# Dataw Island Club Morgan River Course: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/dataw-island-club-morgan-river-course-profile/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / South Carolina


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

Every two course club has a pecking order, and at Dataw Island the argument usually starts with which one you would rather play when the wind is up and your swing is loose. Cotton Dike, the first course built here, gets the seniority. Morgan River, the Arthur Hills course opened in 1993 as the second course at Dataw, gets the reputation that matters more on the scorecard: it is the narrower of the two, and the more accuracy demanding.

That single fact, recorded plainly in the course listings, shapes everything about a round here. Par 72, 6,657 yards, rating 73.0, slope 138. Again, the numbers are doing quiet work. Morgan River is slightly shorter than many modern private courses and rates harder than its yardage suggests, which is the statistical fingerprint of a course that punishes the crooked shot rather than the short one. Miss left or right here and the recovery is not a longer iron from a clean lie. It is a negotiation.

## Arthur Hills and the second course problem

Building the second course at an established club is a thankless assignment. It cannot just be a softer copy of the first, or members will treat it as the practice round. It cannot try to humiliate the first course either, or the club has a politics problem. Hills threaded it by changing the question. Where Cotton Dike, a Tom Fazio design from 1985, works at a slightly larger scale at 6,787 yards, Morgan River tightens the field of play and makes position off the tee the first skill tested, before distance, before putting, before anything.

Billy Fuller carried out renovation work on Morgan River in 2012, nearly two decades after it opened, the normal point in a Lowcountry course's life when greens, bunkering and tree growth have all drifted from the original intent. A narrower course feels tree encroachment more than an open one does. Every foot of width lost to growth is a foot the design cannot spare, so keeping a course like this honest is maintenance as architecture, year after year.

Dataw Island itself sits near Beaufort on Saint Helena Island, in Beaufort County, which means Morgan River competes for attention in one of the deepest county fields in the South. We include it in the wider picture in [the 5 best golf courses in South Carolina](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-south-carolina/), not as a headline act but as the kind of second course that raises the value of a whole club. Members with two genuinely different tests at home play more golf, and better golf, than members with one famous test and one afterthought.

## Access and the honest verdict

Morgan River is open to members and their guests only. No resort stay unlocks it, no public rate exists to quote, and any cost discussion belongs in the labeled estimate tier for private club membership rather than in invented green fees. That limits its audience, and we should concede the wider point that follows from it. A course almost nobody outside the membership can play has to be judged largely on testimony and on its numbers, and both can flatter a narrow course, because the members who stay are usually the members whose games suit it. The high handicapper who sprays the driver may have voted with his feet years ago, or learned to keep the driver in the bag and stopped complaining.

For the accurate player, though, this is close to an ideal members' second course. Six thousand six hundred fifty seven yards is a walkable, repeatable test. The 138 slope keeps a good player honest without turning every Saturday into a survival exercise. And the contrast with Cotton Dike gives Dataw something many larger clubs never manage, which is a real choice on the first tee, not just a tee time.

We return to it in [our South Carolina state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-south-carolina/) as part of the Beaufort County depth that makes this state harder to rank than its resort reputation suggests.

The Morgan River name promises water and width. The course delivers the river and keeps the width for itself, and a round here is better for the lie.

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