# Pikewood National Golf Club: A Course Profile

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / West Virginia


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

Start with the defense statistics. Seven thousand six hundred forty nine yards. A slope of 155, which is the maximum the system allows. A walking only policy on a mesa top in West Virginia, so the yardage and the slope arrive on foot, uphill and down, with 30 mile views that are no comfort at all when the wind up there gets involved. Pikewood National, outside Morgantown, opened in 2009 and was immediately named Golf Digest's Best New Private Course of that year. New courses are not supposed to max out the slope scale. Pikewood announced itself by doing exactly that.

The authorship is part of the story. The course was designed by the club's owners, J. Robert Gwynne and John Raese, with input from Johnny Pott and Dow Finsterwald. Owner designed courses are usually where rigor goes to die, because nobody in the room can tell the money no. Pikewood is the counterexample that keeps the category honest. Whether the credit belongs to the owners' ambition or to the professional input around them, the result is a course with real architectural ideas on it, severe ones, executed at full championship length on a mesa.

## A Redan, a waterfall, and a green with no bunkers

The hole by hole record has the fingerprints of people who studied the classics before they built. The 12th is a modified Redan, the template par 3 idea tilted and reworked for this ground. The 11th green has no bunkers at all, a bunkerless green complex on a course of this difficulty, which is a confident piece of restraint. On a layout where the slope says 155, the most interesting hole on the property may be the one defended by contour and nerve alone. And the par 3 fifth has a natural waterfall behind the green. A waterfall sounds like decoration until you place it behind a one shot hole on a walking course, where it becomes the thing you are trying not to think about while the ball is in the air.

The mesa setting is the other architect. Thirty mile views mean exposure, and exposure at 7,649 yards means the course's real yardage is a rumor that changes by the hour. There is no tree cover rescue up there. Our [Morgantown ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-morgantown-wv/) is a short list with a giant on top of it, and the giant's case rests on this combination. Scale, severity, and a handful of holes with genuine design pedigree, in a state that the national conversation rarely visits.

Think about what the walking rule does to a course this size. On a cart course, 7,649 yards is a number. On foot, it is a physical negotiation that changes how the golf feels by the 14th hole, when the mesa wind has been in your face for three hours and the modified Redan at the 12th is already behind you, demanding a decision you had to make with tired legs arriving. The club chose this on purpose. Walking only at this altitude of difficulty filters the experience down to golfers who want the examination whole. It also keeps the ground honest. No cart traffic, no paths, just the mesa and the routing the owners and their two tour winning advisors laid across it. Pott and Finsterwald played the game when walking was simply what golf was, and their fingerprints on that policy would surprise nobody who knows their era.

## The concession

Pikewood is private, walking only, and built to a standard of difficulty that will simply beat up a large share of the golfers who admire it from a distance. A 155 slope is not a badge every player should want to test. For a mid handicap golfer on a windy day, this round can stop being an examination and become a sentence, and the course makes no apology for that. It was not built to be all things. It was built to be the hardest, boldest private test in West Virginia, and on the evidence of its debut award and its numbers, it succeeded on its own uncompromising terms.

In [the West Virginia state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-west-virginia/), it stands where a best new private course with a maximum slope should stand. At the top, alone with the view. The mesa keeps the wind. The waterfall keeps its counsel behind the fifth green. And the walk, all 7,649 yards of it, keeps asking the same question the slope rating asks. Are you sure? Pikewood respects you enough to doubt you.

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