# Blessings Golf Club: A Course Profile

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / Arkansas


A golf ball beside the hole on a green. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Start with the numbers, because at Blessings the numbers are the story. Rating 80.9. Slope 155. More than 7,900 yards from the back tees. Those are not tough course numbers. Those are numbers at the edge of what American golf produces, on a course in Johnson, Arkansas, along Clear Creek, funded by Tyson Foods chairman John H. Tyson and built as the home of the University of Arkansas golf teams.

Robert Trent Jones Jr. designed it, and it opened in June 2004. The routing plays through the Clear Creek floodplain and up onto a plateau 65 feet above it. That elevation change is the round in miniature: low, wet, demanding ground, then a climb, then golf played above the creek with the floodplain spread out below. A course this hard needs variety or it becomes a beating administered in one note. The land gives it two registers, and the design uses both.

## Built for championships, tested by them

Blessings hosted the 2019 NCAA Men's and Women's Division I Championships, both of them, which is the assignment the course was built for. A college championship field is a useful test of a hard course. The players are long, fearless, and not yet wise, and a course with a slope of 155 sorts that combination out quickly. Before those championships, Kyle Phillips renovated the course extensively. That matters. The club did not treat a 2004 design as finished work. It hired a serious architect to sharpen the course for the biggest week in college golf.

The earlier record supports the championship claim. Blessings hosted the 2012 SEC Women's Championship and a 2013 NCAA Men's Regional. Conferences and the NCAA do not hand those events to courses on reputation alone. They need length, they need practice ground, they need a test that identifies the best team over several days rather than the luckiest player over one round. Blessings, at over 7,900 yards, gives them length to spare.

Golf Digest ranked it No. 156 on its America's 200 Greatest list in 2025, which puts an Arkansas private club built in 2004 on a list dominated by courses three and four times its age. In [the full Arkansas state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-arkansas/) we score the golf first, and on pure difficulty and championship proof, nothing in the state argues with it.

## Who should want this, and who should not

Here is the concession, and at Blessings it is a large one. A rating of 80.9 from the back tees describes a course that most golfers should not play from the back tees, full stop. Difficulty this extreme stops being a test and becomes a tax if your game is not built for it. The honest defense of Blessings is not that everyone will enjoy it. It is that college golf and championship golf need a few places that ask the maximum question, and Arkansas built one on purpose, with a university program to use it every day.

That daily use is easy to overlook. A course maintained for a college team gets played, practiced on, and judged by good players constantly. It cannot hide behind one big week a year. The Arkansas teams live with the floodplain holes and the plateau holes in every season, and that kind of scrutiny keeps conditioning and setup honest.

Access is private, and that is the second limit. There is no public route onto a course with these numbers, which is a shame for strong players who collect hard tests the way other golfers collect headcovers. Estimates for private clubs at this level run well into six figures for initiation, and that figure is an estimate, not a quote from the club. Most readers will know Blessings the way they know it now: through championship coverage and the scorecards it produces.

And those scorecards are the point. Every state has a hardest course argument at the bar. Arkansas ended its argument in 2004 by building a course along a creek, up a plateau, past 7,900 yards, and letting the rating reach 80.9. You can question whether golf needs to be that hard. You cannot question that Blessings meant to do it, or that it keeps proving it every time a championship field shows up and starts posting numbers.

Arkansas's other entry in this class is [Coopers Hawk Golf Course](/blog/coopers-hawk-golf-course-profile/), a public counterpoint worth the comparison.

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