# The Ardmore Golf Guide

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/ardmore-ok-golf-guide/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Guides / Oklahoma


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Perry Maxwell is buried at his golf course. Not near it, not in the town cemetery with a view of it, but on the property, in the family cemetery on the ridge north of the 7th fairway at Dornick Hills in Ardmore, Oklahoma, where the hook for this guide is also its simplest fact: Dornick Hills was Maxwell's first design and his home club, and he arranged to stay. Golf architects leave monuments all over America. Almost none of them are graves beside a fairway they built with their own money on their own farm. Ardmore's golf story starts there, and in south central Oklahoma there is no second story that competes with it.

## Dornick Hills, where Maxwell began

Understand what the first design means. Maxwell, the Ardmore banker, built the first nine holes in 1913 on a former dairy farm he owned, and completed the second nine in 1923. The name comes from the Gaelic word dornick, meaning small rocks, thousands of which were removed to build the course. This was a man literally clearing his own land by the rock load to make a golf course in Oklahoma in 1913, before Oklahoma golf existed as an idea. The firsts pile up around him. Dornick Hills was Oklahoma's first golf course with Bermuda grass greens. It was the first Oklahoma club affiliated with the USGA, on July 20, 1914. The architect who later worked across America learned his trade here, on his own farm, at his own expense, and the course is the laboratory that survived.

The golf holds up as more than a history lesson. The course plays par 70 at 6,453 yards, its signature is the Cliff Hole, played over natural rock outcroppings, all that dornick turned from obstacle into feature. The club hosted the Ardmore Open from 1952 to 1954 and the LPGA Ardmore Open in 1954, so tournament golf found this farm course in the middle of the century. Tom Doak's Renaissance Golf Design has renovated the course in recent years, and GOLF.com ranked it third in Oklahoma for 2024-25. A private club, and the access is the honest limit of this guide: Dornick Hills takes a member's invitation. But a Doak renovated Maxwell original, ranked third in the state, is worth the effort of finding one, and it leads both our [Ardmore ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-ardmore-ok/) and the town's place in the [Oklahoma state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-oklahoma/).

## The rest of the town, and the mistake to avoid

Lakeview Golf Club is Ardmore's other anchor, the public facing side of the town's golf, and a two course town works like this: Dornick Hills is the destination you plan around and pursue, Lakeview is the round you can always play. Build the trip in that order. Chase the invitation early, and let Lakeview carry the days the private gates stay closed. Ardmore rewards the golfer who comes for the history and stays flexible about the tee sheet.

The one mistake visitors make is treating Dornick Hills as a drive by photo stop on the way between Oklahoma City and Dallas. Ardmore sits in that corridor, and Maxwell's course gets reduced to a story people tell at highway speed. Do not do that to the place where the man is buried by the 7th fairway. This is a living club with its own memory, not a plaque, and it deserves a full day rather than a windshield hour.

End the day at the Cliff Hole, over the rocks Maxwell's crews hauled out of this ground a century ago, on the course where American golf architecture has one of its true home addresses. He built it, he joined it to the USGA before Oklahoma had another club to join, and when the time came he stayed. Play it like a guest in someone's house. It is one.

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