Prairie Club (Dunes Course)

Favorite Hole

No. 4, par 3, 213 yards 

On a golf course that stretches to 8,100-plus yards, it’s no surprise that one of the shortest holes is the favorite. The short grass behind the third green rolls right into the primary tee box on the fourth that the vast majority of golfers play from around 145 yards, unless you’d rather make the 150-yard backtracking journey to the seldom-used back tee box. 

This 82-yard-long green is a rollicking good time. It’s essentially two separate greens bisected by a small ridgeline, providing tremendous variability. Club selection can vary from a wedge to a long iron depending on the hole location. The front half is a little more demanding and requires more precision, while the back half has funneling contours. A fun, playful design amongst the Nebraska dunes is a wonderful combo, and that’s exactly what the fourth offers.

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Overall Thoughts

When I say big, you say bigger.

The concept of wide fairways with more optionality baked into each corridor is certainly in vogue with modern golf design. It allows designers to cater their courses to various levels of golfers while still testing the better players. This type of golf is typically present at public destination resorts and especially important in a region like the Nebraska Sandhills, where strong winds are a constant factor. While width is commonly seen as a positive for golfers, can too much width be an issue?

Building an abnormally large golf course may or may not have been the core concept for the fifth 18-hole golf course to be built in the Nebraska Sandhills, but it sure seems like it based on the courses that preceded the Dunes Course at the Prairie Club. The white whale, Sand Hills Golf Club, blazed a virtually untouchable trail in the region. Next came the understated and highly sophisticated Wild Horse Golf Club, where a smaller footprint, gentler landforms, and public access made it stand out from Sand Hills. The second creation from Dave Axland and Dan Proctor, Bayside Golf Club, was an “experiment” of golf on the wild side with extreme terrain that doesn't quite resemble the typical environment. By this point, golf in the sandhills went mainstream with Jack Nicklaus leaving his mark on the region with the controversial Dismal River White Course, which plays like a demanding PGA Tour course set amongst enormous sand dunes. Finally, we reach the up-and-coming public resort, Prairie Club, which decided to build one of the biggest and most expansive golf courses humanly possible.

There’s not a single aspect about the Dunes Course that is restrained or small in nature. Six sets of tees, fairways you can land a jet on, massive, cavernous bunkers, and six-plus acres of green surface all spread out over 600 acres of terrain. This course is an absolute marvel with its visual appeal and unique qualities, and that’s exactly why it’s a notable modern golf course. It truly breaks the conventions of classic golf design, creating this sort of anomaly that people travel far and wide to see. 

While the sandhills environment is spectacular in its own right, the golf course itself fails to create a cohesive story. There are several fascinating golf holes throughout the round – Nos. 2, 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, and 13 – but there are just as many, if not more, head scratchers that fail to mentally engage the player outside of visual appeal and splendid turf conditions. The two biggest pitfalls are the green designs and routing. The size of each green is massive with little variability, making them blend together in many ways. Nearly every green is larger than 10,000 square feet and exhibits very redundant internal contouring that feels more man-made than wind-blown. On top of this, 13 of 18 approach shots play uphill to an elevated green. Altering the size of the putting surfaces and types of contours, like broad heaving movements and smaller intricate rolls, is a great way to create variation and present multiple questions on different styles of holes.

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Routing is the backbone of a golf course's design, and many architects would suggest that without a great routing, it's tough to have a great golf course. In the case of the Nebraska Sandhills, it can be difficult to determine a good accumulation of golf holes versus a good routing that creates a cohesive golf course. Here’s more at length on this notion. Specifically at the Dunes course, the routing is so expansive that each hole has little association with those before or after. This continuous flow away from the holes you’ve already played makes it feel like you are just playing a bunch of individual holes versus a complete golf course. 

A few golf courses that are similar in size and style to the Dunes Course that create more cohesion between golf holes while still maximizing the natural landscape are The Plantation Course at Kapalua and Mammoth Dunes. Unlike the Dunes Course, these two are routed in a way where they travel to pockets within the environment and stay within sight of each other for several holes. At certain points during the round, both courses also return to an area you have previously visited, which provides familiarity with the expansive natural environments and creates a deeper connection to the property. While this isn’t a must-have quality, it develops a more dynamic experience than the wandering routing at the Dunes.

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While the Dunes course is without a doubt a fun and exciting golf course to play, it’s hard to credit the totality of the design for anything extremely noteworthy outside of the beautiful sandhills terrain and quality turf. The landscape created some awesome golf holes that promote strategy, creativity, and optionality, but as a whole, it fails to produce quality coherence throughout the round. At the same time, I would never dissuade someone from going to experience Nebraska Sandhills golf at the Prairie Club. It’s simply a less refined and meticulously crafted design compared to the other standout courses in the region.

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The Dunes Course is certainly an outlier as it goes about golf design in a different way. The routing creates an isolated feeling for each hole at the expense of the course’s walkability and continuity. The greens, while interesting, become too redundant to the point where only one or two stand out in your memory. This course sits at the very top of the zero egg category and could easily be viewed as a one-egger by others.

Course Tour

Front Nine

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Back Nine

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