Our inaugural list of best par-3, short and non-traditional courses in the U.S. includes a bit of everything.
What makes a great short course? We posed that question to our huge network of course raters to establish the first Golfweek’s Best ranking of non-traditional courses in the United States.
We included par-3 courses as well as short courses that might have a few par 4s and even par 5s. Some are crazy, over-the-top fun meant to be played barefoot with a cold drink in hand. Others are more traditional in their design. They might be at an elite private club, or they might be a muni down the street. There might be 18 holes, or there might be only six — who cares when you’re having a blast?
Basically, they all fit the bill of not being a traditional-length, traditional-par course. And just like the best short courses, we threw out some of the rules used for rating traditional courses and asked the raters to submit one overall score for each course based on how much they enjoyed the design and the environment. Those individual ratings were then combined to form one average rating, which is listed for each course. Each course had to receive a minimum number of 10 votes, and there are several other great short courses that likely will make this list when they receive enough votes. We received nearly a thousand ballots in all for this inaugural list.
The Cradle at Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina (Courtesy of Pinehurst Resort)
And as for how we decided which courses fit the bill: All of these would be shorter than 2,700 yards if they were nine holes, compared to a traditional course typically being made up of nines measuring 3,100 to 3,800 yards. Short courses, particularly the public-access variety, are the most welcoming of all golf — everyone can take their shot.
And there’s more to come. Streamsong Resort in Florida is adding a new short course this fall called The Chain, and the newly renovated Cabot Citrus Farms (formerly World Woods) in Florida also will have one named The 21 when the resort opens in December. Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon, already home to one of the best short courses in the world, is adding another. There’s no end in sight for fresh additions.
One note: Many courses have also added large putting courses, but those are not included on this list.
For this list, we included each course’s rating on a points scale of 1 to 10. We also included their locations, the designers, the year they opened, the number of holes, the total length and the par. At the end of each entry, the letter “p” indicates a private club, “d” indicates daily fee and “r” indicates a resort.
Check out Golfweek’s top 100 U.S. public-access golf courses in 2023.
Welcome to the Golfweek’s Best 2023 list of the Top 100 Best Courses You Can Play in the U.S. Each year, we publish many lists, with this selection of public-access layouts among the premium offerings.
The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on 10 criteria on a points basis of 1 through 10. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings are averaged to produce these rankings. The top handful of courses in the world have an average rating of above 9, while many excellent layouts fall into the high-6 to 8 range.
All the courses on this list allow public access in some fashion, be it standard daily green fees, through a resort, or by staying at an affiliated hotel. If there’s a will, there’s a tee time.
Each course is listed with its 2022 ranking in parenthesis in the title line, its average rating next to the name, the location, the year it opened and the designers.
KEY: (m) modern, built in 1960 or after; (c) classic, built before 1960. For courses with a number preceding the (m) or (c), that is where the course ranks on Golfweek’s Best lists for top 200 modern or classic courses in the U.S.
The PGA Tour star built a second career as a course designer, with many of his layouts ranking high in Golfweek’s Best course rankings.
Tom Weiskopf, who died Saturday at age 79 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, accomplished much more in golf than just his 16 PGA Tour titles, including the 1973 British Open.
Weiskopf was an accomplished course designer with dozens of layouts around the world, many of which place highly in various Golfweek’s Best course rankings. Following is a list of his top 15 courses, as judged by Golfweek’s panel of more than 850 raters.
Our course-ratings panel members continually evaluate courses and rate them based on 10 criteria on a points basis of 1 through 10. Members also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings are averaged to produce these rankings. The list below includes each course’s average rating.
The various Golfweek’s Best rankings (top 200 modern, top modern international, top private and public courses in each state, et cetera) have different requirements for numbers of ballots necessary to appear on each list. This list of Weiskopf’s courses ignores all those various ballot requirements to simply create one lineup of the designer’s best courses, regardless of number of votes, which could lead to slight variations in this versus other Golfweek’s Best lists.
Michigan offers miles of great golf at Arcadia Bluffs, Forest Dunes, Greywalls, Boyne, Belvedere, Island Resort & Casino and Eagle Eye.
Red barns and cows. Narrow two-line highways and trees – so many trees. Grand lake views stretched to the horizon. Blue jean jackets and gas stations attached to liquor stores. Tall cornfields and billboards advertising only the finest marijuana edibles.
And incredible golf.
Michigan is more rural than an outsider might expect, full of farms and small-town crossroads. Outside Detroit and a few midsize cities, the Great Lakes State is the embodiment of Midwestern agrarian living, this despite it being the 10th-most populous state among the 50.
And thanks to a boom of golf course developments over the past 25 years mixed with a handful of exceptional classic tracks, Michigan offers what could be considered a surprisingly inspiring spread of public-access layouts. Outsiders might expect states such as California, Arizona and Florida to be packed with solid golf, but a recent study of Golfweek’s Best ranked courses revealed that Michigan offers the seventh-best sampling of elite public-access layouts in the country, ahead of such golf-heavy destinations as Hawaii and Virginia. Not bad for a state where the golf season doesn’t stretch much past seven months before the snow falls in many locales.
The Links nine at Boyne’s Bay Harbor Golf Club in Michigan (Courtesy of Boyne Golf/Evan Schiller)
I was there to see as many courses as I could fit into 11 days. Landing in Detroit and cruising west toward Lake Michigan, I would tee it up at 15 layouts – including a new par-3 course – and put some 1,400 miles on my rental car’s odometer before dropping it off in Milwaukee, the easiest major airport for me to reach after sliding my carry bag back into its travel case at the end of the trip.
This trip started with an airport arrival in Detroit and meandered all the way north into the Upper Peninsula along the shores of Lake Superior with samples of everything from daily-fee options with one course to a winter-season ski destination with 10 tracks. The only rule was the courses had to offer spots on their tee sheets to non-members. I started my planning with the goal of playing the top five Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play in the state and added plenty more, including four days in the Upper Peninsula hosting a tournament for Golfweek’s Best raters. My golf route, in order:
Eagle Eye, No. 5 in Michigan on the 2021 Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list for public-access layouts
Arcadia Bluffs’ Bluffs Course in Arcadia, No. 1 in Michigan
Arcadia Bluffs’ South Course, No. 6 in Michigan
Forest Dunes’ Bootlegger par-3 course
Forest Dunes’ The Loop, No. 3 in Michigan
Forest Dunes, No. 4 in Michigan
Belvedere, No. 9 in Michigan
Boyne Golf’s Arthur Hills course, No. 19 in Michigan
Boyne Golf’s Donald Ross Memorial
Boyne Golf’s The Heather
Boyne Golf’s Bay Harbor (Links/Quarry nines), No. 8 in Michigan
Island Resort & Casino’s Sage Run
Timberstone
Marquette Greywalls, No. 2 in Michigan
Island Resort & Casino’s Sweetgrass, tied for No. 15 in Michigan
One of the best parts: The end of summer in Michigan offers some of the best-rolling greens found in the country. Bent grass thrives at this latitude, and the putting surfaces I sampled were, without exception, pure. Perfect greens frequently are an imperfect goal – there’s a lot more to great golf than smooth and fast greens – but seeing ball after ball roll across Michigan’s putting surfaces with hardly a bump or wiggle was a highlight of my trip.
It was an unforgettable and sometimes exhausting romp, with nine rounds played on foot and six in carts. There were cliffside holes overlooking one of the Great Lakes followed by secluded, forested layouts – even a fast and firm track that plays in one direction one day, the other direction the next. Hills, valleys, bluffs – a few birdies to keep things rolling, and so many bogeys. Too much golf and never enough, always waking before sunrise to squeeze in more holes, trying to finish before dark with enough time to find an open restaurant while avoiding the roadside deer that flashed through my high beams en route to that night’s bed.
Arcadia Bluffs tops the list of Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play 2020: Michigan.
Arcadia Bluff’s Bluffs course in Michigan (Courtesy of Arcadia Bluffs)
Forget Vegas or any other casino hotspots that also caters to golf. If seven is a lucky number, golfers would be more than lucky to find themselves in Michigan, because the Wolverine State is ranked No. 7 in the country for elite public-access courses, No. 7 for elite private courses and No. 7 for its share of top-100 on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play.
That triple-seven ranking must be worth something on a Michigan casino slot machine, right? Especially for a surprising golf state that spends so much of the year blanketed by snow.
And by one significant metric for judging elite public-access golf courses and their designs, as compiled by Golfweek’s Best national panel of raters, Michigan is miles ahead of some popular sun-drenched destinations.
Golfweek ranks courses by compiling the average ratings – on a points basis of 1 to 10 – of its more than 750 raters to create several industry-leading lists of courses, including the popular Best Courses You Can Play list for courses that allow non-member tee times. These generally are defined as courses accessible to resort guests or regular daily-fee players.
By averaging the scores of the top five public-access courses in each state, Golfweek has compiled a list of the top states for ultra-elite golf. That list is led by a state that might be a surprise to some golfers: Oregon. But while Oregon tops the list based mostly on the strength of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort’s four ranked courses, Michigan offers a broader swath of great golf to finish in the No. 7 slot, just behind South Carolina and one ahead of Hawaii.
Other northern states also fare well on this elite list, with Wisconsin No. 2 in the country and Minnesota No. 16. The golf seasons might not run all year along the Canadian border, but the summers can be glorious on some of the best courses in the country.
Arcadia Bluffs’ Bluffs course, in Arcadia on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan, tops the list of Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list in Michigan. The course, built by Rick Smith and Warren Henderson, opened in 1999 with rolling terrain and fescue grass, two of the commonalities found in so many of Golfweek’s top-ranked courses because they help keep a golf ball rolling. The Bluffs course also ranks No. 53 on Golfweek’s Best list of modern courses built in or after 1960 in the United States. The resort’s newer South Course also is a must-play and ranks No. 7 (there’s that number again) for public-access courses in the state.
The great golf stretches all the way to the Upper Peninsula and Marquette’s Greywalls course, which is No. 2 among Michigan’s public-access courses and No. 83 on Golfweek’s Best modern list. The Mike DeVries design opened in 2005 and features giant granite outcroppings and views of Lake Superior.
Rounding out the top three for public-access courses in Michigan is the Loop at Forest Dunes in Roscommon, an exceedingly clever, reversible layout by Tom Doak that opened in 2016. The Loop has 18 greens and two routings, the Red running counter-clockwise one day and the Black running clockwise the next. Forest Dunes also features its original namesake course built by Tom Weiskopf that ranks No. 4 in the state on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list.
Michigan also is tied for No. 7 among all states for the most courses on the Top 100 Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list for the entire U.S. Arcadia Bluff’s Bluffs course, Greywalls, the Loop and Forest Dunes each show up on that list, giving Michigan a numerical representation equal to Hawaii, Virginia and Washington on the list topped by California’s 10 courses.
Marquette Greywalls (Courtesy of Kevin Frisch PR)
Michigan’s private courses are not to be left out, either. The state ranks No. 7 in Golfweek’s comparison of top-5 elite private courses for each state with an average rating of 7.77 (sensing a theme?). New York is No. 1 on that list with an average of 8.82, but Michigan leads private-golf stalwarts such as Ohio, Massachusetts and Florida. Michigan’s top five to earn that average rating are Crystal Downs, Oakland Hill’s South, Kingsley Club, Dunes Club and Franklin Hills.
It’s all a testament to a diverse landscape that is perfectly suited to golf. And in a state with a golf season that runs roughly seven (again!) months, there are plenty of great options to satisfy any golfer.
Each year, we publish the three lists that are the foundation of our course-ratings program: Golfweek’s Best 2020: Top 200 Classic Courses, Golfweek’s Best 2020: Top 200 Modern Courses and Golfweek’s Best 2020: Best Courses You Can Play. On the lists below, a number in parentheses represents that course’s ranking on either Golfweek’s Best Modern or Classic list of top 200 courses in the U.S.
Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play 2020 in Michigan
1. Arcadia Bluffs (Bluffs)
Arcadia (No. 53 m)
2. Marquette (Greywalls)
Marquette (No. 83 m)
3. Forest Dunes (The Loop Red & Black)
Roscommon (No. 105 m)
4. Forest Dunes (Weiskopf)
Roscommon (No. 154 m)
5. Gull Lake View Resort (Stoatin Brae)
Augusta (m)
6. Eagle Eye
Bath (m)
7. *Arcadia Bluffs (South)
Arcadia (m)
8. Bay Harbor (Links/Quarry)
Bay Harbor (c)
9. Belvedere
Chalevoix (m)
10. Pilgrim’s Run
Pierson (m)
11. LochenHeath
Williamsburg (m)
12. University of Michigan GC
Ann Arbor (c)
13. Island Resort and Casino (Sweetgrass)
Harris (m)
14. TimberStone
Iron Mountain (m)
15. Orchards
Washington (m)
16. Hidden River Golf & Casting Club
Brutus (m)
17. Treetops (Signature)
Gaylord (m)
18. Black Lake
Onaway (m)
19. *Hawk Hollow
Bath (m)
20. *Boyne Highlands (Arthur Hills)
Boyne (m)
* New or returning to the list; c: Classic, built before 1960. m: Modern, built in 1960 or after
The Bluffs at Arcadia Bluffs in Michigan (Courtesy of Arcadia Bluffs)
Golfweek’s Best Private Courses 2020 in Michigan
1. Crystal Downs
Frankfort (No. 13 c)
2. Oakland Hills (South)
Bloomfield Hills (No. 23 c)
3. Kingsley Club
Kingsley (No. 20 m)
4. Dunes Club
New Buffalo (No. 45 m)
5. Franklin Hills
Franklin (No. 71 c)
6. Indianwood (Old)
Lake Orion (c)
7. Lost Dunes
Bridgman (m)
8. Meadowbrook
Northville (c)
9. *Wuskowhan Player’s Club
West Olive (m)
10. Orchard Lake CC
Orchard Lake (c)
* New or returning to the list; c: Classic, built before 1960. m: Modern, built in 1960 or after
The members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged together to produce a final rating for each course. Then each course is ranked against other courses in its state, or nationally, to produce the final rankings.
The short course joins a growing list of fun, creative par-3 courses around the world that provide a break from longer traditional courses.
Forest Dunes already had two of the best golf courses in Michigan, but now there’s even more reason to visit the resort in Roscommon.
Forest Dunes this month opened its new Short Course, a 10-hole, 1,135-yarder designed by Keith Rhebb and Riley Johns, the designers of the popular Winter Park Golf Course near Orlando.
The Short Course is situated between Forest Dunes’ original course designed by Tom Weiskopf, which ranks No. 3 in Michigan on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list, and the Loop, a reversible Tom Doak design that ranks No. 4 in the state. The holes measure between 65 and 110 yards.
Forest Dunes Short Course (Courtesy of Forest Dunes)
“We essentially had carte blanche from (Forest Dunes owner Lew Thompson), which was awesome, and really the only way we could get the project completed in time,” Rhebb, who also works frequently as a shaper for Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, said in a news release. “You don’t often get the chance to get super creative when designing courses, but with the Short Course we really had the opportunity to have some fun with it. Lew wanted it to be fun and always engaging, and we were able to express that in the design.”
Forest Dunes Short Course (Courtesy of Forest Dunes)
The news release said “the Short Course’s creative greens were constructed to funnel balls toward pin locations, improving the likelihood of holes-in-one, while a few tee shots tempt players to make use of strategic slopes and banks instead of flying it in the air. The greens showcase a variety of subtle shapes, many being bowl-shaped and some resembling catcher’s mitts or tabletops.”
Forest Dunes Short Course (Courtesy of Forest Dunes)
Thompson said in the release that music, bare feet and eightsomes are all fair game on the new par-3 course if that’s what it takes to make the game more accessible and fun.
Forest Dunes Short Course (Courtesy of Forest Dunes)
“When you come to Forest Dunes, we want you to have a good time,” Thompson said. “What Keith and Riley have built is bringing a new life and energy to the property. It’s going to bring people together and make their time here more enjoyable.”
Adding short courses is a growing trend for operators of premium golf destinations, with the 13-hole, par-3 Preserve at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon and the nine-hole, par-3 Cradle at Pinehurst in North Carolina serving as prime examples. The shorter courses can attract families and novices as well as serve as a fun break from larger, traditional courses. Cabot Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, home to Cabot Cliffs and Cabot Links, also recently opened a new par-3 course, a further example of the trend.
