# Triple Crown Country Club: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/triple-crown-country-club-profile/

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Course Profiles / Kentucky


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The signature hole at Triple Crown asks you to hit an approach shot to an island green on a par five. Not a par three, where an island is a one shot gamble. A par five, the 10th, where you have already played two shots to get into position and now the layup decision and the wedge both carry water in the calculation. That is a confident piece of design for a private club in Union, Kentucky, and it tells you what kind of course this is. Triple Crown is not interested in being a gentle members' walk.

The club opened in 1990 in Boone County, in a horse themed residential community, which fits its name and its part of the world. Northern Kentucky sits in Cincinnati's orbit but keeps its own identity, and Triple Crown is its private standard bearer. The designer, per the Kentucky Golf Association, was Gene Bates, a former Jack Nicklaus Design vice president who assisted on Valhalla and Muirfield Village. That pedigree is worth pausing on. Bates spent years inside the Nicklaus operation during its most ambitious period, and the Nicklaus school influence shows in the numbers: par 72 at 7,108 yards, a 74.7 rating and a 142 slope. Those are not social golf numbers. That is a course built to examine a good player.

## A state championship record

The Kentucky Open has come to Triple Crown twice, and the two hostings frame the club's story neatly. J.B. Holmes won its first hosting in 2003, before he became one of the longest hitters on the PGA Tour, and the championship returned in 2020, 17 years later. State opens go to courses the state association trusts: venues that can be set up fairly for a strong amateur and professional field and that carry enough prestige to make the title feel earned. Two invitations, nearly two decades apart, say the trust held.

Golf Digest noticed early, too. The course was rated seventh Best in State by Golf Digest between 1995 and 1998, per club releases, within its first decade of existence. Rankings from that era are period pieces, but they establish that Triple Crown arrived with a reputation rather than growing one slowly.

The island green 10th remains the hole members describe first, and it earns the role. Island greens are easy to mock as gimmicks, and some of them are. On a par five the concept works differently. It turns the second shot into the real decision. Go for position to attack the island and you bring the water in early. Lay back and the approach grows longer over the same water. The hole distributes its risk across the whole length of the play instead of concentrating it in one swing, which is what good design is supposed to do.

We place Triple Crown where its record puts it in [the Kentucky state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-kentucky/): behind the state's major championship venues, at the front of the private club tier in the northern part of the state, close to Lassing Pointe geographically but operating in a different world of access.

## The honest concession

Private is private. Triple Crown sits inside a residential community, it is a members' club, and estimates put its costs in the higher tiers for the region, though they remain estimates because the club does not publish them. The public golfer in Boone County plays elsewhere, and the comparison with nearby public options is not one Triple Crown tries to win.

The other concession is historical. The Golf Digest recognition is from the late 1990s, and the Kentucky Open hostings, while real, are a state level credential in a state where one Louisville club collects national championships. Triple Crown's case rests on the quality of the test and its standing in northern Kentucky, not on competing with that.

Who suits it: the low handicap member who wants a 142 slope waiting at his home club and a par five with an island at the end of it. Who it frustrates: the casual player who finds water on the signature hole of a long course to be one hazard too many. Holmes won here before he was famous. The course was already asking tour length questions in 1990, in a horse themed neighborhood in Union, and it has not softened since.

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