# Moss Creek Golf Club North Course vs. The Golf Club at Indigo Run: The Hilton Head Island Choice

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/moss-creek-golf-club-north-course-vs-the-golf-club-at-indigo-run/

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Course Comparisons / South Carolina


A golf ball beside the hole on a green. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hilton Head Island has more private golf than a visitor can sample, and the members who live there make this choice in its practical form: Tom Fazio's short, tight shot-maker's course at Moss Creek, or Jack Nicklaus's longer championship layout at Indigo Run. Both are private. Both are in Beaufort County's Lowcountry. They were built six years apart, Fazio's North Course in 1978 and the Nicklaus course at Indigo Run in 1984, and they represent the two schools of Lowcountry design that have argued with each other on this island ever since. The island field is in [the best courses in Hilton Head Island ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-hilton-head-island-sc/), with state context in [the best courses in South Carolina ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-south-carolina/).

## Moss Creek Golf Club North Course

Moss Creek is a private 36-hole club, and the North was its second championship course, designed by Tom Fazio and opened in 1978. Locally it goes by a better name: Devil's Elbow North. Nicknames like that are earned by elbows in the routing where the hole turns and the trouble waits. The numbers explain the character. Par 72 at just 6,510 yards, rating 72.3, slope 134. That is short for a Fazio, and deliberately so. The course guides describe it plainly: a shot-maker's course, short and tight, with elevated greens surrounded by water or signature trees. Length is not the defense here. Position is. A driver left in the bag is not a concession at Moss Creek North, it is the correct answer on hole after hole, and the elevated greens mean a shot played from the wrong side of a fairway faces a target it cannot hold.

The North is also the fresher test of the two right now. John Fought updated the course in a renovation that ran from March to August 2025, so members are playing a Fazio routing with newly reworked details, a 1978 design given a current edit.

## The Golf Club at Indigo Run

Indigo Run's course is earlier Nicklaus, built in 1984 when Nicklaus's design identity was forming, and one of two Nicklaus courses inside the one Hilton Head community. It plays to a different scale: par 72 at 7,110 yards, rating 74.5, slope 138. Six hundred yards longer than Moss Creek North, two full points higher on rating. This is the championship template, length and carry and greens that ask to be approached from height, reserved exclusively for members and their guests. Where Fazio's course defends itself with tightness, Nicklaus's defends itself with distance and demand: the longer hitter is rewarded, the shorter hitter spends the round hitting more club into firmer targets.

## The verdict

On the golf, we take Moss Creek North, by a nose, and the renovation is part of it. A short, tight Fazio that forces a decision on every tee ages better in weekly member play than a longer course whose main question is whether you can carry it far enough, and the Devil's Elbow nickname signals the thing golfers actually remember: holes with personalities sharp enough to name. The elevated greens ringed by water or trees give its 6,510 yards more variety per yard than Indigo Run's 7,110.

The concession to Indigo Run is honest and substantial. It is the sterner examination. A rating of 74.5 and a slope of 138 say that a low handicapper who wants to know exactly how his game measures up will learn more, faster, on the Nicklaus course, and the player who hits it long and high, the game Nicklaus designs reward, should pick Indigo Run and not look back. Choose Moss Creek for the argument on every tee. Choose Indigo Run for the measuring stick.

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