Course Profiles / Nebraska
Prairie Club Horse Course: A Course Profile
There are no tee boxes. That is not a gap in the record or a quirk of the listing. The Horse Course at The Prairie Club in Valentine, Nebraska, is a 10 hole par 3 course designed by Gil Hanse with Geoff Shackelford, played without defined yardages or tee boxes, where holes are invented by players across about 12 acres of ground along the Snake River Canyon. You walk to a spot that looks right, drop a ball, pick a green, and play. Golf Digest ranked it No. 10 on its list of the Top 50 Most Fun Public Golf Courses in 2012, the highest of the three Prairie Club courses. The two big courses at the same resort, the Dunes and the Pines, finished behind a 10 hole par 3 with nine greens. Sit with that for a second.
Nine greens for 10 holes, free flowing short grass everywhere, choose your own routing. The numbers from the longest tees, if you can call them tees, come to 1,125 yards at par 30, which is the least important statistic in Nebraska golf. The Horse Course is named for the game of HORSE, the basketball playground game where one player invents a shot and the rest have to match it. Transferred to golf, it becomes a match format. Your opponent picks the spot and the target. You hit it. Roles reverse. The course is not really a course. It is a piece of beautifully kept canyon rim ground with nine greens in it, waiting for golfers to finish designing it every single round.
Hanse understood what he was building. In 2010 The Prairie Club opened with the Dunes and Pines courses as the main events, 36 holes of Sandhills golf that drew national attention to Valentine. The Horse Course was the side bet, about 10 to 12 acres along the Snake River Canyon, greens placed where the ground suggested them. Hanse and Shackelford resisted the urge to fix the routing, number the shots, and publish a card. That restraint is the whole design. A normal architect builds you a test. Hanse built you a playground and trusted the format golfers already knew from driveways and practice greens.
Why a par 3 course wins the fun argument
Fun is a slippery ranking category, and Golf Digest does not hand the Horse Course its spot cheaply. It beat both of its big siblings. The reason is time and company. A round on the Dunes Course is a commitment, four plus hours, a scorecard, a score. A session on the Horse Course is an hour of invented golf with your group, wagers optional and usually mandatory, shots you would never attempt with a card in your pocket. Golfers remember trips by their evenings as much as their mornings. The Horse Course owns the evening at The Prairie Club. Inside our Valentine town ranking it is the entry every other Nebraska town wishes it could copy, and it strengthens the whole resort's place in the Nebraska state ranking, where the Sandhills names dominate.
Access is semi-private resort access. Stay at The Prairie Club and the Horse Course is part of the property's rhythm, the thing you do after lunch or before dinner rather than a tee time you plan a day around. That informality is a feature the resort could not buy with another championship course. Two great big courses make a destination. A great big course plus a game like this makes a destination golfers talk about in a different tone of voice, the one usually reserved for the best story of the trip.
Who suits it? Groups. Players who grew up playing games on practice greens. Anyone whose favorite golf memories involve a bet and a ridiculous shot. Who gets frustrated? The scorecard golfer, the one who wants every hole defined, measured, and rated, who asks where the first tee is and gets pointed at 12 acres of short grass. That golfer is not wrong about his preferences. He is just playing the wrong course, or rather, refusing to invent the right one.
The concession is honest. The Horse Course is a garnish, not a meal. Nobody books a Nebraska trip for 1,125 yards of par 3 golf, and if the Dunes and Pines courses were mediocre, the Horse Course would be a footnote. It shines because the main courses are strong enough to draw you to Valentine and relaxed enough to let a side game steal the evening.
Ten holes, nine greens, no tee boxes, no card. The best golf idea in Nebraska might be the one Gil Hanse refused to finish, leaving the last design decision of every round to the players standing on the grass.