Yale Golf Course

The Course at Yale opened in 1926 on roughly 700 acres of rock, swamp and woodland gifted to the university in memory of Ray Tompkins. Charles Blair Macdonald advised the project, but the routing and construction were the work of his protege Seth Raynor, who began surveying in 1923; the finished course reportedly cost about $400,000, an enormous sum that made it one of the era's most ambitious builds. Originally conceived as 36 holes, the site's difficulty forced a single 18. Yale is a showcase of the Macdonald-Raynor template style, featuring celebrated versions of the Biarritz (the par-3 9th, with its vast bisected green over water), Redan and Eden holes, along with huge contoured greens, deep bunkers and dramatic elevation change. Long regarded as one of the finest college and public-access courses in America, it underwent a major restoration completed in 2026 that revived Raynor's bold original features.