C.B. Macdonald

New Haven, CT

Yale Golf Course in New Haven opened in 1926 on land given to the university by Sarah Wey Tompkins. It was laid out by C.B. Macdonald with Seth Raynor doing the construction work, on a rocky, heavily wooded property that had to be blasted and cleared before golf could be routed through it. The course is built on the template holes Macdonald and Raynor used throughout their work, including a Redan, an Eden, a Short and a Biarritz. The greens are enormous and heavily contoured, and the par-3 ninth plays across water to a Biarritz green split by a swale deep enough to hide a golfer standing in it. The course is home to Yale's golf teams and is open to public play at set times. It went through a long stretch of deferred maintenance and has been the subject of ongoing restoration work aimed at recovering the original green sizes and bunker shapes.