# The Best Golf Courses in Nekoosa

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-nekoosa-wi/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Wisconsin


A leading golf course in Wisconsin. Photo: Jhansen23, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Central Wisconsin was supposed to be golf nowhere: sand barrens and pine plantations an hour from anything, the kind of land farmers apologized for. Then the Keiser family, fresh from proving at Bandon Dunes that golfers will travel anywhere for the right ground, looked at the sand under Nekoosa and saw the same recipe inland. Sand Valley is Bandon's model rebuilt in Wisconsin, walking golf on firm turf in the middle of the state, and it worked so completely that this small town now holds four of the most discussed courses in America. Four. In Nekoosa.

The argument here is not whether Sand Valley belongs in a national conversation. It is how to order four courses that split golfers into camps: the romantics of the original, the fun seekers, the architecture obsessives, and the golfers who just want the most beautiful walk. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and we are taking a side.

## 1The Lido at Sand Valley

The Lido is the most extraordinary story in modern golf architecture: C.B. Macdonald's lost Long Island masterpiece, a course demolished decades ago and mourned by architecture students ever since, rebuilt at Sand Valley from the original plans and a famous scale model, with Tom Doak's firm doing the resurrection. Every template hole Macdonald invented is here, on Wisconsin sand, playing over ground that feels eerily like the original's. Nothing else in American golf is like this, because nothing else could be.

The concession is access and attitude. Lido tee times are the hardest to get at the resort, and its template golf is an acquired taste: golfers who want their strategy explained in plain sight may find its blind shots and old fashioned demands baffling rather than thrilling.

Baffling is the point. The Lido is a hundred year old argument about what golf should be, rebuilt at full scale, and playing it is the single most interesting golf experience in Wisconsin. It goes first.

## 2Mammoth Dunes Golf Course

Mammoth Dunes is David McLay Kidd's course, the same architect who built the original at Bandon, and it is the most fun golf at Sand Valley by a wide margin: enormous fairways, enormous greens, slopes that feed a well judged shot toward the hole and forgive the rest with a wink. Where the Lido examines you, Mammoth entertains you, and its scale in the dunes is the resort's great visual spectacle.

The concession is that fun and greatness are different categories, and purists note that Mammoth's generosity can blur its challenge. A course where almost every drive finds a fairway asks fewer hard questions tee to green.

It asks them around the greens instead, and it delivers the day most Sand Valley guests describe when they get home. Second here, first in more actual hearts than this ranking will admit.

## 3Sand Valley Course

The original Sand Valley course, by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, is the one that proved the whole idea: minimalist golf on exposed sand, wide and rumpled and firm, the anti resort course that built a resort. Its defenders, and they are numerous, say it remains the purest expression of the property, the course the others are variations on, and there are days, in a crosswind with the fescue up, when they are plainly right.

The concession is that its restraint now reads, against its louder siblings, a touch austere. The original has no gimmick and seeks none, which means first time visitors gravitate to the spectacle next door.

Third at Sand Valley still means a course most states would call their best. Coore and Crenshaw built the foundation, and foundations rarely get the applause the upper floors do. Consider this the applause, one spot lower than its fans will accept.

## 4Sedge Valley Golf Course

Sedge Valley is Tom Doak's other course here, a par 68 short course in the old sense: under full length, built on the idea that position beats power and that a 350 yard hole with the wrong angle is a harder puzzle than a 480 yard hole with none. It is the architecture crowd's favorite and the thinking golfer's round, and on a two round day it pairs with anything.

The concession is arithmetic. Golfers paying resort prices for a bucket list trip often want the full scorecard, all par 72 of it, and Sedge's charms are intellectual ones that a scorecard selfie cannot capture.

Fourth of four, in a town that had no business having one course on a national list. The sand that farmers apologized for now holds a Lido, a Mammoth, an original and a Sedge, and the drive out of Nekoosa takes you past farmland that looks, suddenly, like unbuilt golf courses everywhere you look.

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