Opened in 1899, Washtenaw Golf Club is the third oldest golf course in Michigan. Located in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the course boasts 18 holes of par 72 golf with a length of 6.512 yards from the longest tees.
Original founders Cora Henry, I. Newton Swift and Daniel L. Quirk Jr. persuaded a local farmer to let them stick three empty tomato cans in his freshly cut hay field west of the city and invited their friends over for a game of golf. The event was a success, and fifteen men from Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor formed the Washtenaw Country Club in Ypsilanti Township a year later. Eventually, the sheep that grazed on the greens were replaced with lawnmowers and the tomato cans with golf holes, and the small hay field became a private golf club. For more than a century, it has attracted the top ranks of Washtenaw County businesses, professionals and government leaders.
Washtenaw Golf Club provides a traditional style, classic design, with narrow tree lined fairways, well-guarded and quick undulating greens. Even though the length of the golf course is not overbearing, what it lacks in distance is made up with the importance of accuracy. The positioning of your tee ball and precision of your next shot is what makes the course so difficult to master.
The first lesson in Golf Course Architecture 101 is that land should dictate design. So it’s no surprise that hall-of-famer Hale Irwin, one of the few players in history to win three U.S. Opens and a prodigious student of the game, would follow that rule to a “tee” at Coyote Crossing in West Lafayette, IN. The award-winning layout fits the property like a well-worn glove.
