Course Comparisons / Kansas

Colbert Hills Golf Course vs. Stagg Hill Golf Club: The Manhattan Choice

Manhattan, Kansas has a golf course with a bunker shaped like a wildcat paw print, purple sand on football weekends, and the highest slope in any conversation in the state. Twenty minutes of history away, it has another course that began with buffalo grass fairways and sand greens held together with motor oil. Colbert Hills against Stagg Hill is the cleanest old against new argument in Kansas golf. A $5.5 million clubhouse university flagship against a community nonprofit born in the Depression. Both are worth your Saturday, for entirely different reasons, and choosing between them says what you think golf is for.

Colbert Hills Golf Course

Colbert Hills is Kansas State's home course, co designed by architect Jeff Brauer and Jim Colbert, the Kansas State alum who won eight times on the PGA Tour. It opened April 30, 2000 with a founders pro am featuring Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd, Annika Sorenstam, and Deb Richard, which is a guest list that tells you the ambitions on day one. Golfweek ranked it the best public course in Kansas from its opening through 2011 and second best since. The numbers explain the reputation. Par 72, 7,525 yards, a 77.5 rating and a 152 slope, among the toughest figures in the state, built as a university living laboratory for turf and environmental research and as the home of the Earl Woods National Youth Golf Academy, named for Tiger Woods's Manhattan born father. The fifth hole's bunker complex is shaped like a wildcat paw print, and the sand is dyed purple on big football weekends. A par 3 course and the 2010 clubhouse complete a facility that functions as a small golf university of its own. Our Manhattan ranking puts it first without a fight.

Stagg Hill Golf Club

Stagg Hill's story starts in the early 1930s, when Manhattan American Legion members raised money to build a community course. Construction began in 1930 on rented land atop Stagg Hill west of town. The original course had buffalo grass fairways and sand greens and tees, with motor oil used to hold the sand in place. The club was sold and incorporated as a nonprofit in 1937. By the 1960s, high rent and a lack of water on the hill forced the move, and in 1967 George Filinger, creator of the Johnny Kaw figure, acquired land with water access for the present course. The current layout opened in 1968, credited to Richard Morse and Ray Weisenburger, par 72 at 6,697 yards with a 73.1 rating and a 131 slope, along the river bottom. In the 1993 Kansas River flooding, all but two holes went under as much as 10 feet of water at times. The course came back. Community courses that survive sand greens, a forced relocation, and a flood that drowns 16 holes have earned their place in a town's memory in a way no ranking measures.

The two courses also divide the town's golfers by life stage in a way Manhattan residents understand instinctively. Colbert Hills is where the university's players train, where the visiting golfer with a low handicap wants his one round measured, where the turf program turns the fairways into a research subject and the Earl Woods academy introduces juniors to the game at a facility with tour bones. Stagg Hill is where Manhattan learned the game in the first place, where a nonprofit structure kept golf in town through a depression, a relocation, and a flood, at community scale. A college town runs on both institutions at once, the flagship and the hometown original, and the healthiest sign in this comparison is that neither course has put the other out of business in a quarter century of coexistence. The flagship did not kill the community course. The community course did not resent the flagship into irrelevance. Manhattan kept both.

The verdict

The concession writes itself. Stagg Hill is the warmer story and, for a Manhattan local, possibly the warmer place. It is the town's own course in the deepest sense, built by Legion members in a depression, drowned and rebuilt, still standing along the river. Nobody should rank it first and nobody should skip it.

Colbert Hills wins the comparison on the golf, and it is not close. A 152 slope against a 131, Golfweek's state best for a decade, a tour caliber test with a research program attached. In the Kansas state ranking, it sits with the elite. Pick Stagg Hill for the history, the river bottom, and the feeling of a course a town built for itself. Pick Colbert Hills when you want to find out, precisely, how good you are. The paw print bunker will be waiting on the fifth, purple or otherwise.