Course Comparisons / Oregon
Bend Golf Club vs. Broken Top Club: The Bend Choice
Bend has two private clubs with almost nothing in common except a zip code and a mountain backdrop. Bend Golf Club started in 1925 on donated lumber company land, played its first rounds on dirt fairways and oiled sand greens, and grew into Central Oregon's oldest private club. Broken Top Club opened in 1993, a Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish design named for a hollowed out volcano, with a 27,000 square foot clubhouse overlooking a six acre lake. One club is the town's golf history. The other is the resort era arriving with money and a view. A golfer choosing between them is really choosing which version of Bend he wants to belong to.
Bend Golf Club: the long record
Bend Golf Club plays par 72 at 7,010 yards from the black tees. The design credit for the 1925 original nine carries the H. Chandler Egan name with an honest footnote attached: contemporary newspapers credited Waverley pro Bill Henley, and GolfLink credits William Hanley alongside Egan. The second nine, by Bob Baldock, opened in 1973 on 309 more donated acres. The club has hosted the Oregon Open, the Northwest Open, the Oregon Amateur, and the PNGA Mid-Amateur, a competitive record no newer club in town can match because it takes a century to build one.
The recent story is renovation. Dan Hixson began a long range plan in 2013, and the club removed more than 200 trees in 2015 to recover width and turf. That is a mature club making a hard decision well, choosing the original playing character over the enclosed look that grows up when nobody is willing to argue for a chainsaw. Members who have played here for decades are playing a course that keeps being maintained as an idea, not just mowed as a property.
Broken Top Club: the polished newcomer
Broken Top plays par 72 at 7,161 yards from the back tees, ranked No. 19 in Oregon by GolfCourseGurus. Weiskopf and Morrish were a proven team by 1993, and their Bend work leans on the setting: the club takes its name from Broken Top itself, whose cinder cone remnant reaches 9,155 feet, and the routing plays in high desert country where the mountains do the framing. Troon lists the opening as 1994, a year after the 1993 design year in the record, a small discrepancy worth noting rather than smoothing over. Troon Prive took over management in March 2022, which tells you the club's modern identity: professionally run, amenity forward, the big clubhouse and the lake as the centerpiece of the day.
Concede Broken Top its best points plainly. The facility is newer, the clubhouse is a genuine asset, the course is 150 yards longer and presents as the more complete modern club experience, and for a member whose golf day includes family, dining, and the full country club program, Broken Top was purpose built for exactly that. Bend Golf Club, by contrast, asks you to value history and competitive tradition over polish, and a golfer who does not care about either will find the older club easy to underrate on a single visit.
On the golf alone, we give it to Bend Golf Club, narrowly. Not because older is automatically better, it is not, but because the combination of a 1925 routing still hosting state championships, a second nine that completed the course on the same donated ground, and a renovation program willing to cut 200 trees to protect the design adds up to a course with a stronger identity. Broken Top is very good resort era private golf. Bend Golf Club is a specific place that could not be rebuilt anywhere else.
Both are private, members and guests only, with membership costs in the high estimate tier and no public tee times at either. Estimates are all anyone outside the clubs can offer, since neither publishes its numbers. For the full local picture see the best golf courses in Bend and the state argument in the 5 best golf courses in Oregon. Pick Broken Top if you are buying the modern club day, lake, clubhouse, and all. Pick Bend Golf Club if you want the round that Bend golfers were playing, on sand greens and then on turf, long before the town had a resort to sell.