# Holston Hills Country Club: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/holston-hills-country-club-profile/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / Tennessee


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Tom Doak has walked more Donald Ross courses than almost anyone alive, and his verdict on Holston Hills is the one the club will never have to pay for: it is the closest course around to what Ross originally designed. Sit with that for a second. Ross left behind hundreds of courses, and nearly all of them have been lengthened, softened, regrassed, re bunkered, and otherwise improved by a century of committees with money. In Knoxville, on the old McDonald Farm, the 1927 original mostly survived. That survival is Holston Hills' whole claim, and it is a strong one.

The founding story explains the ambition. Holston Hills was started by members of Cherokee Country Club who wanted something Cherokee was not: a longer, tournament ready course. Ross laid it out and built it in 1927 on farmland that was, at the time, largely treeless, with subtle undulation rather than drama. He used the existing rises and ridges for targets and green pads, which is the Ross method at its purest. No moving mountains. Find the high spots, set the greens on them, and let the ground between do the arguing.

## Ross without the varnish

What that produces, nearly a century later, is a course whose difficulty hides in plain sight. Golf Digest has ranked it 58th among America's top classical courses, per University of Tennessee sources, which is a list that rewards exactly what Holston Hills kept: original greens, original strategy, original bones. On treeless, gently rolling farmland, the examination is angles and elevation. A green pad set on a rise defends itself against the shot played from the wrong side of the fairway more honestly than any bunker complex, because the penalty is built into the approach rather than pasted onto it.

The restoration history shows unusual restraint, and restraint is the whole game with a course like this. Doak's Renaissance Golf Design did light touch work starting in 1997, the architectural equivalent of dusting a painting rather than repainting it. McConnell Golf acquired the club in early 2016, and in June 2024 Kris Spence began a course wide bunker renovation working from Ross's original drawings and aerial photographs. That last detail matters. Renovating bunkers from the architect's own drawings and period aerials is archaeology. Renovating them from a modern architect's instincts is authorship. Holston Hills keeps choosing archaeology.

## Where it stands

In [our Knoxville ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-knoxville-tn/), Holston Hills is the standard everything else gets measured against, and in [the Tennessee state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-tennessee/) its classical pedigree carries it into company far richer and more famous than a Knoxville club has any automatic right to join. The case is simple: the most intact Ross in the state, arguably one of the most intact anywhere.

The concession, honestly given: intact also means unmodernized, and not every golfer wants that trade. The course plays at the length and scale Ross intended for the equipment of his era, and players who equate quality with 7,400 yards and forced carries will find it quiet. It is also private, so the public golfer's relationship with Holston Hills is necessarily a spectator's one. Members and guests walk it. Everyone else studies it.

But quiet is the point. American golf spent a hundred years renovating Donald Ross, and Holston Hills is what the restraint looks like when a club, a succession of owners, and two generations of careful architects all decide the original was right. The farm rises are still there. The green pads are still on them. Ross would recognize his course, and in this country, that is close to a miracle.

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