# Colbert Hills Golf Course: A Course Profile

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

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Course Profiles / Kansas


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

The opening ceremony tells you this was never meant to be an ordinary college course. Colbert Hills opened on April 30, 2000 with a founders pro am featuring Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd, Annika Sorenstam, and Deb Richard. That is a serious guest list for Manhattan, Kansas. The course was co-designed by architect Jeff Brauer and Jim Colbert, a Kansas State alum who won eight times on the PGA Tour, and it serves as the home course for the Kansas State men's and women's golf teams. College home courses are often pleasant afterthoughts. This one was launched like a championship venue, because that is what Colbert intended to build.

Then you read the scorecard and the intention gets clearer. Par 72, 7,525 yards, a rating of 77.5, and a slope of 152. Those are among the toughest numbers in Kansas, full stop. Seven thousand five hundred yards on the Flint Hills prairie, where the wind is a permanent member of the foursome, is a very long way. Brauer and Colbert built a course that could stretch a college field and humble a visiting scratch player, and for its first decade the market agreed it worked. Golfweek ranked Colbert Hills the best public course in Kansas from its opening through 2011, and second best since. Sustaining a ranking like that for twenty plus years, in a state where the public golfer has other proud options, is not an accident of opening day publicity.

The Colbert part of the design team matters. An eight time PGA Tour winner does not design by yardage book. He designs by memory: the approach shot that holds up under a Sunday pairing, the green that accepts a well struck long iron and rejects a lazy one, the tee shot that looks generous until the crosswind starts doing arithmetic. Paired with Brauer, a working architect who could grade and drain and route the thing properly, Colbert gave Kansas State a course that teaches competitive golf rather than merely housing it. A college team that practices daily at 7,525 yards and a 152 slope travels well. Its players have already seen the hard version at home.

The details keep it human, though. The fifth hole's bunker complex is shaped like a wildcat paw print, and the sand is dyed purple on big football weekends. You can roll your eyes at the gimmick, and then you stand over a shot out of a purple paw in October with the stadium crowd in town and admit the place has a sense of itself. College golf courses should be tied to their schools this tightly. Colbert Hills also works as a university living laboratory for turf and environmental research, which is a practical asset in Kansas, where growing championship grass through prairie summers and winters is a genuine scientific problem and not just a maintenance budget.

It is also home to the Earl Woods National Youth Golf Academy, named for Tiger Woods's father, who was born in Manhattan. That connection is local and real, not a marketing borrow. Earl Woods came from this town, and the academy bearing his name brings junior golfers onto a course built to championship standard. A $5.5 million clubhouse was completed in 2010, and the facility includes a par 3 course as well, which matters more than it sounds. The par 3 course is where the academy kids and the beginners live. The big course is where the Wildcats train. Both functions share one property without diluting each other.

Our [Manhattan town ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-manhattan-ks/) puts Colbert Hills at the center of golf in the Little Apple, and it holds a clear place in [the Kansas state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-kansas/) as well. The concession is difficulty. A 152 slope from the tips is a warning label, and casual players who insist on the back tees here will spend a long afternoon being educated. Played from the right set of tees, the course is demanding but fair. Played from the wrong ones, it is a lesson in humility with a purple bunker in the middle of it.

Take the lesson properly and Colbert Hills is one of the great bargains in American college golf: a tour caliber test, a working research lab, and a youth academy, all on the prairie outside a college town, with Trevino and Floyd in the opening day photographs to prove somebody meant it from the start.

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