Bee Tee Golf Course Review

Bee Tee Golf Course Review

Bee Tee
Grade: B+
Teacher’s Comments: If I lived in the area, I’d play often.

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The curiously named Bee Tee is the former Burning Tree Country Club. That club opened in 1953 with a design by Lou Powers. Rattle Run is the only other course I’m aware of that was designed by Powers, a long-time Michigan PGA member.

Bee Tee is an odd name, but at least has the advantage of having the same initials as Burning Tree.

Bee Tee/Burning Tree was opened to the public in 2021. It is one of a number of private courses that have reinvented themselves as public daily fee courses in recent years. The historic Washtenaw Golf Club, my home course, is another.

Bee Tee is a parklands course, with tree-lined fairways, and back-and-forth routing. A branch of the Clinton River runs through Bee Tee, and there are several tidy ponds. It is a pretty layout.

The course is mostly flat and tight. Some small elevation changes occur around the river basin. Most of the interest on the course, however, is generated by a nice variety of holes. There are half a dozen doglegs; four holes are straight shots; two of the four par threes are over water; the other four have some sort of irregularity in the fairway.

The course also has quite a few fairway bunkers for the unwary, and fairways that pinch and expand in interesting ways.

I think you could play here quite a bit before “solving” the puzzle.

Bee Tee has a notably weird hole. The seventh is a par five with an approach shot that must cross the entrance road to the club.

The only other time I’ve seen something like this is at Flushing Valley. There, the eighteenth approach carries over the entrance road.

My favorite hole was the par 5 fourth. The tee shot is tight, crossing the Clinton River and threading between two lines of tree. The target is a crestline directly ahead.

From that crestline, the hole opens up a bit, letting players have at it with the second shot.

As the ball approaches the green however, it tightens just a bit, while the green is tucked a little to the right. The approach to the green is pinched, almost certainly requiring a high shot that stops fast.

If I were to play this again, I would take care to get my second shot to the left side of the fairway to avoid the trees pinching from the right.

Bee Tee is a par 71 that tops out at 6, 109 yards.

Tee	Yardage	Slope	Rating
Blue	6, 109	131	71
White	5, 764	120	69.4
Red	5, 130	120	69..9
Red (L)	5, 179	130	71.1

Conditions on the day I played were very good. To use a hackneyed phrase, the course was “country club quality” — which it should be, considering that it was very recently a country club. I thought the bunker sand was notably good.

I spent more time than I would have liked in the bunkers.

The post Bee Tee Golf Course Review first appeared on GolfBlogger.Com. It is based on notes and photos taken on a round played in the summer of 2022. More Michigan Golf Course Reviews are at the link.

A photo tour of Bee Tee follows: