Town Guides / Michigan
The Ann Arbor Golf Guide
The best golf course in Ann Arbor hides in plain sight, beside the football stadium, and it was designed by Alister MacKenzie. Say that sentence in any other college town and it sounds like a rumor. Here it is the hook and the fact: the University of Michigan Golf Course is a MacKenzie and Perry Maxwell design from 1931, one of only six MacKenzie designed courses in the United States, tucked into the athletic campus of a university better known for a different Saturday sport. Ann Arbor golf starts with that improbable sentence and fans out from it: a second university course, a city course, and a private Donald Ross club along the Huron River. For a town its size in southeast Michigan, that is an embarrassment of architecture.
The order to play them
Play the University of Michigan Golf Course first, because everything else in town is measured against it. MacKenzie designed it in the late 1920s and it officially opened in spring 1931, just the fourth course located on a college campus when it opened. It plays par 71 at 6,730 yards from the Wolverine tees, hosts Michigan's men's and women's teams, and held the 2012 NCAA Central Regional. Arthur Hills led a multi million dollar restoration completed in 1994, which matters because it means the MacKenzie you play is a maintained MacKenzie, not a faded one. The access rules require honesty: this is primarily a course for university affiliated golfers, with limited public access through unaffiliated guest packages. It is not a walk up muni with a famous name. Plan accordingly, use the affiliation or the guest route if you have one, and do not build an Ann Arbor trip that collapses if the tee time does not come through.
Second in the order is Radrick Farms Golf Course, the university's other course, and third is Leslie Park Golf Course, the city's own. We list them in this order for a practical reason. A visiting golfer should work from the hardest access to the easiest: chase the MacKenzie invitation first, keep the university's second course and the municipal option as the rounds you can count on, and you will leave Ann Arbor having played golf every day regardless of how the guest list broke. Our Ann Arbor ranking orders the town's courses on merit, and the guide order here follows the same logic a trip demands.
Barton Hills Country Club is the private counterweight: a Donald Ross club dating to 1920 along the Huron River, ranked No. 24 in Michigan by Golf Digest and No. 10 on the architecture panel list. If a member's invitation appears, it rearranges the whole trip. A 1920 Ross in the same town as a 1931 MacKenzie Maxwell is a one two punch very few American towns of any size can throw, and it explains why Ann Arbor punches so far above its weight in the Michigan state ranking.
The one mistake visitors make
The mistake is treating Ann Arbor as a football town with a golf footnote and booking the golf as an afterthought. The MacKenzie course rewards the opposite approach. Its access windows are limited and affiliation based, its season is a Michigan season, and the rounds that surround it, Radrick Farms and Leslie Park, deserve daylight rather than the leftover slot after a stadium tour. Book the golf first, early in the trip, in the best weather window you can get, and let the rest of the visit arrange itself around 6,730 yards of MacKenzie and Maxwell.
That is the Ann Arbor secret, hidden beside the stadium since 1931. The town that gathers 100,000 people to watch football sits a short walk from one of the six MacKenzie courses in America, and on a quiet weekday morning, with the campus empty and the Wolverine tees waiting, it might be the best seat in town.