Lake Forest Golf Course

Ann Arbor, Michigan

Overall Grade: A-
Value: A ($15 - $42, depending on time and day)
Course Conditions: B+
Course Design: B
Walkability: A
Practice Facility: A+
Food: B nothing fancy.
Teacher’s Comments:This is a fun course, but too short and not particularly challenging from the whites. Even the bogey golfer should play the blues.

Lake Forest bills itself as a “championship quality” course—and indeed, it has hosted a couple of LPGA Futures Tour events. But if you’re a bogey golfer, don’t let that monicker scare you. Lake Forest is eminently playable—even by high handicappers.

Laid out across a former dairy farm, Lake Forest features about half the holes are prairie style, and the other half wooded. On two of the holes, you are required to take shots over swampy areas. The swamps are present on other holes, but shouldn’t come into play. With a number of large ponds, it’s quite a pretty course, especially on sunny days, with the light reflecting off of all that water.

The routing of the course leaves a bit to be desired. In the designer’s desire to have both 9 and 18 feed back to the clubhouse in parallel, he had to resort to a confusing layout. When you come off of eight, the first tee that you see turns out to be 16. New golfers to the course may very well unknowingly play this hole. If you follow the path past the fifth green, down a hill and back up again, you find another tee—the 18th. You have to go past that to get to nine.

That said, the 9th and 18th have a neat design feature. They run parallel, and for some length, the fairways are actually connected.

The course begins reasonably enough, with a wide open par 5 that meaures just 449 from the whites and 512 from the tips (photo on right, second from top). A water hazard that runs the length of the right side will catch slicers. It’s a good warm up. 

Pine View Golf Course

Ypsilanti, Michigan

Overall Grade: A
Value: B+ ($17 - $45, depending upon time and day of the week)
Walkability: A
Course Conditions: A
Course Design: B (good, but not inspired)
Practice Facility: A
Food: B - nothing fancy.
Teacher’s Comments: A fair, friendly course with many extras.

Every town should have a golf course like Pine View. With a 6,500 yard 18-hole track, a 9 hole “executive” (Par 3) course, full-sized grass tee driving range, practice greens, a well-stocked pro shop, and lots of men’s and women’s leagues and family friendly activities, you could easily make this your golfing home.

Pine View’s 18-hole course offers a fair and fun golfing experience for a wide range of skill levels. From the white tees (6262 yards), the bogey golfer can reach every green in regulation. The blues offer moderately more challenge at 6,526 yards. The red tees are well-placed, permitting the shorter hitters a good golfing experience.

That’s not to say that the course is easy. The large greens are tricky and well defended. Several holes are defended by truly deceptive distances. And on the back nine, the tree lined fairways place a premium on accuracy. The whites play to a 69.610, while the blues are a 71.3/124.

Still, a golfer who plays smart is going to score well. 

Whiskey Creek Golf Course
Ijamsville, Maryland
Grade: A
Value: B ($80)
Walkability: D; You can walk if you want, but I wouldn’t.
Course Conditions: A
Practice Facility: A
Food: A
Teacher’s Comments: A thinking man’s course. Beautiful and challenging.

Whiskey Creek was Ernie Els’ first official attempt at golf course design, and it was a successful debut. The story is that after this trial run, Els decided that he would start his own course design company. Good move.

I think that a golf course by a celebrity player should reflect his (or her) personality. I don’t know Ernie Els, of course, but from news and watching him on television, I get the sense that he’s a genuinely nice guy.  My sense is that he’s called the Big Easy for more than his swing. The way he “adopted” Michelle Wie (affectionately calling her “Wiesy") when other Tour players were bristling at having to play with a girl speaks volumes about the man.

And if that’s true, then Whiskey Creek does reflect his personality. What I liked most about the course is that it’s fair to players of all ability levels. In spite of the challenges the course presented, I was never frustrated. Each hole had a couple of clear strategies—and one was always available for a player of my (modest) skills.

That’s not to say that the course was easy to navigate.

Calderone Farms Golf Club
4490 Willis Rd.
Grass Lake, MI 49240
(517)522-6661

Overall Grade: A-
Value: A+ ($29 - $40)
Walkability: D; I walked, but you have to be in very good shape.
Course Conditions: A-
Practice Facility: A
Food: C - basic hot dog and chips type fare
Teacher’s Comments: An exceptional value.

I’ve often passed Calderone Farms on my way down I94 to my favorite courses in Jackson, Michigan. From the highway the three holes that you can see aren’t very inviting. And it doesn’t help matters much that it’s located next to a cheesy looking deer farm that calls itself the Michigan White Tail Museum.

But since I am on a mission this summer to review all of the courses within a half hour’s drive of Ann Arbor, I decided to take advantage of Calderone’s off season rates ($25) and give it a try.

I liked it so much that I went back a week later for another round—just to be sure. And the second round confirmed my initial opinion: this is a championship quality experience at municipal golf course rates.

Calderone Farms is a prairie course—and I mean that in the best possible way. Laid out by William Newcomb on 220 acres of glacier sculpted land, Calderone Farms has many of the characteristics of a “links” style course: largely treeless, with windswept fairways lined by thick, tall grasses.

But that’s where the comparison ends, because the land is anything but flat. The glaciers of ten thousand years ago saw to that.

It’s the elevation changes that make Calderone Farms such an interesting course. The holes are routed through small hilly valleys, across ridge lines, down from elevated tees and back up again to the greens. The changes are not severe, but they are enough to make it necessary to do some serious thinking about your yardages, landing zones, and approaches.

I love a thinking-man’s course.

On my favorite hole—number three—your first shot has to carry from a hilltop tee box across a ravine to land on a ridgeline fairway. While the fairway is relatively flat, missing on either side will cause your ball to roll down a steep slope. A good tee shot will take you left and then back to the right side of the fairway, leaving about 140 to the hole. From there, an ideal shot would draw back to the green. If you miss left, your ball will be stopped by a couple of mounds; miss right and you’re back down a hill. (A shot of this hole is the third picture from the top)

The best part of the hole, however, is that it is deceptive. The first time I played it, I was sure that my tee shot had rolled to the right off the fairway down the hill and into the scrub. But when I got there, I was sitting pretty in the short grass. Thanks to the slight dogleg left, the fairway is a lot wider than it appears in the landing zone.

Five sets of tees make this course playable by players of practically skill level, with the back tees coming in at more than 7,000 yards. I played once from the tips and once from the whites; the course was fun and fair from either location. If you realize that you can’t make the ideal shot, there always are plenty of places to bail.

The greens are large and well kept. But they are treacherous, and generally guarded by both sand and grass bunkers. Several have deceptive false fronts.

If you’re going to score well on this course, your short game has to be well-tuned.

Course conditions were good for the spring. Spring rains had not left any of the puddles of water that are common on southeastern Michigan courses. The fairways had more weeds than I would have liked to see, but the tee boxes and grees were immaculate.

The course is walkable, but you have to be in good shape to do so.  Between the hills and the distance between the holes, it can be quite a hike. They also don’t have pull carts available, so if you’re going to walk, you need to bring your own. I’m in good shape, but I wouldn’t even think of carrying on that course. (I walked and used my Sun Mountain Speed Cart).

Calderone Farms has a nice practice facility, including a secluded range and a large practice green. The “clubhouse” is a doublewide trailer with a small snack area. There is no pro shop to speak of, but they do have gloves, tees, cleats and balls.

My major complaint with the course is that there are no markers next to the tee boxes. I was told—correctly—that following the cart paths, will lead directly from hole to hole, but it was still disconcerting to get to a tee and to not be absolutely sure that it was the right one. The manager said that signs would detract from the natural beauty, but they could easily place a low numbered stone at each box.

Whispering Pines
Grade: D

I took a day off last week for some mental R&R and ended up playing a course in Pinckney, Michigan called Whispering Pines.

Built in 1991, it measures 6017 yards from the middle tees with a slope of 121. But it's much harder than that. So hard, in fact, that I consider it an "unfair" course, and I don't think I'll go back.

The unfair part of Whispering Pines is that there doesn’t seem to be a safe landing spot anywhere on the course. Even tee shots that split the middle of the fairway ended up on sidehill lies, or on a difficult uphill (or downhill) slope. It was most discouraging to hit a good tee shot, only to watch the thing roll sideways off the fairway.

Now, I don’t mind a difficult course—in fact, I rather like the challenge of thinking my way around a course that’s really too much for my physical skills. But Whispering Pines didn’t seem to offer anywhere for me to “bail out.”

Back at school the next day, I found that I wasn’t the only one who considered it unfair. It’s apparently on the “do-not-play” list of some of the building’s better golfers.

On the positive side, its a very pretty course that manages to give a woodlands feel while winding its way through a golf course community. The visuals were the only reason this course didn’t flunk.