# The Honors Course: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-honors-course-profile/

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Course Profiles / Tennessee


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

Before there was a golf course at Ooltewah, there was a munitions plant. The land at the foot of White Oak Mountain, about 460 acres of it, was an Atlas Powder Company site, where a fatal explosion ended powder manufacturing in 1945. Four decades later Pete Dye built a golf course there with a single stated purpose. Jack Lupton, a Coca-Cola bottling heir, founded the club to honor amateur golf. Not to sell houses. Not to host a tour event chasing television money. Amateur golf, full stop. The course opened for play on July 2, 1983, and it has kept that mission with unusual discipline ever since.

That focus explains the calendar. The Honors Course is set to host the 2026 U.S. Women's Amateur and the 2031 U.S. Amateur, the second of those landing on the 40th anniversary of its first U.S. Amateur. For the 2024 U.S. Senior Amateur the setup played par 72 with a course rating of 74.4 and a slope of 154. Read that slope number again. At 154, this is close to the maximum difficulty the USGA system allows, on a course built for amateurs. Lupton's idea was never to make golfers comfortable. It was to give the best amateurs in the country a test worthy of a national championship, in Tennessee, on ground that had quite literally blown up once already.

Dye's work here sits in his mature period, and the recent care of the course shows respect for the original. Gil Hanse replaced the 10th and 11th greens in the manner of their original configuration rather than reimagining them, and exposed two creek tributaries in front of the 18th green. Fairways were re-grassed with Zeon Zoysia in 2021. That is restoration as stewardship: keep Dye's intent, fix the surfaces, let the creeks back into the argument at the last hole, where a championship should be decided by nerve and not by a sprinkler line.

Who does a 154 slope suit? Not the casual member guest, and the club seems at peace with that. This is a course for the competitive player who wants every shot examined: drives that must find the correct side to open an angle, approaches that have to control distance into firm championship surfaces, and a closing stretch where the exposed creeks turn one loose swing into a lost hole. High handicappers will find it punishing rather than fun, and there is no point pretending otherwise. The Honors Course was built as an examination hall. Complaining that the exam is hard misses the founding document.

GOLF Magazine ranked the course No. 54 on its Top 100 Courses in the U.S. for 2024-25, and in our own ordering it anchors [the Tennessee state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-tennessee/). The ranking makes sense when you weigh what the place refuses to do. It refuses resort traffic, refuses a professional money event as its identity, and refuses to soften a 154 slope for member comfort. Plenty of famous private clubs talk about championship standards. The Honors Course schedules the championships, decades out, and lets the amateur game make its case.

The concession is access, and it is a hard one. This is a private club in Ooltewah, outside Chattanooga, and the public golfer's relationship with it runs through USGA broadcasts and member invitations. Cost of belonging is not published, and estimates place it in the serious private club tier; treat any specific figure as an estimate, because it is one. If you judge courses by what an ordinary golfer can actually book, The Honors Course barely exists. That critique is fair and we make it about every locked gate in these profiles.

But some courses earn their standing on intent executed over time. A powder plant site at the foot of a mountain, turned into the amateur game's Tennessee home, holding its difficulty and its mission for more than forty years while the sport chased money in every other direction. The 18th, with its creeks newly exposed in front of the green, is the right finish for that story. The last shot at The Honors Course asks you to commit, with water in view and a championship possibly on the line. No shortcuts. Which was the founding idea all along.

Twenty minutes away, [Chattanooga Golf and Country Club](/blog/chattanooga-golf-and-country-club-profile/) shows the older Tennessee answer to the same question.

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