Course Profiles / Virginia

Princess Anne Country Club: A Course Profile

President Warren G. Harding played here in 1921, the year the course opened. That tells you something about the place Princess Anne held from the start, and it tells you something else too. This was never a course built to chase length or fashion. It was built by Norfolk businessmen who founded the club in 1916 looking for a coastal retreat, and the golf they got still reflects that idea: a walk among pines and live oaks, across inlets and lakes, on ground that asks for placement more than power.

The par is 70. Sit with that for a second. Most modern private clubs stretch toward 72 and 7,200 yards and call the result a test. Princess Anne stayed short enough that Golf Magazine named it one of the Top 25 Short Courses in the World in 2020, and the honor makes sense once you understand the design credit. The club credits Willie Park Jr., a two time Open Championship winner, with the design of the tees, greens and bunkers. Park understood scoring from the ground up. A short course by a great player is rarely an easy course. It is a course where the easy birdie keeps moving just out of reach.

What the golf asks

The layout winds through pines and live oaks and crosses water more often than the scorecard suggests at a glance. On a par 70, every par 3 and short par 4 carries extra weight, because there are fewer long holes where a strong driver can make up ground. Miss in the wrong place here and the recovery runs through trees or across an inlet, with a green that was positioned a century ago to punish exactly that angle.

First club president Clarence Amos Neff oversaw the early routing and planning, and the routing still feels like a walk someone laid out on foot rather than a plan drawn to maximize lot frontage. Holes turn. Wind off the coast gets into the round in stretches, then disappears behind the oaks, then finds you again on an exposed tee. That rhythm is the round. Players who like a steady, predictable examination tend to rate it lower than players who like variety packed into a smaller footprint. We side with the second group, and our Virginia Beach ranking puts the course where that preference lands.

The honest concession is conditioning and scale. A 1921 course on a coastal site will never present like a modern tournament venue, and it should not try. If your idea of a great day requires 7,400 yards and a range the size of a farm, this will feel cramped. Fair enough. But cramped is the wrong word for what is actually happening. The course compresses decisions. Shorter holes, tighter margins, more shots where the smart play and the brave play are genuinely different choices.

The renovation that respected the brief

Tim Liddy completed a total renovation in 2007 and the course reopened on May 17, 2008. Total renovation is a phrase that should make any lover of old courses nervous. Too many clubs have used it to erase the very thing that made them distinct, sanding off the quirks until the course could be anywhere. The test of the Liddy work is simpler: the course that came back still plays as a par 70 through pines and oaks, still crosses its inlets and lakes, still earns a place on a list of the best short courses in the world more than a decade later. Whatever changed under the surface, the identity survived on top of it. That is harder than it sounds, and rarer.

Access is private, plainly. This is a members club in Virginia Beach, and the route in is the usual one, a member host or a reciprocal arrangement. Estimates for clubs of this age and standing in coastal Virginia vary widely, and the club does not publish figures, so we will not pretend to a number. What can be said is that the value case here was never about the check. It is about a membership that gets a distinctive course, the kind members can play four times a week without solving it.

Who it suits, who it frustrates

It suits the golfer who keeps score with a pencil and opinions. The wedge player. The senior who hits it straight and enjoys watching longer hitters negotiate trouble he cleared with a layup. It frustrates the bomber who wants every par 4 to be a driver and a flip wedge, because the routing keeps taking the driver out of his hands or charging him full price for using it.

Set against the rest of the state in the full Virginia ranking, Princess Anne is the argument that age and restraint still count for something. A president played it the year it opened. A century later, the golf world is still writing it onto lists, not out of politeness, but because a short course this well arranged is genuinely hard to build and easy to ruin. Princess Anne avoided the ruin. The pines close in, the water waits where it has always waited, and par remains a good score.