This Big 10 school's golf course has stadium views and was designed by Alister MacKenzie

AI-assisted summary
• The University of Michigan golf course, designed by Alister MacKenzie, is located in Ann Arbor and presents a challenging yet enjoyable experience for golfers.
• The course features unique boomerang greens on the sixth and 14th holes, a design element rarely seen in modern courses.
• The 18th hole offers a memorable finish with a downhill 450-yard play and a challenging approach shot over a pond.
• The course's varied terrain and distinct hole designs create a dynamic and engaging experience, requiring strategic thinking and precise execution.

This was part of a five-part series on the best public golf courses in the six-county metro Detroit area.

The University of Michigan golf course in Ann Arbor is a beautiful piece of property that takes advantage of its natural topography and surprising amounts of elevation. It could be renamed Ann Arbor Hills.

It also offers an endless challenge, created by an architect who brought his entire life experience to bear. Alister MacKenzie was a trained physician and a former military strategist, and those disciplines helped him create a course that forces golfers to think and execute shots with careful precision.

And let’s be real. It’s amazing that the course sits across the street from Michigan Stadium and offers a spectacular view of downtown Ann Arbor from the 18^th tee box, which makes it one of the best finishing holes in the state.

The 18^th hole is a strong and memorable one. It plays downhill, 450 yards from the tips, but requires a careful layup and then an approach shot over a large pond. There used to be a fountain in the pond that added a diabolical aerial challenge to the shot, but has since been removed as the course has returned to a more minimalist aesthetic.

You won’t forget the 18^th hole, but you also might not forget any of the others because no two holes are alike in any way. That’s a rare feat in course design, and it’s apparent right off the bat.

The first hole is a benign and straightforward par-5. The second presents you with a steep hill off the tee box for a blind shot to an unseen fairway. After you’ve ascended the hill, you tee off on the par-5 third hole, a downhill dogleg left that ends up with a blind uphill shot to a small green.

After just three holes, the U-M course not only feels like a roller coaster, but it quickly establishes that you’re in for a tough but fun ride.

The fun continues with one of the U-M course's signature features: boomerang greens on the sixth and 14^th holes. Boomerang greens were rare, even for the time, and have become relics largely lost to a bygone era. One of MacKenzie’s world-glass gems, Cypress Point Club in Pebble Beach, California, has a famous boomerang green on its 15^th hole. Even Augusta’s ninth hole was originally a boomerang.

It's strange that the boomerang green has almost disappeared, because its shape and multitiered plateaus allow for a variety of pin placements and ever-changing possibilities for each round.

The boomerangs are an extreme example of the difficulty of MacKenzie’s greens throughout the course. There are subtle breaks you swear don’t exist, which can lead to a lot of frustration. The best advice I got about dealing with that frustration came from course general manager Andrew Romig a few years ago.

“If you’ve played here once, you struggle,” he said. “By your 10th time, you struggle. But maybe by your 20th, 30th time, you start to get a feel for the greens and where putts are going to go.”

So maybe it isn’t a coincidence that the U-M Golf Course uses a boomerang green as its logo. It represents one of the course’s distinctive features, but it also subtly suggests that you need to come back again and again in order to score well — and, perhaps, appreciate the historical value and excellence of this course.

See the others on the Detroit Free Press list:

Macomb County: The Orchards

Wayne County: The Cardinal

Monroe County: The Legacy

Livingston County: Moose Ridge

Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on X @cmonarrez.