Ballyowens Golf Club

Ballyowen opened in 1998 as the centerpiece of the Kurlander family's Crystal Springs Resort in the Sussex County hills of northern New Jersey. Architect Roger Rulewich, for decades the lead designer alongside Robert Trent Jones Sr., routed the course across roughly 250 acres of former farmland and rolling knolls above the Wallkill River. The layout is deliberately Celtic in spirit: essentially treeless, with wide green fairways framed by pristine white bunkering and wheat-colored native fescue that ripples in the wind. Playing to a par of 72 from a back tee near 7,100 yards, it rewards the ground game and tee-shot placement over raw distance. The course proved popular enough that Rulewich returned to build the resort's Wild Turkey and Cascades layouts, and Ballyowen is routinely named New Jersey's top public course.