About

I started really getting into golf in high school, where I got to play a lot of free golf at local courses in our matches and started to get a bit of an idea of what I liked (Allentown Municipal) and what I didn’t like (Willowbrook!).  At that point, I knew basically nothing about golf course architecture (and obviously even now I still have a ways to go).  But my high school coach would plan a three round golf trip each year that we would do at the end of our fall season.  After my first exposure to a golf trip – a trip-long competition format, hanging out at the hotel with teammates, and getting to see new, legitimately good golf courses (and of course some educational side activity to make sure the school approved) – I was hooked.  I started looking at all of the best in state lists for states nearby and would go through and highlight all of the courses that looked like ones I really wanted to see.  Then I’d plan hypothetical trip itineraries and turn these into PowerPoint presentations.  I probably made about 10 of these itineraries and used them to lobby my coach into planning the trip my senior year.  But I still didn’t really think I’d ever get to all of those courses, and at that point my knowledge of golf courses only extended to a four hour circle.

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My first adult golf trip in college with a few of my high school golf teammates.  We drove down to North Carolina, and played Southern Pines (before the renovation), Tot Hill Farm, and Tobacco Road.  We also stopped in Sperryville, VA along the way to play a little par 3 course in Shenandoah called Schoolhouse Nine (which would eventually become one of my favorite places in the world) and played a local course in North Carolina that wasn’t nice just to get some more golf in.  I think this first real trip was important for a couple of reasons.  It showed me that going on a golf trip was actually a real, possible thing that didn’t require being on a golf team.  It exposed me to Mike Strantz, who would become possibly my favorite architect.  And it made me really appreciate the need for variety in a golf trip.  Not every course needs to be spectacular.  I think early on in my golf course journey I probably was the wrong kind of “top 100 chaser” – where I just wanted to check these courses off just because they were on a list.  I still am kind of that way – I have a push-pin map for the top 100 public US courses that I keep track of, and I heavily view top100golf.com to help plan a lot of my trips.  But if you asked me if I’d rather get to play Schoolhouse Nine or Pebble Beach, I would probably consider Schoolhouse Nine for way longer than I should.  My taste has morphed a little bit into finding the most awesome golf experiences that I can – which is sometimes great golf, sometimes a crazy location/trip to get somewhere, and sometimes just a really fun place with friends.

I’ve put all of this together because I genuinely love doing this.  I love looking at Google Maps in random places and panning until I see a golf course, then trying to evaluate the course from the overhead view to see if I need to look into it, I love planning golf trip itineraries to places that I would never think to go without golf, I love thinking through courses after I play them and trying to think about what I’d change and what I really liked, and I love putting this all into my rankings (because I like spreadsheets and data almost as much as golf).

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So while this website is mostly for my own enjoyment, I’m hoping that there are some other weird people that might enjoy looking through my lists, rankings, and itineraries and either nod in agreement or think to themselves, “this guy is an idiot.”  And hopefully this leads to more connections, discussions, and experiences in the future.