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.
Our travel writer has played 79 golf courses so far in 2022. Here’s what stood out.
I have one of the best jobs in the world, but don’t tell my boss that I acknowledged such. Truth is, plenty of people would line up to do this travel job for free. Play golf around the world and write about it – just about a perfect gig.
There are some downsides. The 3 a.m. wakeup calls, the flight delays, the time away from family, the late nights staring at the keyboard, not to mention all the bogeys. But these are niggles, easily dismissed.
I played 79 golf courses so far in 2022, and I am likely to add at least one or two more before the calendar flips. There were affordable munis, high-end private clubs and plenty of top-dollar resorts. I see the full spectrum of golf in my travels, from dirt fairways to perfect putting surfaces. They all were among the 250-plus stories I filed in 2022, and I remember just about every shot from each round – my wife calls this ability to recall and fret about shots I struck months ago a major character flaw.
With the year wrapping up soon, it’s time to take a look back at several of my favorite experiences of 2022. I played from California to Scotland, and some days, courses and golf holes just stood out.
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.
Golf courses in Florida offer different levels of precaution and safety during the coronavirus pandemic
Winter Park Golf Course near Orlando has its game together. In playing a round there this week after the Monday reopening of the popular nine-hole municipal track – known far and wide as the WP9 – I didn’t have to touch a thing but my own gear.
The course set up a check-in stand outside the clubhouse. Because online payment is required, players never have to enter the clubhouse or come in contact with anything. Players are told not to arrive more than 10 minutes early for tee times, and they are told to leave immediately after the round ends. Starting May 11 the course will have four carts available for single riders who might have disabilities, but the vast majority of golfers walk. Social distancing is easy because it’s ingrained in the course’s new operational set-up.
If only every operation made it so easy, or at least gave the option of being so. Whether mandated by local or state ordinances or just operating out of a sense of safety for players and staff, many courses have made a round of golf a smooth endeavor without risking anybody’s health.
Winter Park Golf Course (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)
But not all courses. It’s a game of buyer beware, at least in the six rounds I have played at daily-fee or resort courses around Central Florida over the past six weeks.
I have seen discrepancies that can boggle the mind. Simply put, in my very small sampling of public-access courses, there has been a wide range of policies – and more importantly, operational practices – intended to keep players safe. Implementation at several courses was spotty at best.
Each of these six courses had proclaimed to be enforcing social distancing and to have implemented intense cleaning regimens. Each had something blocking the bottom of the golf hole, either a foam pool noodle or an overturned golf cup.
And each round was played under loose stay-at-home orders by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – golf in the Sunshine State was declared an essential business and was allowed to remain open except in a few Southeast Florida hotspots that closed the game on a county level. Social distancing was a mandate, not a suggestion.
I’ll name the best two experiences: WP9 and Streamsong Resort. Both made it seamless to get to the first tee with zero contact. Thought had been put into small details, such as how to give a player a scorecard if wanted. Both properties not only allow walking – a great method for social distancing – they promote it. Reduced tee times prevented the courses from being too crowded. My rounds there felt as safe as a stroll to my mailbox, only with better organization.
If these rounds were indicative of the new normal, bring it on.
A staff member checks players in before rounds at Winter Park Golf Course with social distancing enforced. All payment is online, so players need only say they are ready. (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)
Two of my rounds were at the opposite end of the spectrum. Players were crowded around tee boxes, halfway houses, practice greens or cart staging areas. Golfers had to go inside closed doors to pay. Tee times were stacked on top of each other, filling the courses to the brim and beyond. Course marshals were entirely absent except for on one particular par-3 tee box where three groups collided, waiting for the green to clear. The unmasked marshal watching from his cart said not a word.
One of these courses not far from the shuttered Disney World wouldn’t allow walking, with the starter saying it slows down the entire course – apparently pace of play was paramount. But even though each player had his own cart, my threesome preceded to wait 10-15 minutes at every tee box on the backed-up, overflowing course. Lightning mercifully cut the round in half and players stacked up on a patio, rubbing shoulders while waiting out the storm. My group didn’t linger to finish the round.
I’m not naming these courses, because my experiences might have been an aberration. Each had laid out policies – good intentions. But on the days I was there, nobody in particular seemed to be following the rules.
And two of my rounds were pretty solid but with a few headscratchers. At one course where I was free to walk and staff seemed truly interested in new safety measures, I still saw 16 guys sitting around a table on a patio next to a snack shop. At another, a sevensome caromed down the final fairway, each player in his own cart before congregating as a tight group on the green. Golf is played over vast spaces, but it is a social game with a 4.25-inch focal point at the hole – players tend to gather.
A consortium of golf-industry leaders has formed a new initiative, Back2Golf, to help courses lay out best practices. Representatives of the U.S. Golf Association, PGA of America, PGA Tour, LPGA and others worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop optional guidelines available for any course to follow.
Streamsong Black is open this summer while the resort’s Red and Blue course undergo regrassing of the greens. (Courtesy of Streamsong Resort/Laurence Lambrecht)
And many states have implemented specific rules for golf, such as walking only with the requirement of online payment. Massachusetts this week was the last state to reopen its courses, and officials there spelled out in great detail what it required for courses to reopen.
But it’s up to each facility to make good things happen. Golf has an opportunity as one of the first recreational activities to reopen around the country to promote safe practices and put a spotlight on all the great qualities of the game. If professional golf resumes in June as planned, that spotlight will be even greater, as golf will be the first major sport available on television or streaming.
With that kind of spotlight comes scrutiny as coronavirus infections and deaths continue to rise across the nation. It will take effort on the part of participants, staff and course operators to make the sport’s reopening run smoothly.
“Part of the operators’ responsibility, once they put those rules in place, is to make sure the players are operating by it,” said Jeff Morgan, CEO of the Club Management Association of America and a participant in the Back2Golf initiative. “It’s not only about their safety, it’s about the staff safety and everyone else that is playing. I would hope that operators are aware of the entire experience and have an obligation to make sure that everybody is abiding by the rules that that facility sets up.”
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And it’s up to the players to follow the rules.
“Were fortunate to have an opportunity to start playing again that really is dependent on our collective ability to follow social distancing guidelines and to make the right choices when we’re out on the golf courses,” USGA CEO Mike Davis said on the call that launched the Back2Golf safety initiative. “We’re all in this together, so be responsible.”
There’s no telling how long the safety guidelines will be needed. In the meantime, there’s a great opportunity for golf to not screw this up. In the end, the value of any safety guidelines is only as strong as the will of courses operators and players to engage them.
In normal times, most travelers would be chomping at the bit to visit Saint Lucia, the island nation that is part of the Windward Islands marking the border between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Mountains, beaches, not too crowded. … who …
In normal times, most travelers would be chomping at the bit to visit Saint Lucia, the island nation that is part of the Windward Islands marking the border between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Mountains, beaches, not too crowded. … who wouldn’t want to go? It’s a tropical paradise 1,500 miles southeast of Miami.
That would be in normal times, not since the coronavirus pandemic teed off on the world’s travel industry.
Keith Rhebb, a golf course shaper who frequently works for the design team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, is currently stuck in paradise. He’s helping build a course at the new Cabot Saint Lucia, and with work shut down on the island to only essential tasks as the nation’s government tries to prevent any new cases of coronavirus, he’s biding his time until he can climb back onto his bulldozer and return to shaping the course.
“One guy on a dozer out in a field, I’m not sure what the risk would be, but we’re following the guidelines,” Rhebb said in a call via Facetime audio, one of his best ways of staying in touch with family and coworkers in the U.S. “There’s no traffic coming in, there’s no traffic going out. The government has been really proactive on that, making sure everyone is trying to be safe here.
“I think they’re doing the right thing. We’re just kind of abiding by all the social distancing, washing hands, being mindful of not just going out and being out and about. We’re basically staying put, not going out and lining up in the street for KFC. Life is just continuing on here. There’s still food on the shelves. They are limiting the amount of people that can be in the store at one time. There wasn’t a run on toilet paper or anything like going on in the States, you know.”
Rhebb said local news reports have indicated three cases of coronavirus on the island: Two people from the United Kingdom were infected and later flown off the island, and one local resident was sick but has recovered. All travel to and from the island is effectively shut down until April 5.
The last flight out was this past Saturday, and he chose to stay on the island so he could return to work as soon as possible. After arriving in Saint Lucia on Feb. 24, he had planned to return to his home in Winter Park, Florida – his design credits include the Winter Park 9, a short course that ranks as the 27th best in Florida on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play – on Thursday for a break.
“Basically, if I took that option to leave on Saturday, I knew I wouldn’t be able to know when I could come back and nothing would happen on the site,” he said. “Talking with my wife, she’s working from home and has everything she needs there. This is kind of what we’ve always known, a long-distance-type thing. She said, you’re probably safer there than traveling back to Florida and having to go through the airports in Florida. So we just made the decision for me to stay put.
“We’re working a plan to get things started. There’s plenty of work to do. That’s the reason I stayed here, because I wanted to be productive to keep things going.”
Rhebb is the only Coore-Crenshaw shaper left on the island, staying in an apartment in Rodney Bay in what he described as a popular shopping area. A handful of other contractors working on the course are there, too. He said there aren’t many Americans left on the island, where about 65 percent of the gross domestic product is reliant on tourism, according to the CIA World Factbook. With no cruises arriving and the airports closed, things are certainly quiet.
“I’m a creative person, and my outlet is kind of being creative and building stuff and wanting to be productive,” Rhebb said. “I know that’s kind of a first-world problem, so I don’t want to complain too much.”
Rhebb – whose work in the past year has included stints at Kapaulua’s Plantation Course in Hawaii and the new Sheep Ranch at Bandon Dunes in coastal Oregon – described the course, Cabot Point, as “spectacular.” The site has eight holes that directly contact the coastline, and the ocean is in view from all 18.
“The coastal holes are off the charts,” he said. “And personally, I’m really excited about these inland holes that aren’t right on the coastline. They have their own character and beauty. They might not be right on the ocean, but they’re just as spectacular.”
But for now, he’s staying away. He said that judging by what he sees outside his apartment, life appears to be continuing just fine on the island. He sees people lined up for fast-food takeout or visiting a nearby bank, but he and the other contractors are “just staying put for the most part.” He goes for jogs and has been taking photos, and despite many travelers’ fantasy of life in a beach bar, he’s staying away from beer.
“You find appreciation for the things you kind of took for granted earlier,” he said. “You take it day by day. Trying to make a plan for even four days out, you know it’s all going to change. You can just take time to put things in perspective and not waste energy on things that aren’t positive.”
