# Alling Memorial Golf Club: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/alling-memorial-golf-club-profile/

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Course Profiles / Connecticut


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Start with the par threes, because everyone in New Haven does. The third and the 17th at Alling Memorial both play over 200 yards from the back tees. On a municipal course that plays 6,283 yards total. That ratio tells you almost everything about this place: a city course from 1931 that never got the memo about making golf easier, and whose hardest questions come on the holes most modern courses use as breathers.

Alling Memorial began life as the New Haven Municipal Golf Course, designed by Robert D. Pryde, the Scot who also laid out Race Brook and Wethersfield country clubs. Put that resume in context. Pryde was building private club golf in Connecticut and then turned the same hand to a public course for the city. The result, nearly a century later, still carries the bones of that ambition: par 72, 6,283 yards, a rating of 71.9 and a slope of 120.

That rating deserves a pause. A 71.9 rating on a 6,283 yard muni means the course plays close to a full shot harder than its yardage suggests. Short courses usually rate soft. Alling does not, and the par threes are a big reason why. Two one shotters past 200 yards will wreck a casual card. The sixth hole adds to it, a par four rated the No. 1 handicap hole on the course, with an elevated tee shot and a blind uphill approach. Blind and uphill, on a municipal, in 1931. Pryde was not designing down to his audience.

## A private club architect working for the city

There is a version of municipal golf that apologizes for itself: flat, open, forgettable, built to move rounds rather than test anyone. Alling is the other version, the one a few lucky cities got when a real architect took the commission seriously. The elevated tee at the sixth, the long par threes, the routing that asks you to hit a proper long iron or hybrid more than once, these are private club demands placed in front of anyone with a greens fee.

Readers can place it against the rest of the city in [our New Haven ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-new-haven-ct/) and against the state in [the full Connecticut state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-connecticut/), where Alling's case rests on exactly this point. Connecticut has plenty of polished private golf. It has very few public courses where the hardest hole is honestly the hardest hole and a 200 yard par three is treated as a normal thing to ask.

There is also a quieter point in Pryde's name being on both kinds of work. Race Brook and Wethersfield are the sort of clubs where members measure a course over decades, and Alling was built for a public that would do exactly the same thing, one generation handing the tee time to the next. A muni that survives from 1931 with its hardest holes still intact has been re-argued by every golfer who ever stood on the third tee with a long iron in hand and wondered why a city course was asking this much of them. It survives because the question is a good one.

The concession, and it is a real one, is that municipal golf carries municipal limits. Conditioning will not match the private clubs Pryde built, tee sheets get crowded, and a blind uphill approach that plays as charming on a quiet Tuesday plays as slow on a packed Saturday. The slope of 120 also cuts the other way for the strongest players: off the tee, Alling will not stretch a low handicap the way a 7,000 yard course does. Its difficulty is concentrated, in the long par threes and a handful of demanding approaches, rather than spread across every shot.

That concentration is also the charm. Alling asks a specific question that modern golf keeps dodging. Can you hit a long club to a target, under control, when the hole gives you nothing cheap? The third asks it early, before you are warm. The 17th asks it again when the match is usually still alive. A city course from 1931, still asking the hardest question in the bag at the two moments it stings most. New Haven could have built something easier. It built this instead, and the city game is better for it.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.