GOLF, Kevin Cunningham, Starfire Golf Club, Jack Hirsh
A U.S. Open host.
A course played backward.
And a hole inside a prison.
Truly, GOLF’s writers enjoyed golf in a variety of locations in 2025. Recently, seven GOLF staffers wrote about their favorite spots, and below are snippets from those stories.
2 greens on 1 hole?! Why this famed U.S. Open site added surprising quirk
Here’s a fun wrinkle, though: The Balty membership gravitates not toward the higher ranked and more storied of the two courses (the Lower) but instead to the “other” option — the Upper. This isn’t to say that the club’s members aren’t proud of their more famous offering or that they don’t still enjoy testing their games out there; it’s just that if they’re sneaking out for a quick nine after work or playing a friendly Saturday-morning fourball, most members prefer to do so on the less bruising Upper.
That’s truer today than ever thanks to a recent restoration by restorers du jour Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, who also helped return the Lower course to its Tilly-rich roots by way of a restoration job they completed in 2021. “The Lower had gotten a lot of the architectural changes in the name of hosting championships,” Hanse said at an event for the Upper’s reopening I attended earlier this year. “The Upper was this kind of sleepy little golf course that sat up there.”
Sleepy but deeply beloved! Whereas the Lower daunts you with length and imposing hazards (like the Sahara bunker complex on the par-5 17th), the Upper delights you with more variety in hole settings and designs, on account of its home in the side of a mountainside. (It delighted me, anyway; my summer round at the Upper was my favorite round of 2025.) Working off a trove of archival photography and maps, Hanse and Wagner extended greens to their original dimensions and removed trees to open sight lines but never strayed from Tillinghast’s original intent. Read Alan Bastable’s full story here.
Why the best course I played in 2025 was the one I played backward
One of the funny parts about letting go of your childhood is learning the small lessons you managed to keep.
I don’t know how old I was when my dad first dropped his favorite pearl of wisdom. I don’t remember why he said it. But I can still hear the phrase in my mind, spoken in Dad’s playful intonation, as if to emphasize its inherent truth. I suspect I always will.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
It took me a while to realize the meaning of those words, and even longer to realize they referred to me. But the answer arrived when I was least expecting it: On a golf course headed in the wrong direction. Read James Colgan’s full story here.
This pristine public 9-holer in New York’s first capital topped my 2025 list
There are many benefits to having an inexpensive, easygoing public course near home. Quick rounds at sunrise, or to beat the dark before sundown. Spontaneous speed-rounds when an unexpected window opens up. Familiarity. Community. No dress code.
With all that to offer, you don’t need to ask much of the course itself. With relatively smooth greens and some grass in the fairways, you’re good to go.
But Green Acres Golf Course in Kingston, N.Y., offers so much more than that. For the price of a goat track, any golfer who arrives at Green Acres will be treated to near-pristine conditions, a friendly and accommodating staff, a short but varied layout and, at least as fall settled in this year, the fastest and smoothest greens I’ve ever putted on. Read Kevin Cunningham’s full story here.
Why this heralded PNW Muni was my favorite course I played in 2025
I was fortunate enough to play lots of new-to-me courses in 2025, but my venture to Chambers Bay, the muni darling of the Pacific Northwest and site of the 2015 U.S. Open, was easily my favorite for one simple reason:
I didn’t know what to expect, and it totally exceeded whatever expectations I ended up having.
You see, three factors had shaped my image of Chambers Bay:
1) That 2015 U.S. Open won by Jordan Spieth, where pros and fans alike bemoaned bumpy greens, a weird setup with a changing par, and a sketchy Dustin Johnson three-putt to close it out;
2) My own dad’s experience with the course and him telling me he didn’t like it — tough way to start out for the ole muni;
3) The recent praise of the course (championed by GOLF’s own Seattleite, Dylan Dethier), which had its greens redone and has since hosted the 2022 U.S. Women’s Amateur.
But, it is golf, and when I scheduled a trip to Bend, Ore. and then Seattle this past November, I knew I had to drive down to University Place and check out the course myself. Read Jack Hirsh’s full story here.
My favorite course of the year offers an incredible summer deal
One of the great ironies of living in a winter paradise like Phoenix is that just when the weather gets wonderful, the prices get outrageous.
That’s a very unwelcome development for someone like me, who tends to be a little bit price-sensitive when it comes to paying for golf. With two young kids at home, shelling out more than $100 for a routine round at a local course hurts my wallet and my conscience.
That’s why the summer in Arizona is truly my time to shine — at least, in a golf sense. Because the deals available for courses that routinely charge a lot of money for rounds in the high season drop to rock-bottom prices. The only caveat? You have to play in 100-degree heat. But remember — it’s a dry heat. Truly, it’s not bad!
This year, my mom and I bought summer passes to Starfire Golf Club in Scottsdale — an original Arnold Palmer design that once included three nines but has since been renovated to feature a nine-hole short course (the Mulligan — a wonderful option for families) and a full-size, 18-hole option, the King. Read Jessica Marksbury’s full story here.
My favorite course played in 2025? It’s inside a prison
One doesn’t fully understand pressure, I now believe, until they’ve stood inside a prison yard bordered by 15-foot barbed-wire fences, in front of a dozen inmates, an officer and a superintendent, and needed to drop a rubberish ball onto a green carpet about 25 yards away with a 56-degree wedge.
Chunk it?
Trash talk.
Thin it?
Trash talk.
Land the ball on the putting surface? I somehow did that at the end of a pitching contest — and still heard about it.
Of course the golf writer wins. I mean, he writes about golf. He better freaking win!
Can’t argue that. And a golf story was why, in late July, I was at Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a minimum-security prison outside Olympia, Wash. Tim Trasher, the aforementioned superintendent, had started what has been dubbed Cedar Creek Golf Club, hoping that its members would be rehabilitated through what golf romantics like Thrasher believe makes golf good. Whether that’s possible won’t be known for a while, as CCGC is only a couple of years old, and the process is by no means linear. Read Nick Piastowski’s full story here.
My favorite course from 2025 made me want to go D1
One of my worst rounds of 2025 came on a course I fell in love with instantly — the Warren Course on campus at Notre Dame.
It was the Friday morning of Labor Day weekend, the final day of welcome week, so campus was still quiet when we arrived in South Bend, Indiana. But therein lies one of my favorite aspects of the Warren — it is as close to campus as university courses get. The layout sits right across the street from Notre Dame’s rec fields, and only a couple hundred yards from Dunne Hall, a dorm named after American golf baron Jimmy and his wife, Susan. Before I even hit a tee shot, I was already jealous of that proximity. I attended UW-Madison, which has an equally great university course, University Ridge, but that one’s located nine miles from any other university building.
We checked in at the pro shop, just ahead of the husband of Notre Dame coaching legend Muffet McGraw, who enjoys her own time on the course here and there. During my 15 minutes inside, the phone was constantly ringing, and with good reason. Tee times can be made two weeks in advance, and we were two weeks from Texas A&M’s football visit to Notre Dame Stadium. There was another lovely aspect: the course is open on home gamedays, but with an all-in, $135 deal. Rather than force course staffers to show up early, work all day and close up late, the course schedules out a morning shotgun start and closes down in the afternoon. Patrons can reserve a spot, get their 18 holes in and head straight to the stadium afterward. Read Sean Zak’s full story here.
And some thoughts on just playing — period
One of the reasons behind this story is to create options for you, but that assumes you can make time to play, so we thought we’d end things here with this — Dylan Dethier’s article entitled “I played disastrously little golf this year. Here are 5 ways I want to change.” You can read it here.
