# The Best Roger Rulewich Golf Courses in America

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-roger-rulewich-golf-courses-in-america/

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A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Roger Rulewich is the most influential golf architect most golfers have never heard of, and the reason is a business decision made in Alabama. For years he was Robert Trent Jones Sr.'s right hand, and when Alabama's retirement system decided to build the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, 468 holes at 11 sites, Rulewich was the man who turned the brand into ground. Thirty of his courses sit in our dataset across seven states, and the center of gravity is unmistakable. The Trail courses, mostly joint credits with Jones, are where Rulewich's ideas got built at a scale no solo architect of his generation ever touched. Ranking him means ranking the Trail's peaks, and the peaks are higher than the Jones name alone explains.

## 1The Judge Course, Capitol Hill

Prattville, 2000, the third of three championship 18s at Capitol Hill, the only Trail stop with three. The first hole drops nearly 100 feet from a cliff tee toward the Alabama River backwaters, one of the great opening tee shots in American public golf. Water is in play on 14 of 18 holes, with an island green par 3 at the sixth, and the whole thing measures about 7,813 yards with a slope of 142. Golf Digest ranks it No. 7 in Alabama. It is the fullest statement of Rulewich's Trail style, drama first, endurance after, and the anchor of [our Prattville town ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-prattville-al/).

## 2Ross Bridge Course

Hoover, 2005, co-designed with Bobby Vaughan and one of the newest and longest Trail courses at 8,191 yards, par 72. Ten holes play along two large lakes joined by a waterfall dropping almost 100 feet between the 9th and 18th greens, with a gristmill by the cascade nodding to the property's mining history. Golf Digest calls it the most majestic Trail layout, wide landing areas, large greens, sweeping vistas, and it renovated in 2023 and sits No. 12 in Alabama. Scale is easy to buy and hard to compose. Ross Bridge is composed, and it leads [our Hoover town ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-hoover-al/).

## 3Lake Course at Grand National

Opelika, 1992, one of the Trail's three inaugural sites, built around Lake Saugahatchee with 12 holes on the shoreline. The signature is the 230 yard par 3 15th with an island green. The PGA Tour's Barbasol Championship played here in 2015, the first tour event in Alabama since 1990, and Golfweek ranks it the No. 2 public course in Alabama. If the Judge is Rulewich's spectacle, the Lake Course is his balance, water everywhere but the golf still fair, which is why [the Opelika town ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-opelika-al/) starts here.

## 4Fighting Joe Course

Muscle Shoals, 2004, the first Trail course to break 8,000 yards, at 8,092. Links style in open rolling terrain, dunes like mounds, tall grasses, water on 12 holes including an island green par 3 ninth, and an 18th green overlooking Wilson Lake on the Tennessee River. Travel and Leisure Golf named it one of the top new courses of 2004. Fighting Joe is the Trail testing its own limits, length as a design material.

## 5The Senator Course, Capitol Hill

Prattville again, 1999, the Judge's older sibling and its stylistic opposite. A links style layout with more than 160 pot bunkers and tall mounds, a distinctly European feel that Trail guides call rare in the Southeast, and an LPGA Tour history as host of the Yokohama Tire Classic. Where the Judge overwhelms with water and elevation, the Senator works with bunkering and ground. Same campus, same design team, two opposed ideas of golf. That range is the Rulewich story in miniature.

## 6Ridge Course at Oxmoor Valley

Birmingham, 1992, an original Trail site built across former mining land with nearly 200 feet of elevation change. Trail guides call it the most dramatic and photographed layout at Oxmoor Valley. The eighth is a par 3 with about a 200 foot drop from tee to green near water, the routing threads dense woodland with back to back par 5s and large undulating greens, and Golfweek ranked it the No. 5 public course in Alabama in 2021. Mining land to mountain golf, in Alabama.

## 7Schoolmaster Course

The Shoals, in Florence, 2005, named for President Woodrow Wilson, nicknamed the Schoolmaster. It plays 7,971 yards as the deliberate counterpoint to Fighting Joe across the property, a shotmaker's course with narrower tree lined fairways and demanding approaches to protected bent grass greens, a waterfall guarding the second green and a finishing hole on high bluffs above the Tennessee River. The Trail's most traditional test, and proof Rulewich could tighten a course as happily as he could stretch one.

The concession is real. Rulewich's Trail golf can tip into excess, yardages past 8,000, water on a dozen holes, spectacle that occasionally shouts where a quieter hole would do. Judged as resort and public championship golf, though, the body of work is unmatched in its lane. He built playable drama for millions of public golfers who will never know his name, inside a brand that bears somebody else's. The Judge's cliff tee at Prattville is as famous an opening shot as public golf owns. That it belongs to Roger Rulewich, mostly anonymously, is exactly why this ranking exists.

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