Best golf courses near Ann Arbor, MI

Barton Hills Country Club in Ann Arbor is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Michigan. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information

The Alister MacKenzie-designed course at the University of Michigan is ranked in the top five of Golf Digest’s top collegiate courses in America, and the university also owns Radrick Farms, a Pete and Alice Dye design, also a member of our Greatest College Courses list. Radrick Farms is Dye in his gentlest form. The course is one of Dye’s earliest designs and lacks many of the penal features that he used in his most famous layouts. Some bunkers have the steep faces Dye would use more in his later designs, but many are quite forgiving. The course is built on a former gravel mine, giving the terrain a significant elevation change of up to 100 feet across the property. Like the university’s MacKenzie design, Radrick Farms is semi-private and open to those with an affiliation to the university.

Alister MacKenzie’s University of Michigan Golf Course was one of just a handful of college courses when it opened in the early 1930s, and it has remained one of the country’s best at any university. A restoration by Michigan native Arthur Hills in the 1990s restored some bunker and green complexes to MacKenzie’s original intent. The scene at the Blue, as it’s often referred to, is also one of the best of any collegiate venue as it sits atop hilly terrain in the shadows of the Big House, the Wolverines’ famous football stadium.

The Cardinal is the first public course to open in the Detroit area in over 20 years. Designed by architect Ray Hearn, it replaces Saint John’s early 1980s 27-hole resort course with more spacious and strategically engaging holes that are either brand new or significantly redesigned. The excess holes were removed and transformed, giving Hearn room to add a fun 7-hole short course and large, Himalayas-style putting green. Part of a $50 million-plus renovation of the entire campus, The Cardinal is a much-needed reclamation of a scenic and moving piece of land that tended to get lost under the old design, with a less formal style of bunker and the latitude to explore different avenues into the greens. Though just 20 miles from downtown, the revamped feel of the wooded property whisks players to a place much farther away.