On Campus
Check out the mind-blowing golf facilities that have transformed the University of Illinois college golf program

It's generally presumed that golf is better in the warmer parts of the country and, by extension, so is college golf. And why wouldn't it be? When you're not confined indoors by cold spells like the one currently ripping through the U.S., you can practice more, and that gives you a leg up on the shivering northerners. A look at the last 20 NCAA men’s D-I team champions confirms the narrative; all but one (Oregon in 2016) are from south of the Mason-Dixon or California.
Look closer, though, and there's an anomaly—a team with a national runner-up and two individual national champions since 2010. That team is Illinois, led by head coach Mike Small, and the Fighting Illini’s success—which includes nine appearances in the match-play portion of the NCAA Championship, tied for most along with Oklahoma State—is down to an ambitious and in many ways breathtaking transformation of their facilities.
It wasn't too long ago that the Illini were forced to hit balls into a net in a racquetball gym when the weather got cold, but one of Small's goals when he took over in 2000 was to change all that. An Illinois native and a U of I alum, he knew all too well how much land was available on the south of campus, and by 2007, he used his influence to help open the Demirjian Indoor Golf Practice Facility, a 20,000-square-foot state-of-the-art complex that cost more than $8 million all in and features a jaw-dropping short-game area, every kind of putting tech you can imagine and nine heated bays that let you hit even in brutal winter conditions.
Outdoors, players on the team are greeted by a 24-acre marvel called the Lauritsen/Wohlers Outdoor Practice Facility that Small designed with Steve Stricker to mimic the practice grounds at Augusta National. Simply put, this $3 million project that includes a $5 million endowment for upkeep allows players to replicate any kind of shot under any kind of conditions, from the tee to the bunker to the green, somewhere on the grounds.
These descriptions are just a hint at what Small has created at Illinois. In the video below, Golf Digest visited the Illinois campus and took a comprehensive tour through the grounds, highlighting the ambition and execution of a project that has made an unlikely northern program one of the titans of American college golf. Check it out below: