# Friar's Head Golf Club: A Course Profile

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / New York


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

The 15th tee sits up in the dunes, 200 feet above Long Island Sound, and the hole in front of you is a 460 yard par 4 guarded by one vast bunker. You have spent the previous stretch moving through reshaped potato fields, ground that Coore and Crenshaw had to invent, and now the routing hands you the other half of the property all at once: sand, height, wind off the water. That two part walk is the whole argument for Friar's Head. It is two courses stitched together so well that most golfers stop noticing the seam by the turn.

Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw opened Friar's Head in 2003 in Baiting Hollow, out on Long Island's North Fork in Suffolk County. The founder was Ken Bakst, who won the 1997 U.S. Mid-Amateur, and the club was built by a man who plays competitive golf at a serious level for people who do the same. That shows in the details. Par is 71 and the card reads 7,070 yards, numbers that look manageable until the dunes holes start asking for carries into a Sound wind and the field holes start asking for position off the tee rather than length.

The rankings caught up fast, then kept climbing. The course debuted at 34th on Golf Digest's 100 Greatest in 2011 and rose to 14th. Golfweek put it at No. 2 on its 2026 list of the best modern courses in the United States. We score the golf first, then the day, then what it costs you, and on the golf alone Friar's Head belongs in any conversation about the best American work of the last quarter century. Our [New York state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-new-york/) places it in that company, surrounded by clubs that had a hundred year head start.

## Two pieces of ground, one routing

The potato field holes get dismissed in some tellings, as if manufactured ground were a confession. That has it backward. Coore and Crenshaw took flat farmland and built holes with real decisions in them, shaping that never announces itself as shaping. Then the routing climbs into the dunes and the tone changes. The land gets louder, the bunkering gets bigger, and the 15th, that long par 4 from the elevated tee, plays like a hole that was waiting in the sand for someone to clear the scrub off it.

The concession, honestly made: the transition between the two landscapes is the one thing critics pick at, and a golfer who wants every hole to look like the dunes holes will find the quieter stretch a step down in theater. But theater is not the test. Shot values are, and the field holes hold theirs. A course that only had its big moments would be a highlight reel. This one asks questions for 18 holes.

## Who it suits, and the access reality

Friar's Head rewards the golfer who thinks in landing zones. The vast bunker at the 15th is not decoration. It is the hole. Play away from it and the approach lengthens into the wind. Take it on and the hole opens up. That pattern, a clear risk stated plainly and priced fairly, runs through the Coore and Crenshaw work here.

Access is the blunt part. Friar's Head is private, fully private, in the way Long Island's best clubs tend to be. There is no resort arm, no public tee time, no loophole worth printing. Estimates put initiation well into six figures, and they are estimates, since the club publishes nothing. For most golfers this is a course to study rather than to book, which is part of why its place on lists like [the 5 best golf courses in New York](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-new-york/) matters. The ranking is the visit most of us get.

What lingers is not a single hole. It is the walk down from the dunes late in the round, Sound on one side, farmland turned into golf on the other, and the odd feeling that both halves were always supposed to be one course.

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