Design Notebook: Top 100 Angst

Greetings and welcome back to Design Notebook, where we decided to publish a bit late this week to make room for Brendan Porath’s excellent profile of Sweetens Cove. Also, I’m lazy sometimes. Sue me! (That’s a joke, Larry Klayman. Please don’t actually sue me.)

In today’s DN, I give Golf.com’s new golf course ranking more thought and attention than it deserves. In so doing, I contribute to the vicious circle of clicks, discourse, and more clicks that gives magazine rankings their power. I also discuss the ongoing flurry of renovation work on Golden Age courses in Kansas City and the news that grazing animals might be expelled from the Scottish links of Brora.

→ Last week, Golf.com released the latest edition of its ranking of the top 100 golf courses in the United States. It’s pretty much the same as every other such ranking, with minor differences that golf tragics like you and me will argue about and obsess over before moving on to our next object of dispute/fascination.

Do I seem cranky? Sorry. I’m mostly just miffed at myself for not restraining myself from writing about yet another one of these damn lists.

Anyway, here are some takeaways from Golf.com’s 2024-25 ranking:

1. Brian Schneider is having a moment. The Lido, a C.B. Macdonald “reincarnation” (that’s the term Golf.com’s editors settled on) built by Schneider and Tom Doak, debuted at No. 30, while Old Barnwell, an original design by Schneider and Blake Conant, entered the list at No. 51. Schneider is a longtime Doak associate who has started to take on more solo projects. These top-100 credits seem likely to give him a prime position in the ongoing “who’s the next Big Three?” sweepstakes.

2. Whither The Tree Farm? Old Barnwell’s crosstown rival does not appear on the list. Perhaps not enough Golf.com raters have made it there?

3. Renovations and redesigns = still hot. After major projects, Interlachen Country Club and Course 3 at Medinah Country Club have reentered the ranking at Nos. 73 and 74, respectively. Interlachen hired Andrew Green to restore its original Donald Ross design, while Medinah brought in the Australian firm OCM Golf to reinvent its championship-hosting No. 3 course. Both reopened earlier this year and have received an immediate bump from Golf.com’s panelists (enough of whom have seen the courses post-surgery, evidently).

Incidentally, my colleagues Andy Johnson and Cameron Hurdus have both spent time at Interlachen and Medinah in the past few months. They have nothing but good things to say about the quality of Green’s and OCM’s work, and they were particularly impressed with the Medinah transformation. The higher rankings would appear to be well deserved.

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4. Beware the dissipation of new-car smell. The Dunes Course at Monterey Peninsula Country Club (No. 90), Streamsong Red (No. 97), and Gamble Sands (No. 100) tumbled significantly down the list. Meanwhile, Congaree, Streamsong Blue, the Dunes Course at the Prairie Club, Sand Valley, and Pinehurst No. 4 fell out of the top 100. What do all of those courses have in common? They opened—or reopened, in the case of Jackson Kahn’s redesigned MPCC Dunes—in the 2010s.

This is a natural dynamic. A great new thing comes on the scene, causes a stir, gets slightly (or substantially) overrated, and then slides down the ranking once the buzz fades. Some of the best-regarded golf courses of the 2010s are currently in the last part of that sequence. Perhaps the truly exceptional ones will rebound in a few years, once they’ve escaped from the initial cycle of hype and backlash.

Relatedly, I support my friend Tron Carter’s proposal to make new courses serve a three- to five-year probationary period before they can be ranked. Let’s at least give these places time to grow in fully, especially given how quickly golf construction projects unfold these days.

→ As I said on the podcast earlier this week, I find Golf.com’s top-100 lists interesting insofar as they represent the shifting opinions of an influential set of golfers. The magazine’s panel consists primarily of industry insiders, many of whom are well connected, well traveled, and deeply informed about golf course design. As a result, Golf.com’s rankings tend to feel more authoritative than those of Golf Digest and Golfweek.

But they aren’t, really. They’re just more fashionable.

I don’t like how these lists masquerade as objective assessments of quality. I worry that they’ve damaged our collective ability to appreciate a diversity of golf courses. Over and over, the magazine rankings tell us that Pine Valley, Cypress Point, Augusta National, Shinnecock Hills, Oakmont, Merion, National Golf Links, and Sand Hills—perhaps ordered slightly differently year to year, but always those exact courses—are the best American golf has to offer. Which isn’t untrue, exactly. Those are all remarkable works of golf architecture and agronomy. But the relentless lionization of them has created a standard by which humbler courses suffer.

Would Diamond Springs—a great, affordable public course—be ranked more highly if it were private? Well, if it were a private club, the grounds crew might have the time and budget to maintain a lower fairway cut and smoother putting surfaces. This would, by the supposedly objective measures of a top-100 ranking, make a private Diamond Springs “better” than the current public one. And that’s bullshit.

→ I don’t think this is an exaggeration: I’ve seen more photos of cows and sheep at Brora Golf Club than photos of golf holes at Brora Golf Club. People seem to love those animals and appreciate the course’s willingness to let them roam about.

Apparently, however, the caretakers of the Scottish Highlands club don’t feel the same way.

“I have taken Brora Golf Course as far as I possibly can, while sharing the land with animals,” said course manager James MacBeath in a letter to members. “If we were successful in removing them, I believe we would be able to improve turf quality and the golfer’s experience, move up the rankings and be judged as a golf course rather than a field.”

I’m sorry, did that man say “move up the rankings”?

Okay, okay. Cool it, Morrison. Calm down.

Look, if the cows and sheep are damaging the course in costly ways, that’s one thing. But if this is about turning Brora—a 130-year-old Highlands links celebrated far and wide for its simple, rustic beauty—into neatly manicured top-100 bait, I’m not sure what to say. What a shame.

→ This winter and through much of next year, Kansas City will be a hotspot for golf course renovations. In August, Hillcrest Golf Course broke ground on a $30-million transformation of the facility, which will include a course redesign overseen by Tripp Davis. Last month, Kansas City Country Club closed down its golf course for an 18-month renovation by Andrew Green. Finally, this coming January, municipal Swope Memorial Golf Course will start a round of upgrades overseen by architect Todd Clark and historical consultant Ron Whitten. (We first reported on the Swope project in a May edition of Design Notebook.)

All three courses have Golden Age bona fides. Hillcrest was designed by Donald Ross in 1916, while KCCC and Swope were built by A.W. Tillinghast in 1926 and 1934, respectively.

The Hillcrest overhaul has me slightly concerned. Originally a private club, Hillcrest went kaput during the Recession. It survived for the next decade as a daily-fee course before being purchased by Robb Heineman, owner of Kansas City’s MLS franchise Sporting KC. Heineman plans to take Hillcrest private again and, according to his pronouncements in the press, turn it into a top-100 candidate.

In spite of the course’s Ross pedigree, however, Tripp Davis’s plan calls for many of the holes to be rerouted.

Tripp Davis's plan for rerouting Hillcrest Country Club

Yes, the old course was short by modern standards. But if top-100 status is the goal, why not restore the design of an architect who produced about a dozen top-100 courses in his career?

Chocolate Drops

Tom Doak’s Old Petty course at Cabot Highlands will open for preview play in August and September 2025.

Delray Dunes Golf and Country Club, Pete Dye’s first design in Florida, has reopened after a “sympathetic restoration” by Scot Sherman. Here are some flyovers. Lots of cool-looking stuff.

Tyler Rae shared some fresh photos of Old Sawmill, his new build in Ridgeville, South Carolina.

The National Links Trust has named Seth Waugh, former CEO of the PGA of America, as honorary chairman of the Nation’s Capital Project, the NLT’s long-term project seeking to revitalize Washington, D.C.’s three municipal golf facilities. This is a savvy move by the NLT. As Waugh proved through his involvement in the Park project in West Palm Beach, he knows how to raise money for public golf.

A Course We Photographed Recently

Cherry Hills Country Club (Cherry Hills Village, CO)—designed by William Flynn in 1922, restored by Renaissance Golf Design in 2009

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Underlined and Starred

“The direct line to the hole is called the line of instinct, and to make a great hole you must break up that line in order to create a line of charm. The line of charm is the provocative path that shaves off distance and provides an ideal line into the green, usually by skirting bunkers and other hazards. The golfer wants the most direct line he can find to the hole, while the architect uses bunkers and other hazards to create risk and reward options that suggest the ideal line for the player, or the line of charm.” –Max Behr

(Yes, this is a somewhat overfamiliar quote in golf architecture circles. But have you ever dug in and tried to understand exactly what Behr is saying? It’s not as easy as it seems at first.)