# Atlantic Golf Club: A Course Profile

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / New York


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

In 1992, Bridgehampton had Shinnecock Hills and National Golf Links setting the standard for golf on the East End of Long Island, and developer Lowell Schulman built a modern links on a former 205 acre potato farm in between them. That took nerve. Atlantic Golf Club, designed by Rees Jones and opened that year, has spent three decades being graded against two of the most celebrated courses in America, and it is still standing in the conversation. It is listed among the best golf courses in New York, which in that neighborhood is not a participation honor.

The facts are clean: par 72, 7,121 yards, private, modern links style. Links is a word American clubs abuse, but the starting point here was at least honest. A potato farm is flat, open, sandy soiled agricultural land, about as close as Long Island gets to the raw material links golf was invented on. Jones built up from that flatness rather than pretending the farm was dunes country, and the result is a course that plays in the wind that defines East End golf.

## Living in a hard neighborhood

We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and Atlantic's problem is never the golf. Its problem is geography as reputation. When your neighbors hosted U.S. Opens in the nineteenth century, a 1992 course starts every argument two down. The counterargument is the golf itself: 7,121 yards of modern championship length, built by a designer whose career was made preparing courses for major championships, on land that lets the wind do the defending.

Access is private, full stop, and in the Hamptons that means the realistic route is knowing a member. Estimates put initiation well into six figures for clubs at this level on the East End, and that is an estimate, not a published figure, because clubs here do not publish figures. In [the full New York state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-new-york/), Atlantic's place rests on whether you grade the course or the zip code's history.

The concession, honestly given: Atlantic does not have the architectural pedigree of its neighbors, and no amount of conditioning closes a century gap in aura. If the invitation is to Shinnecock, you take Shinnecock.

But grading a course down for its neighbors is a parlor game. Graded on its own card, Atlantic is a 7,121 yard modern links on real sandy ground, holding its own in the toughest golf neighborhood in America. The potato farm grew up well.

## The potato farm question

Every modern course built near a classic gets asked the same question: why does this need to exist? Atlantic's answer is in the land record. Two hundred five acres of former potato farm is not scenery, it is raw material: flat, open, agricultural ground that an architect has to shape into golf without a famous dune or a headland to borrow glory from. Rees Jones, whose reputation rests on building and rebuilding championship tests, took that blank acreage in 1992 and produced 7,121 yards that panelists keep listing among the best in New York. Doing it next door to two landmarks is either arrogance or confidence, and three decades of rankings suggest the second reading.

The modern links label also deserves precision. American clubs use the word for anything with fescue and a breeze. Atlantic at least starts from honest inputs: sandy agricultural soil, open ground, and the East End wind, which does more design work in Bridgehampton than any architect. A course that plays in that wind, at that length, asks the championship questions in a modern dialect rather than a Golden Age one.

New York does not lack for famous golf. What it lacks, at the top end, is famous golf built in the lifetimes of the people playing it. Atlantic is the East End's entry in that shorter list, and it has held the spot since 1992.

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