The view from the 4th tee box at Ballyneal
I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days at the Ballyneal Golf and Hunt Club in the sand hills of northeastern Colorado.
If you’re not familiar with Ballyneal, it’s a 5-year old private course (designed by Tom Doak) that has quickly become one of the premier links courses in the US. It’s a top 100 Golf Digest course. Golfweek ranked it at #6 on their top modern courses list (anything built within the last 50 years). Golf Magazine has it at 83rd in the world and 48th in the US.
I was invited out to Ballyneal as a part of an outing of the Walking Golfers Society. You can learn more about TWGS on their website, but their goal is to promote walking when playing golf instead of using a cart.
And Ballyneal is a great place to walk. In fact, that’s the only way to play it. There are no cart paths at Ballyneal. You either use a caddy or hoof it with your own bag. If you’ve never played with a caddy before, it’s a really great experience. Aside from carrying the bag, a good caddy can be invaluable when it comes to figuring out how to play the course.
But the lack of carts isn’t the only thing that makes Ballyneal unique. First, it’s located in the middle of nowhere. To get to Ballyneal, you have to drive 20 minutes from the nearest town of a few thousand people. The last 4 miles of road to the front gate isn’t even paved. When you’re on the property, you really do feel like you’re out in the middle of nowhere.
Even though the location is remote, you still have all of the amenities you could ever want when staying there. The rooms in the lodge are big and comfortable. You have satellite TV and wifi throughout the property. There’s a restaurant that serves breakfast and dinner, and a sports bar where you can relax after a round and get lunch. I was ready to move in by the 3rd day.
A view of the facilites at Ballyneal - I told you it was remote
And did I mention the course itself? Amazing. I had never played links golf before, but honestly I can’t imagine that the courses over in Scotland and Ireland have anything on Ballyneal. The fairways are wide and fast. There’s no water or any marked hazards on the course. However you’d be wise to keep it in those wide fairways because if you hit it into the scrub brush, it’s all you can do to hack it back to the fairway (if you can even find your ball).
The greens are also unlike anything I’ve ever played. They weren’t particularly fast (although the sped up as the wind dried them out during the day). But they rolled as pure as anything I’ve ever seen. The unique contours and shapes of the greens also allowed for some very creative shot making.
At Ballyneal you don’t always have to hit the ball at the hole. Sometimes the smarter play is to use an embankment or slope to funnel your ball around to the hole from the side or back. It’s hard to describe without seeing it, but if you’re willing to think outside the box a bit, you can come up with some amazingly creative shots around the green.
The first green at Ballyneal
Ballyneal also encourages creativity with regards to the course routing. While they do have tee boxes, they don’t have any tee markers. You can basically tee it up from wherever you want. And you can also hit from one tee box, to another fairway/green. The options are almost limitless. Playing at Ballyneal is almost like the golfing equivalent of being a kid in a candy store.
The other great thing about playing at Ballyneal is that you might be the only group out on the course that day. They only have about 110 members so it’s not uncommon for there to be less than 10 people playing on any given day. One of the days I was at Ballyneal, there was a grand total of six of us out on the course. It’s really amazing to be one of just a handful of people on a course of that caliber.
If you ever have the opportunity to tee it up at Ballyneal, I highly recommend it. It’s truly one of the best courses in the world.
You can view the Walking Golfers Society write-up of the event here. They have some amazing pictures that really showcase the design of the course as well as a link to a full hole-by-hole review.
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