditions and infrastructure to improve its current position of no. 22 in the Best in Canada ranking. View Course false Private Olympia Fields Country Club: South Olympia Fields, IL 4.4 10 Panelists

• Best In State

Early in its history, Olympia Fields had four golf courses. Today the country club, located in the quiet suburbs south of Chicago (downtown members used to take a train to the courses, as the line lies right along the property line), boasts two layouts, the North and the South. The North is well-established as a major tournament course as host of two PGA Championships, two U.S. Opens, a U.S. Amateur and several Western Opens. The South, originally designed by Tom Bendelow, serves as a wonderful everyday alternative. It’s been many things over the years, having undergone several remodels. Steve Smyers tapped into its early 20th century heritage during a 2007 renovation creating chocolate-drop mounds and other sharp features, and Andy Staples recently completed a revision. How the recent work impacts its ranking both nationally (it made our Second 100 Greatest from 2013 through 2018) and regionally remains to be seen. View Course ev false Private The Olympic Club: Lake San Francisco, CA 4.8 26 Panelists

• 100 Greatest
• Best In State

It seems fitting that, in a town where every house is a cliffhanger, every U.S. Open played at Olympic has been one, too. For decades, the Lake was a severe test of golf. Once it was a heavily forested course with canted fairways hampered by just a single fairway bunker. By 2009, the forest had been considerably cleared away, leaving only the occasional bowlegged cypress with knobby knees, the seventh and 18th greens were redesigned and a new par-3 eighth added. Despite those changes, the 2012 U.S. Open stuck to the usual script: a ball got stuck in a tree, slow-play warnings were given, a leader snap-hooked a drive on 16 in the final round, and a guy name Simpson won. If the past was predictable, the future of the Lake Course might be more mysterious after Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner completed a remodeling in 2023 in preparation for the 2028 PGA Championship. The holes are even more breathable than before with additional tree decluttering, the greens have been expanded for more hole locations and the bunkers don’t seem so deep and disconnected with the greens as they did. That old seventh hole was also scrapped in favor of a new drivable par 4 playing to a new greensite closer to the eighth tee. What hasn’t changed is the Lake Course’s secret ingredient, the mysterious hillside atmosphere that makes balls fall out of the air and the holes play much longer than their yardage. View Course false Public Pawleys Plantation Golf & Country Club Pawleys Island, SC 3.8 11 Panelists This Jack Nicklaus design contends not only for the best in Myrtle Beach but the best public courses in South Carolina. Pawleys Plantation lies among the region’s natural saltwater marshes and boasts some strong par 3s. According to Nicklaus, each hole has a distinct intended strategy shaped by hazards, trees, bunkers, and even a double green shared by two holes. It’s one of the most attractive courses in the Myrtle Beach area with long views across the intracoastal marshes, interior lagoon holes, strong bunkering and stately specimen oaks, some of which stand in fairways. In 2023, Nicklaus Design returned to update the course, reversing the shrinkage of fairways and greens and adjust strategies by adding, removing and shifting bunkers and eliminating large, open sand waste areas. View Course Evan Schiller false Private Sahalee Country Club South/North Sammamish, WA 4.4 6 Panelists

• Second 100 Greatest
• Best In State

Many 100 Greatest courses began as open fields, then had decades of green-committees plant trees to frame fairways; many of those same clubs are now clear-cutting such trees to open up vistas and invite more sunlight and air to greens. Sahalee is no such a club. Its course was carved from a Pacific Northwest forest of cedar, spruce, fir and pine, and its dominant theme has always been narrow fairways framed by towering trees that reach to the heavens. To strip Sahalee of its trees would be to shave Samson of his locks, so when Rees Jones and Steve Weisser began a 2022 renovation of the famed North/South nines where the 1998 PGA Championship and 2016 and 2024 KPMG Women’s PGA Championships were held (Jones had previously remodeled the course in 1996), they were calculated in their approach to thinning the forest growth. Gradually they pared back the treeline to better expose the site’s topography. They were able to expand fairways to enhance shot options and took out individual trees that had come to interfere with strategic angless into greens. What players may notice most are the new bunkers, each rebuilt, reshaped and repositioned to better engage with landing areas and putting surface hole locations. Sahalee seems at once refreshed while being absolutely the same carved-from-the-woods course it’s always been. View Course false Private Tamarack Country Club Greenwich, CT 4.3 16 Panelists

• Best In State

Situated within a mecca of great golf courses, Tamarack Country Club stands out as one of the finest. Built by Charles Banks in 1929, the course includes many template holes that were the trademark of Banks’ mentors, Seth Raynor and C.B Macdonald, and a few great original holes on the back nine. The course is memorable for its massive scale throughout the property, often allowing players to recover from wayward misses. A historical restoration by Brian Schneider, completed in 2023, focused on continued tree removal, reestablishing old fairway parameters, tying the green entrances into the approaches and returning the bunkering shapes and schemes to what was first developed by Banks but later modified through the decades.

View Course false Private TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley: North Alton, Ontario, Canada The North Course at TPC Toronto, one of three 18-hole designs at this facility an hour west of Toronto, is a lovely contrast to the British-inspired Heathlands Course and the wild, heavily bunkered, Pete Dye-esque Hoot. All three were built by noted Canadian designer Doug Carrick in the early 2000s. The North carries an almost mountainous feel as the large-scale holes roam across a big, isolated section of land. In 2023, architect Ian Andrew, who was involved in the creation of the TPC courses when he was an associate with Carrick, remodeled the North to prepare if for hosting the 2025 RBC Canadian Open. He opened up the views and connectivity between the holes through smart tree removal, lengthened the yardage to 7,445, tightened fairways in the areas where pros would land their drives, added chipping areas around the greens and shifted bunkers while reducing them in number. View Course Brian Oar false Public Tot Hill Farm Golf Club Asheboro, NC 4 26 Panelists Architects are usually only as good as their sites, or at least their budgets—Tom Fazio would certainly agree with that, which is why he only agrees to projects that give him the resources to push the land around until it’s the way he wants it. Strantz, who began his career working for Fazio, was just getting to that level of prestige when he passed away, but Tot Hill Farm, opened in 2000, was a relatively low-budget design on a central North Carolina property that was too rugged and rocky to yield a Tobacco Road-level course. Strantz used what he had to shape some of his wildest greens, working around the site’s obstacles the best he could. The course is a staggered mix of daring, often outrageous holes (the par-3 13th) dotted with moments of sublime brilliance like the par-5 eighth and the par-4 17th. Golf Digest named the third hole, a downhill par 3 with a green wrapped around a rock outcropping, the best third hole built in the U.S. since 2000. Over the last few seasons, new ownership has invested in ongoing course improvements including tree removal and new turf, and as of 2024 the course has never been better. What used to be a “lesser” Strantz design due to conditioning challenges is now one of the country’s best showcases of his eccentric, some say genius, architecture. View Course Evan Schiller false Private Wakonda Club Des Moines, IA 4 6 Panelists

• Best In State

Located on a beautiful property cut with ravines and depressions in south Des Moines, Wakonda is a textbook example of what happens when golf courses age: they tend to get dulled and more narrow, overgrown, restricted by trees and contracting grass lines, and lose the character that made them exemplary in their day. Wakonda was built by William Langford, one of the most distinctive architects of the Classical Era of the 1920s, but by the 2000s little of his architectural expression remained. A major renovation by Tyler Rae in 2023, however, reversed the aging effect. Rae was able to reestablish Langford’s principles and trademark style, defined by large plateau greens, steep faced bunkers cut into their bases and more spacious fairways that set up strategic driving lines off the tee. Rae considers Wakonda one of the country’s greatest hidden gems, and while the course has always been respected (it ranks fifth in Iowa), the sharpening of the dramatic architecture could push it toward the top of the state list. View Course false Public Woodlake Country Club: Maples Course Vass, NC 3.8 7 Panelists The courses at Pinehurst Resort and in Southern Pines garner most of the hype in the North Carolina Sandhills, but the soils, climate and pines add a unique character to all the golf here. One newly polished, under-the-radar example is the Maples Course at Woodlake Country Club, east of Pinehurst. Pre-pandemic economic trouble forced the club to shutter the course for several years, but in 2021 it embarked on a multi-year revival program of its 1971 Ellis Maples/Ed Seay design (Seay would shortly after go on to become Arnold Palmer’s lead architect). Designer Kris Spence, a Donald Ross specialist, oversaw the reconstruction of the course, slowly nurturing it back to life, honoring the original design while updating the infrastructure and making allowances for modern equipment and agronomical advances. Reopened in 2023, the course plays along and over a chain of lakes and wetlands with expanded fairways and playing corridors and a new 18th hole that runs the opposite direction of the old. View Course Laurence Lambrecht false Private Woods Hole Golf Club Falmouth, MA 4 3 Panelists Wayne Stiles, who in the 1920s worked with partner John Van Kleek on projects throughout the East, expanded Woods Hole’s original 9-hole course to 18 in 1919. It’s set over a gorgeous property on the southern tip of Cape Cod with a small aperture on the north end touching Quissett Harbor and Buzzard’s Bay where the green of the par-3 17th is set. Twelve holes play through a separate section of meadow, running through fields of fescue as the land dips and rises invoking top Massachusetts designs like The Country Club and Essex County Club. In 2023 designer Kyle Franz completed a long-range renovation plan that greatly enhanced the visuals across the course through the addition of new and newly expanded bunkers, slightly enlarged greens and new short grass runoffs. Though not long at just over 6,000 yards, the layout continues to demands accurate driving and controlled approaches into a set of small, tilted greens that spill into Franz’s gorgeous hand-crafted hazards. View Course MassGolf false Private Worcester Country Club Worcester, MA 4.1 16 Panelists

• Best In State

Massachusetts is ground zero for Donald Ross designed courses (there have been over 50 nine- and 18-hole courses through the years), and Worcester is considered one of his best, the fourth highest ranked Ross on the state. The course opened in 1914 and hosted the 1925 U.S. Open, won by Willie MacFarlane who beat Bobby Jones in a 36-hole playoff. It also was the site of the inaugural Ryder Cup two years later, in 1927, as well as the 1960 U.S. Women’s Open. The holes are routed over two distinct sections of the club’s property, each parcel roomy enough to let the holes spool out and breathe as they traverse lovely elevations and meadows of native grass. Over the past few years, architects Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner and their team have fine-tuned the design, paying close attention to the approaches of the greens and capturing lost edges and corners of the putting surfaces. They also cleared out some unnecessary trees, enlarged bunkers, and restored several bunkers that had been lost over the decades. Worcester’s naturally flowing holes didn’t need much work, but what has been done over has made the course stronger, more vivid, and more adamantly Ross. View Course America’s Best New Courses Golf Digest Logo Drastic times at Medinah No. 3 called for drastic measures—a former major champ and a bold path forward

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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com