# Arlington Golf Course: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/arlington-golf-course-profile/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / Kentucky


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

Most college golf courses are a practice field with flags. Arlington, in Richmond, Kentucky, is something else: a course from 1924 that sits on a former estate of roughly 190 acres, anchored by the Arlington Mansion, a Georgian style house from the 1870s that predates the golf by half a century. The estate was donated to Eastern Kentucky University in 1967 by W. Arnold Hanger, in honor of his parents, and that single gift explains everything about what Arlington is now. It is a public course. It is the home course of Eastern Kentucky University's men's and women's golf teams. And it hosts the university's Professional Golf Management program, which means the place is simultaneously a golf course, a classroom, and a piece of Kentucky estate history that happens to have greens on it.

That triple identity could easily produce a muddle. University courses often play second fiddle to the institution's other priorities, and public courses on donated estates often coast on the setting. Arlington's defense against both fates is on the card: par 72, 6,638 yards from the longest tees, a rating of 71.5 and a slope of 125, on Zoysia grass. Those are honest, full size numbers. The 6,638 yards will not frighten a college player, and it is not supposed to. The course's job is to be a complete test at a moderate length, playable by the Richmond public every day and useful to two university teams and a PGM program that trains future professionals on it.

## Golf from another century, kept in service

A 1924 opening date puts Arlington among Kentucky's older layouts, and age does different work here than it does at a private club. At a private club, age becomes exclusivity. At Arlington, age became continuity. The course has been part of Richmond's golf life for a century, first as estate golf in local telling, then, after 1967, as university golf that the public shares. The mansion is not set dressing. It is the reminder that this land had a life before the university, and that the university, to its credit, kept the golf going rather than building over it.

The Zoysia grass deserves its sentence, because playing surface is where older public courses most often let themselves down. Zoysia gives a firm, upright lie that flatters the fairway shot and holds up through a Kentucky summer, and its presence in the record signals a course being maintained to a standard rather than merely mowed. For a course that has to absorb public play, team practice, and program instruction at once, surface is not a detail. It is the whole product.

How Arlington stacks up statewide is a different question, and [the Kentucky state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-kentucky/) answers it without sentimentality. Arlington is not the state's hardest or most celebrated course. It is something rarer in its own way: a century old estate course that found a second life as a working university facility and never stopped being public.

There is a practical point buried in the PGM detail that visitors should understand. A course that trains golf professionals tends to be run by people who are being graded on running it. The Professional Golf Management program makes Arlington a teaching facility in the operational sense as well as the playing sense, and that shows up in the small disciplines, the tee sheet, the practice areas, the pace of a weekday round. Public players in Richmond get the benefit of that scrutiny without paying a private club's price for it, which is a trade most university towns never manage to offer their residents.

## The concession

The limits are plain. At 6,638 yards with a 71.5 rating, Arlington will not test an elite player the way a championship venue does, and nobody should drive across Kentucky expecting a tournament examination. Its architect is not recorded in the course's own record, which is common for estate golf of its era and still a gap in the story. And a course serving three constituencies at once, public players, college teams, and a teaching program, will have days when the tee sheet and the practice schedule squeeze the casual round.

None of that dents the central fact. In 1967 a man gave his parents' estate, mansion and all, to a university, and the university turned it into golf that anyone in Richmond can play, that its teams call home, and that teaches the game's business to the students who will run courses like it. American golf has very few places where the mansion is older than the course, the course is older than the university's ownership, and all three are still standing on the same 190 acres. Arlington is one of them.

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