Pierce Lake Golf Course
Chelsea, Michigan

Overall Grade: A
Value: A ($25 - $45)
Walkability: A
Course Conditions: A
Course Design: A
Practice Facility: D
Food: C - There’s more real food at a 7-11..
Teacher’s Comments: A tough course that will test your skills.

If you want to test your skills as a golfer, look no further than Washtenaw County’s Pierce Lake golf course. The woods, hills, valleys, creeks and swamps—and there are plenty of swamps—require good shotmaking and imagination.. 

The course measures 6917 yards from the back tees and plays to a rating/slope of 72.5/135. Fortunately, there are five sets of tees—the mid tees measure 6152 with a 69.8/127 rating/sl
ope. A friendly word of warning: do not overplay your hand. Use the tees that reasonably fit your game or it will be a very long day (and you will lose a bunch of balls).

Salem Hills Golf Club

Salem Hills is a potentially good golf course looking for better management.

From a routing and hole design point of view, I think that Salem Hills could be very good, indeed. It has good length and plenty of opportunity for strategy. It’s also very walkable.

But the course’s management, I think, lets it down and for me turned a potentially good experience into a bad one.

Hickory Creek Golf Course

Canton Township, Michigan

I last played Hickory Creek some ten years ago and remember not being impressed. Conditions were not good, and overall, it reminded me of a cow pasture.

But over the years, I’d heard a lot of good things about the course—especially from people I knew who play in leagues there.

So in the interest of reviewing every course in Washtenaw County, I returned recently for a replay. And to my delight, I found that the course was much improved.

The course measures 6292 from the blues, with a slope of 131 and a course rating of 70.4 That tells you that there’s some trouble lurking on this layout.

Hudson Mills Metropark Golf Course Saline, Michigan Overall Grade: C Value: C ($22 - $27) Walkability: A+ Course Conditions: B Course Design: C- Practice Facility: None to speak of. Food: C - Gas station cuisine. Teacher’s Comments: Boring. The Hudson Mills Golf Course is part of southeastern Michigan’s fabulous Metropark system—a network of parks and recreation areas that includes eight golf courses. Hudson Mills, located in western Washtenaw county, is a rather dull track. Nearly all of the holes are straight shots from tee to green, with little strategy needed. You simply hit the ball straight as far as you can off the tee, and then take another straight shot into the green. The course is also very wide open. There’s little danger of losing a ball in the woods or swamp here. I don’t miss a lot of fairways, but when I did, there was no real penalty. There are a couple of marshes, a few tree lines, some creeks and a pond, but none of them really come into play. In fact, I have a hard time imagining anyone’s ball actually finding these obstacles. The course measures in at 6,560 with a slope of 118 from the back tees. The whites are at 6,339 with a slope of 116.

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Hickory Sticks Golf Course
Ann Arbor, Michigan

This is a favorite course of a friend of mine, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why. There are plenty of better courses and better bargains in Washtenaw County and southeastern Michigan.

I am sure that designer William Newcomb is not putting this track on his resume. For me, the holes swung between bizarre and uninspiring. Despite the fact that I played well, I just didn’t think the course was a much fun.

Reddeman Farms Golf Course
Chelsea, Michigan

Reddeman Farms is one of the best values in golf in the Ann Arbor area. The course is interesting, but friendly. Fairway conditions are good and the greens are in terrific shape. And best of all is the price. I played 18 walking on a weekday morning for just $19. And I had a lot of fun.

The course is built on a former dairy farm (as so many in the area seem to be) and seems quite far away from the hustle of nearby Ann Arbor and surrounding suburbs (although it is just eight miles west). There’s no housing development here, and the only the faintest sounds of automobiles can be heard. It’s a very peaceful place where you can forget the rest of the world. Appropriately, Reddeman lies at the end of a dirt road past aging barns and working fields.

Reddeman Farms offers good length from the whites at 6,228 yards. All of the greens can be reached by a mid-handicapper in regulation At 6.535 from the back tees, it could seemingly be too short for really big hitters, but the course defends itself well with a good mix of water hazards, bunkers and tight driving holes. I can’t imagine anyone who isn’t on the PGA Tour money list who can reach and hold the green on 18 in two.

Lake Forest Golf Course

Ann Arbor, Michigan

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.