# Hayward Golf Club: A Course Profile

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / Wisconsin


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Walter Hagen showed up a month after this place formally opened, looked it over, and praised the design. That was September 1925, roughly. The club had formed in May 1924 as a member owned golf and tennis club on the Hayward city line, its first nine holes were ready that August, and the formal opening came on August 2, 1925. Hagen was the biggest name in American golf at the time, a man not known for handing out compliments to fill a silence. Northern Wisconsin golf has been telling that story for a hundred years, and it holds up because the course underneath it turned out to be durable.

Durable is the right word for Hayward Golf Club. Par 72, about 6,700 yards from the back tees, public, with about 500 members and roughly 32,000 rounds a year. Those last numbers tell the real story. This is not a quiet museum course and it is not a resort test built for one week of photographs. It is a working public course in Sawyer County that thousands of golfers actually play, season after season.

## Built in pieces, kept in one piece

The construction history is honest small town history. Grass greens were built in 1927, replacing whatever came before. A second nine, designed by Art Johnson, opened in 1970, nearly half a century after the first. Ken Killian redesigned the original nine in 1998 to match the Johnson nine, which is the decision that makes an old course cohere instead of playing like two different decades stapled together. Dane Nelson is also listed among its architects across its long development. A tee and bunker renovation project was completed in 2023, which says the club is still spending money on the golf rather than coasting on the Hagen story.

Golf Digest named Hayward a Top 100 Good Value course, and value is the correct frame. In [the full Wisconsin state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-wisconsin/) we score the golf first, then the day, then what it costs you. Hayward will not win a Wisconsin argument on architecture against the state's famous names. It wins a different argument: quality public golf, at public prices, in a part of the state where golfers drive a long way between courses, delivered 32,000 times a year without the wheels coming off.

That delivery record deserves more respect than rankings usually give it. Conditioning a public course through 32,000 annual rounds is an operations problem that defeats plenty of better funded places. Tee boxes wear, bunkers wash, greens take ball marks by the thousand. A club that hosted Hagen in 1925 and completed a tee and bunker renovation in 2023 has solved that problem across ten decades, which is a longer run of competence than most private clubs can claim.

## The limits, plainly

The concession: nothing in the record suggests a championship test, and the course has never pretended to be one. At about 6,700 yards with public play and member traffic, this is golf for the people who live near it and the visitors who come up for the lakes and stay for a round. Strong players looking for a stern examination should set their expectations before the first tee, not complain after the last green. Hayward's job is different, and it does its job at a volume that exposes any weakness quickly.

Member owned and public is also an unusual combination worth naming. About 500 members own a course that still opens its tee sheet to the traveling golfer. Plenty of clubs in that position eventually close the gate. Hayward has kept it open for a century.

For a visitor, the practical advice is simple. Book it as the center of a northwoods golf day rather than as a stop between bigger names, play it from the tees that match your actual game instead of the back markers at 6,700 yards, and judge it by the standard it sets for itself: a good walk, a fair test, a fair price. By that standard it has very little competition in its corner of Wisconsin, and the Top 100 Good Value recognition starts to look less like a consolation prize and more like the correct category.

Hagen praised it in 1925 and went on his way. The golfers of Sawyer County stayed, bought in, rebuilt the greens, added nine, matched the halves, and fixed the bunkers. A hundred years of that is its own kind of championship record.

The northwoods bench runs deeper than one course, as our [Minocqua town ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-minocqua-wi/) shows a few hours east.

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