Have course designers found a cheat code to make our top 200?

The Lido at Sand Valley in central Wisconsin opened in May 2023, and is a down-to-the-inch recreation of The Lido that C.B. Macdonald built on Long Island from 1914 to 1917. Heralded as one of the country’s greatest courses, it went extinct in the 1940s when the U.S. government converted the land to a naval base.Rebuilding The Lido has been the fantasy of many historians, but doing so accurately became possible when Peter Flory, a financial consultant and architecture enthusiast, developed a detailed computer simulation of the course based on scrupulous study of old photographs and other material. Sand Valley proprietors Michael and Chris Keiser discovered Flory’s computer model, then asked architect Tom Doak if he could use it to rebuild the course.First the animated contours had to be translated into a physical GPS topographical blueprint, a technological hack accomplished by digital mapping specialist Brian Zager. The GPS map enabled Doak and his associates to reconstruct Lido holes like Plateau, Alps, Cape and Long in exquisite detail, along with originals like the Dog's Leg sixth and the Home 18th, making only minor adjustments for drainage and adding longer tees for modern play. Though there’s no Atlantic Ocean crashing near the Biarritz eighth green or stiff coastal winds swatting around balls, the ”new” Lido is a stunning representation of Macdonald’s groundbreaking accomplishment and a vivid throwback to a more daring era of architecture. Using the spacious hole corridors to explore different routes into the giant greens is half the fun. Contemplating players navigating holes like the Channel fourth, with an alternative island fairway for daring hitters and a green perched behind a high rampart bunker, using hickory shafts and Haskell balls, is the other half.

The original owner of this property in north-central Nebraska first contacted Gil Hanse to design the course in the early 2000s. It took nearly 20 years—and different ownership—to complete the task, but the wait was worth it. Opened in 2021, the members-only CapRock Ranch is an invigorating addition to the golf wonderland that is the vast Nebraska sandhills, where architects dream of going to do as little as possible. Much of the course explores the gentle, grass-covered dunesland, and the other—eight holes to be exact—frolic along and over the pine-forest rim of the Snake River Canyon, dropping several hundred feet to the bottom. Scoring in both splash and sublimity, CapRock is uncommonly diverse and picturesque, a meeting of melodic minimalism and dopamine rush.

Ladera breaks every "rule" of desert golf in Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. The design does not incorporate unnatural water features, it’s not lined by palm trees, it's not criss-crossed by cart paths and it’s not hemmed in by housing, no matter how expensive. Instead, it is a beautiful and varied expression of what desert golf can be in its most natural form, though nothing about it is natural. The 300-acre site slopes 140 feet from the high point near the Santa Rosa Mountains across once-level land that was formerly lemon groves and mango farms. Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner propped up the low side of the property to reorient sightlines over the valley floor toward the eastern Mecca Hills and moved millions of cubic yards of earth to create each particle of golf.


Ladera’s fairways are generous, 60 to 100 yards wide with no formal rough, but strategy abounds with options to play to wide parts of the fairway—though the best approach angles and lines of sight are reserved for those who skirt the boundaries of the hazards. Even completely straight holes, such as the par-5 seventh, are full of options with staggered bunkers and a treacherous side slope short of the green. The greens reveal a tremendous variety of sizes and forms, some modestly contoured like the enormous saucer third and others a pattern of ridges and falling tiers (the 14th). But the most distinctive features at Ladera are the attractive dry gullies and arroyos that Hanse, Wagner and their team cut through the site emulating sandy, eroded vegetative lows that water would rush through during rare periods of heavy rain. The excavated sand was used to create sweeping elevation changes and to prop up greens like the par-3 fourth, the altar-like 15th, the par-3 16th and the par-5 17th that hangs over the edge of a deep barranca.

Architect Chet Williams has already set the standard for golf in Texas with Whispering Pines, the state’s top-ranked course in Trinity, north of Houston. The land he had to work with at The Covey, set within a 2,000-acre hunting club 75 miles west of Houston, was even better with hills, ridges and ravines cut by natural dry washes that have been reenforced as rushing-water streams. With no surrounding development, The Covey is a scenic journey through the Texas outback through groves of pines and hardwoods and cross-course views. Numerous specimen trees have been left standing in the fairways that must be maneuvered around, and Williams’ green complexes can be wicked, flanked and fronted with deep, staggered bunkers, with strong putting contours that create multiple internal levels and severe false fronts that eject any short approached 30 or 40 yards back down the fairway. The halfway house behind the ninth green on the property’s highest point is one of golf’s best with an upper level observatory deck and lounge that offers 20-mile views across the county.

At The Tree Farm, PGA Tour player and founder Zac Blair has attracted a kindred young-in-spirit if not exclusively young-in-age membership from across the country that mirrors his relaxed-casual passion for walking, fast play, head-to-head matches and creative architecture, particularly from the approach shot through the green. A majority of them are good players who think nothing of hoofing 36 or more holes a day.Design credit goes to multiple people, including Tom Doak, who routed the course over a gorgeously secluded site full of ridges, valleys and galleries of pine accented with scrub, sand and shades of underbrush, parts Pinehurst area and vintage Augusta National; and Kye Goalby and Blair, who designed the holes and features. Most of Blair's and Goalby’s fairways merely brush the land with a minimum of earthwork, draped around the curves of bunkers and ravines that tempt players to try and nip the corners. Highlights include a wonderful Redan par 3, a memorable punchbowl green at the par-5 16th, a mighty uphill par 3 (the fourth) modeled on the fifth at Pine Valley and some other subtle nods to template holes, but overall the architecture at The Tree Farm is organic and inspired primarily by what was already there, giving the course a budding air of sophisticated maturity.Some of the subtlest sections of the course, like the loop through a soothing cove of pines at five, six and seven, may be The Tree Farm’s most evocative, a resplendent sotto voce to the explosive aria of the final four holes that includes the Redan, a reachable par 5 with a corner-cut drive and deep punchbowl green, a short archery target par 3 and a downhill drivable par 4 with a split-level green similar to the 16th at Augusta National.

The Old Barnwell property, 12 miles southeast of Aiken, shares much in common with the nearby Tree Farm, which was constructed at virtually the same time in 2022 and 2023. The latter is a better pure golf site, but the more enigmatic if less aesthetically endowed Old Barnwell property is profound in other architecturally advantageous ways. The course plays around and through a treeless basin at the center of the 500-acre site, shooting the occasional sortie of holes into thinned out sections of pine along a perimeter rim. The landforms surrounding the amphitheater are nakedly muscular, and eight holes traverse and tumble off these fallaway ridgelines. First-time lead architects Brian Schneider and Blake Conant used those movements to prop up wide holes that skirt the edges and handled the less suggestive parts of the property by constructing an assortment of contemporary and antique architectural features: old bathtub bunkers recalling hazards at Garden City Golf Club and Myopia Hunt; linear shaggy-grass berms that evoke military entrenchments; open waste areas and geometric chasms of sand; and vertical grass embankments protecting bunkers and greens. On top of this are a set of putting surfaces that crash any conversation of the game’s most profoundly contoured, pushing the limits of playability without crossing into needless ornamentation.

From architecture editor Derek Duncan:
 

Actor Nicolas Cage once ate a live cockroach for a film he was shooting. Later, when asked why—he could have eaten a pretend insect—he responded, “Anything less wouldn’t be real.”
 

The conceit is that at times the only way to fulfill the potential of a given situation—a movie scene, a piece of art, a military offensive—is to push as far and aggressively as possible. This principle applies to Landmand, a new design in northeastern Nebraska about 10 miles from Sioux City, Iowa. The course sits on a vast, elevated section of loess formations with eroded furrows and valleys. It winds across the bluffs and between valleys, and from the tops of the ridges horizon views of 20 miles or more are possible, filling the landscape with a feeling of unlimited proportion. Given the setting, it’s impossible to discern the scale of the features in the near and middle distance, and the only way for architects Rob Collins and Tad King to make the golf look like it fit against the endless backdrops was to construct fairways 80 to 100 yards wide and greens that are, cumulatively and in some cases individually, the largest in the United States. Anything less wouldn’t be right.
 

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Sand is the defining character of Pinehurst, and Pinehurst #10 goes right to the source: a former sand mining site south of the resort, on a site known as the Sandmines, portions of which used to be a golf course called The Pit that closed in 2010. Several holes of this Tom Doak design, opened in 2024, plunge through the old quarries, including the turbulent eighth where players will want to pop Dramamine before tackling fairway swells that would pitch and toss a fishing vessel. Pinehurst Resort is also characterized by the tight cluster of its primary courses and synchronous relationship with the surrounding village, but #10 is a world apart. The grandeur of the isolated holes roller coasting through the quiet sand barrens creates tension between the sublimity of the environment and the heroism of the architecture, demonstrated most intensely in the uninhibited green shapes, many of which are bowl-shaped and heavily segmented.

Building Lost Rail, just southwest of Omaha, was something of a homecoming for Scottsdale-based architect Scott Hoffman, who grew up in the city and went to school at Creighton. The key to the design, named after an abandoned trainline that ran through the northeast corner of the property, was decoding the routing for this relatively small parcel of land, around 150 acres, or just large enough for 18 holes, a practice facility, clubhouse, parking and maintenance. The matter was complicated by the deep, wooded ravines that cut through the site and further limited the areas where holes could be placed. It was an exercise perfectly suited to Hoffman’s skills, who specialized in laying out the holes on numerous Tom Fazio projects across the western U.S. throughout the early 2000s. The ravines serve as both strategic and penal hazards, flanking and bisecting holes and creating dramatic, intimidating scenery.

Situated in the Bitterroot Valley in western Montana near the Idaho border, Stock Farm Club was developed in part by finance executive Charles Schwab. The club features a Tom Fazio design ranked among the best in the state with terrific views of the Sapphire Mountains. Fazio took advantage of the dramatic setting by creating numerous elevated tees, which we were restored in 2019 along with the greens and bunkers. Other activities at this exclusive private club include fly-fishing, horseback riding and shooting. Over the decades Fazio's new courses have frequently debuted in high positions in the top 100 and Second 100 Greatest rankings, but Stock Farm is the rare specimen that has matured into the club, gaining in stature in the 25 years since it first opened.

Architect David McLay Kidd has seen both ends of the golf site spectrum, from the incomparable ocean setting of the original Bandon Dunes course and the pine dunes of Sand Valley, all the way to lifeless land like the potato farm he inherited for St. Andrews' Castle Course in his native Scotland. He’s not likely to get a better one than GrayBull, the course he built for the Dormie Network in the sand hills of Nebraska. Located about 30 minutes northeast of North Platte, a few miles north of I-80, the 1,800-acre site provided the potential for dozens if not hundreds of golf holes, though the owners instructed Kidd to just build 18 of them and not to worry about leaving room for a second 18—or nine, or a short course—at a future date. Thus the routing takes the long road around the site, moving in a big clockwise flow with gentle cascading movements and only a few switchbacks. There was a section of steeper dunes in the center of the property that were attractive, but they were essentially too severe and Kidd couldn’t find a way to get in and out of them without having to make big cuts to the land, something you shouldn’t have to do in the sand hills. The fairways are larger than they appear but are obscured by angles around the dunes and elevated bunkers, and the greens are a continuing evolution of those at Gamble Sands and Mammoth Dunes, getting progressively more contoured at each course. The strengths of the design are the par 4s presented in a rich variety of lengths and orientations (the drivable fifth and 16th—in certain winds—are standouts, as is the 13th where the fairway kicks drives left into a hollow unless they challenge a large bunker on the right), adding up to a stellar addition to the sand hills, one of the world's vastest and most interesting of golf landscapes.

From Golf Digest architecture editor Derek Duncan:

We may look back and realize that Panther National was the final new course built in the south Florida counties of Palm Beach, Broward or Dade. One of the most golf dense regions in the world, the counties are hemmed in by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and nature preserves and the Everglades to the west, and there’s almost no more land available upon which to construct a 200-plus acre, 18-hole course.

Several years ago, Swiss businessman Dominik Senn acquired what may end up being the last remaining buildable golf parcel, roughly 400 acres northwest of Palm Beach Gardens bordering a vast wildlife preserve where black panthers are often seen. The Jack Nicklaus/Nicklaus Design golf course—the centerpiece of a luxury residential.

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About a half hour north of the Golden Gate Bridge, Meadow Club opened in 1927 as Alister MacKenzie’s first design in the United States. Over the years, the original treeless links-style layout was lost as many trees were planted and greens shrunk, but a restoration project in the early 2000s recaptured much of MacKenzie’s original intent. Architect Mike DeVries expanded the greens to their original size and restored the bunkers to MacKenzie’s intended style. Set in a valley near Mount Tamalpais, Meadow Club once again plays as a sprawling design with large, undulating greens and well-placed MacKenzie bunkering.