# Ben Geren Regional Park Golf Course: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/ben-geren-regional-park-golf-course-profile/

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Course Profiles / Arkansas


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

Twenty-seven holes changes the arithmetic of a municipal golf course. At Ben Geren in Fort Smith, three nines, Magnolia, Silo and Willow, pair into three different 18-hole combinations, which means the regular who plays twice a week is not playing the same course twice. For a city facility in Sebastian County, that variety is the whole offer, and it was built in two distinct eras by two distinct hands. Our Fort Smith coverage sits in [the best courses in Fort Smith ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-fort-smith-ar/), and the state picture in [the best courses in Arkansas ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-arkansas/).

The original golf, the Willow and Magnolia nines, opened in 1970, designed by Marvin Ferguson. That is the foundation: parkland municipal golf of its period, bent grass greens and Bermuda fairways, per the Arkansas State Golf Association's course directory. That grass pairing tells a climate story. Bermuda fairways for the Arkansas summer heat, bent grass greens that have to be nursed through the same summer, a maintenance bargain every course in the transition zone strikes and every superintendent in it understands. Ferguson's nines have carried Fort Smith's public golf since 1970, more than five decades of league nights, junior lessons, and Saturday foursomes, which is the unglamorous work municipal courses actually exist to do.

The Magnolia nine is regarded as the most demanding of the three, and its seventh hole is the evidence: a 196-yard par 3 to an elevated green protected by four bunkers. Read that hole as a municipal golfer meets it. One hundred ninety-six yards is a long iron or a hybrid for most public players, uphill, to a green ringed with sand. There is no safe miss that stays easy. Short is bunkered, the elevation hides the surface, and a par there is a genuinely earned score. Every good municipal course needs one hole that makes the regulars argue, the hole where a match turns. On Magnolia, the seventh is that hole, and it has been turning matches since 1970.

## The Silo nine, a different accent

In 1997 the facility added the Silo nine, designed by Jeffrey D. Brauer, and deliberately different in character: links-style. Setting a links-style nine beside two parkland nines from 1970 is a design decision with real consequences for the golfer. The three 18-hole combinations now mix styles inside a single round, so a Fort Smith golfer can start on Ferguson's parkland, turn onto Brauer's more open, links-flavored ground, and play two kinds of golf before lunch. Variety like that keeps a municipal course from going stale for the people who play it most, and staleness, not difficulty, is what kills regular play at city courses.

Brauer's addition also says something about municipal ambition in the 1990s. A city course could have added nine more holes of the same and called it expansion. Ben Geren instead bought a contrast, a second design voice a generation younger than the first. The 27-hole format only earns its complexity if the nines differ, and here they genuinely do, in architect, in era, and in style.

## Who it suits, and the limit

Ben Geren suits the committed public golfer, the player who wants a home course with enough combinations to stay interesting across a season, on public access at a regional park in Fort Smith. It also serves the beginner and the league player, which any honest profile of a municipal has to count as a feature, not a footnote. The concession: a 27-hole public facility will never be manicured or paced like a private club, bent greens in an Arkansas summer are a yearly fight, and none of the three nines claims a championship pedigree. The course's ambitions are civic, not national.

Civic ambitions, met for over fifty years, deserve their own respect. Three nines, two architects, one elevated par 3 on Magnolia that still sorts out a match, and a links-style wrinkle most city courses never bother to offer. Fort Smith's public golfers are better served than golfers in most cities its size, and Ben Geren is the reason.

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