# The Best Golf Courses in Ann Arbor

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-ann-arbor-mi/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Michigan


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

The best golf course in Ann Arbor hides in plain sight beside one of the biggest football stadiums on earth. On fall Saturdays a hundred thousand people walk past the University of Michigan Golf Course on their way to watch football, and most of them have no idea they are passing a 1931 Alister MacKenzie and Perry Maxwell design, one of the great university courses in America, sitting there in the middle of a college town that has every reason to brag about it and mostly does not.

That course distorts this whole ranking, the way one masterpiece distorts any town list. Behind it, Ann Arbor golf is a healthy college town bench: a second university course, a city muni, and one proper private club. Four courses, four different owners and purposes, and a clear order once you accept that first place was decided in 1931.

## 1University of Michigan Golf Course

MacKenzie and Maxwell, 1931, beside the stadium. Start there, because everything about this course flows from those names and that date. MacKenzie is the architect of Augusta National and Cypress Point, and his American work with Maxwell, his partner in the Midwest and South, has a cult following among design people for good reason: bold, strategic golf where the ground game matters and the angles reward thinking. That the University of Michigan owns one, and that it sits in the middle of campus life, is a genuine anomaly in American golf. University courses are usually pleasant. This one is important.

The setting completes the case. The course rolls over proper Michigan land in the shadow of the stadium, visible, woven into the university rather than exiled to its edge. Playing here on a quiet weekday, with the biggest venue in college football looming over the round, is one of the stranger and better experiences in campus golf.

Concessions, two of them. Access runs through the university, affiliation and guests and the calendar of an academic institution, so the general public cannot simply treat it as a muni with a famous architect. And a 1931 canvas means a course modern length can lean on in places. Neither matters enough. This is a top tier university course nationally, hidden by a football program, and it wins this ranking by the widest margin on our Michigan list.

## 2Barton Hills Country Club

Barton Hills is Ann Arbor's private club, the establishment course of a town whose establishment is the university. It plays the classic country club role here: member golf, a full club life, and a traditional parkland test maintained to private standards in the hills north of town that give it its name.

It finishes a clear second, closer to third than to first, which says more about MacKenzie than about Barton Hills. Against ordinary town competition this profile, private, established, the best conditioned round in the area, would contend for the top spot. In Ann Arbor it runs into a design masterpiece it was never going to beat, and settles into being what it is: the best club golf in town, and the round to take if your invitation comes from a member rather than the university.

The honest concession in Barton Hills' favor: for a golfer who values conditioning, pace and club polish over architectural pedigree, this might be the most enjoyable round on the list. Rankings reward design. Members reward Tuesdays. Barton Hills wins a lot of Tuesdays.

## 3Radrick Farms Golf Course

Radrick Farms is the university's other course, Michigan's second act, and comparisons with its famous sibling are both inevitable and unfair. Where the U-M course is a design landmark, Radrick is the university's working golf: a fuller, more modern feeling round on its own property, serving the same campus community with less history pressing down on every hole.

Third place, then, with a defense. Sharing an owner with a MacKenzie Maxwell is like being the second mountain in a two mountain range. Radrick gives Ann Arbor something valuable, a quality university round with a different character from the flagship, and towns with one university course envy towns with two. Judged against its sibling it is third on this list. Judged against most college towns' entire benches, it would start.

## 4Leslie Park Golf Course

Leslie Park is the city course, Ann Arbor's muni, and it closes the list the way munis close most of our lists: last on pedigree, first on who actually gets to play. This is where Ann Arbor learns golf, where juniors and beginners and the city's league players live, on public land at public prices.

The golf is a clear step below the three courses above it, and there is no clever argument that changes that. Its argument is different. A golf town is not healthy because it has a masterpiece. It is healthy because a kid can start at the muni, a student can graduate to the university courses, and a member can finish at the club, all inside one small city. Leslie Park is the first rung of that ladder, and the ladder does not work without it.

Ann Arbor, then, is a ladder with a landmark on it: a MacKenzie hiding by a football stadium, a proper club, a second university course, and a muni holding the base. Most college towns would trade their whole bench for the view from Michigan's first tee on a Saturday morning, a hundred thousand football fans streaming past a masterpiece most of them will never notice.

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