Willow Creek Golf & Country Club

Willow Creek Golf & Country Club opened in 2005 in Mount Sinai, on the north shore of Suffolk County, as the Hamlet at Willow Creek, a golf community developed by the Holiday Organization. Architect Stephen Kay, who had earlier redesigned the organization's sister course at Wind Watch in Hauppauge, built the course on land that sits below street level; the open ground was dug down and rebuilt, which gave the course its rolling fairways and heavily contoured greens. The result is a championship test with close to a hundred bunkers and water in play on about a dozen holes. Long Island golfers took to it quickly: the 9th hole was voted onto Newsday's Dream 18 and the 15th onto Golfing Magazine's Long Island Dream Club, and the course served as a New York State Open qualifying site in 2011. That June the Holiday Organization sold both Hamlet clubs to ClubCorp, now Invited, which dropped the Hamlet name.