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America's Best New Courses
The 2006 winners feel at home with their surroundings
By Ron Whitten
It was a season that celebrated authenticity in golf design. America's Best New Courses of 2006 reflect what pleasures can result when man and money yield to Mother Nature. This time around there were no magicians conjuring up Scotland in the Sonoran Desert, or Carolina on the Kansas plains. The nation's top new courses are faithful to their surroundings, providing golfers with a genuine sense of where they're at, be it the foothills of Idaho or the Everglades of Florida.
That's immediately apparent at the Best New Private Course of 2006, The Concession Golf Club, a rare Jack Nicklaus design without surrounding homesites (pictured above). Positioned in a remote rural setting east of Sarasota, Fla., The Concession provides an old-Florida experience of saw-grass savannahs, palmetto thickets and hammocks of massive oaks mantled in Spanish moss, all seemingly untouched since the days of the Seminole. The Concession finished ahead of the North Course at Forest Creek Golf Club, whose fairways, edged by pine scrubs, sandy roughs and pine straw, capture the essence of Pinehurst, N.C.
The variety of Virginia's Northern Neck is fully represented at King Carter Golf Club, with its open meadows, forested hillsides and working vineyard beside its practice range. On the rugged topography of northeast Ohio, Blue Heron Golf Club makes no apologies for its steeplechase design from cliff top to cliff top over deep ravines. These were the top two courses in the category Golf Digest now calls Best New Public Course Under $75. After a decade of using a $50 green fee to separate affordable from upscale public courses, we believe an increase to $75 reflects the economic landscape of the times. Still, it is encouraging to report that winner King Carter has a weekend fee of $34 walking, $49 with a cart.
As for Best New Public Course $75 and Over, the winner was Osprey Meadows, a multithemed design in Idaho that rings true to its alpine locale on the western edge of the Bitterroot Mountain range. It won in something of an upset over highly anticipated and highly publicized Bandon Trails, the third 18 at Bandon Dunes, the wind-swept coastal Oregon resort that most visiting golfers believe is positioned somewhere just short of heaven.
America's Best Remodel featured authenticity of another sort. Original design concepts were retained and enhanced at both the winning course, The Stanwich Club in Connecticut, and runner-up, Country Club of Rochester, in upstate New York.
The Best New Canadian Course of 2006 is The Ridge at Manitou, chiseled from the granite outcroppings and dense forests of Ontario's Muskoka Highlands, the fifth such layout in that locale to have won in this category since 1997. The Ridge beat out the South Course at The Club at Bond Head, a prairie design that barely disturbs its Ontario prairie heritage.
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