Photo Tour: The Glen Golf Park

After a visit to the Sand Valley resort for an upcoming project, our team swung by the Glen Golf Park in Madison, Wisconsin. We loved what we saw.

Formerly known as Glenway Golf Course, this nine-hole muni reopened last year after a renovation by some of the brightest minds in golf architecture. Craig Haltom, who restored Lawsonia Links and scouted the location for Sand Valley, helmed the project. Former Renaissance Golf Design intern and Madison local Sara Mess helped out, as did Brian Schneider, Jay Blasi, and Andy Staples. Much of the funding came from Michael Keiser, the developer behind Sand Valley and Rodeo Dunes.

The main goal of the redesigned Glen is to break down the barriers between the course and the surrounding community. Non-golfers are welcomed in a variety of ways. Next to the clubhouse, there’s a large, undulating putting green that anyone can enjoy. Madisonites can use the course on Monday mornings for a stroll, jog, or dog walk. During the warm months, the facility hosts various events, from outdoor movie nights to concerts to dance classes.

The course itself embodies the fundamentals of good golf: rolling but walkable land, wide fairways, inventively contoured greens, and unfussy presentation.

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Haltom retained the basic routing of the old Glenway but transformed the feel of the course by overhauling the greens, expanding the fairways, removing a small number of trees, and reimagining the entrance to the property.

The Glen’s first green introduces the design approach Haltom, Mess, Schneider, and the rest of the shaping team used throughout the course: open fronts, balanced arrangements of collecting and rejecting contours, internal rolls, and short grass everywhere.

Like many of the best vintage urban munis, the Glen has a close, relaxed relationship with its neighborhood.

The Glen’s rebuilt bunkers are rugged in appearance but flat-bottomed and easy to rake and walk in and out of. I’ll be curious to see how the fescue eyebrows evolve.

By my count, the Glen has a total of seven bunkers. Four of them can be found on the ravine-crossing par-3 sixth hole.

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The bunkerless seventh green has sharp runoffs in front and long the right side, but a feeding contour on the left provides some forgiveness.

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Proposal: any course with a view of an old cemetery receives an automatic Egg.

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You can have your bells and periscopes. In my opinion, the finishing hole at the Glen has the coolest blind-shot warning system of all: a stoplight that players change from green to red on the tee and from red to green once they play their approaches.

Next time you’re in Madison, make time for a round or two at the Glen Golf Park. It’s the type of nine-holer every town can and should have.