# Dataw Island Club Cotton Dike Course vs. Dataw Island Club Morgan River Course: The Saint Helena Island Choice

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/dataw-island-club-cotton-dike-course-vs-dataw-island-club-morgan-river-course/

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Course Comparisons / South Carolina


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

Most head to heads on this site pit two clubs against each other. This one is an argument inside a single clubhouse. Dataw Island Club, a private club on Dataw Island near Beaufort in Beaufort County, has two courses, built eight years apart by two different architects, and its members have been settling this question on the first tee ever since the second one opened. Cotton Dike or Morgan River. Fazio or Hills. The older course with the ranking, or the narrower one that makes you earn every green.

## Cotton Dike: Fazio first, and it shows

Tom Fazio built Cotton Dike in 1985 as the first golf course at Dataw Island, and the name reaches back further than golf. The course is named for the old cotton dikes built to reclaim marshland for cotton fields in the plantation era, which tells you the ground it moves through: low, wet at the edges, marsh framed Lowcountry land on Saint Helena Island. It plays par 72 at 6,787 yards, rated 72.9 with a 136 slope, and it was renovated in 2011 under Billy Fuller.

The outside verdict backs the members who favor it. Cotton Dike was named No. 35 on the South Carolina Golf Course Ranking Panel's top 50 courses list, a state panel ranking that puts a private island club course in ranked company statewide. Fazio in 1985 was already Fazio: shaping that gives a hole a clear preferred side, trouble placed where the greedy line goes, and room for the golfer who thinks first. Cotton Dike plays a touch more open than its sibling, and the round breathes a little more because of it.

## Morgan River: Hills, narrower, harder to fake

Arthur Hills built Morgan River in 1993 as the second course at Dataw, and the comparison everyone makes is the accurate one. It is narrower than Cotton Dike and the more accuracy demanding of the two, playing par 72 at 6,657 yards with a 73.0 rating and a 138 slope. Note the pattern in those numbers. Shorter course, higher rating, higher slope. Morgan River defends itself with width, or the lack of it, and a golfer spraying the driver will post a bigger number here than on the longer Fazio course across the club.

Billy Fuller carried out renovation work on Morgan River in 2012, a year after his Cotton Dike work, so neither course holds an edge in freshness worth arguing over. Both are open to members and their guests only. Access, for once in a comparison like this, settles nothing, and the verdict has to come from the golf.

## The verdict

Cotton Dike wins, narrowly, on the strength of the Fazio routing and the state panel's recognition, and because a course golfers play every week should reward thought without rationing fairway. It is the round we would send a guest to first, and the course that carries Dataw's name into [the 5 best golf courses in South Carolina](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-south-carolina/) discussion. Two looks at [our South Carolina state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-south-carolina/) will show how much Lowcountry private golf it is competing with for that standing.

But concede Morgan River its honest point, because it is a real one. For the member who has played Cotton Dike 200 times and can no longer see it, Morgan River is the sterner daily test, the course that keeps a good player's driving honest in a way its sibling does not. Plenty of Dataw members, asked in confidence, call it the better course for exactly that reason. If your game is built on accuracy and you like a course that notices, pick Morgan River and do not apologize. For everyone else, and for the record of this comparison, Cotton Dike, by a shot.

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