Castle Creek Golf Course Review

Castle Creek Golf Course Review

Castle Creek Golf Course
Attica, Michigan
Grade: C+
Teacher’s Comments: A pleasant neighborhood course.

Every small town should have a golf course like Castle Creek: friendly, unassuming, well-kept and inexpensive. It is not a destination course, but if you are in the area, Castle Creek is worth a look.

Castle Creek is a tight, flat and relatively short parklands design. Water is in play on most holes thanks to a creek that runs the length of the course along with a dozen or more ponds of varying sizes. The most interesting of those is a horseshoe shaped affair that creates an island green on the fourth hole (see the photo at top).

The routing at Castle Creek is largely a back-end-forth affair, with holes separated by light stands of trees. You won’t lose a ball in those trees, but a penalty shot is likely in the offing.

Edges of the course are a different story. There, dense thickets line one side or the other. If my snap hook had emerged on any of a half dozen holes, I would have been hitting three from the tee.

I heard cows mooing in those thickets along the twelfth and thirteenth holes.

Seriously.

My favorite hole was the par 5 sixteenth. It begins with a tight tee shot through a tunnel of trees before opening to a wide expanse of fairway with some mounding on the right.

The fairway wraps around a large pond, asking players to make a decision: go for the green, or play it safe.

I really like these sort of decisions on a hole. I am in every way a play-it-safe sort of guy, so I laid up to the left of the hole.

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The ponds are used skillfully throughout the course. On the short par four eleventh, the green positioned slightly behind and to the left of a pond. The fourth has a horseshoe shaped pond that turns the green into a peninsula. A pond on the second catches shots that go long, and so forth.

I did not find any of these hazards overly penal, though. I managed to play the round without losing a ball.

Castle Creek has an interesting story behind its name. The course’s founder, Joe Hawald was a veteran who sought to recreate the castles he saw during his time in Europe during World War II. The course opened in 1979 as Lum International Golf Course. It was later bought by the Cullimore family, which changed the name to Castle Creek.

From the tips, Castle Creek stretches to 6, 335 yards. That’s plenty long for most players. On a first play, you should dial it down little. With the creek and the ponds, there are lots of places where a tee shot can run into trouble.

Tee	Yardage	Rating	Slope
Blue	6, 335	72.4	130
White	5, 878	70.3	123
Gold	5, 459	71.7	120
Red	4, 915	73.1	121

Conditions on the day I played were about what you’d expect for a relatively inexpensive, neighborhood course. The fairways had a large amount of clover mixed in with the grass, but it was all nearly mowed. The greens rolled well, and the tee boxes were serviceable. I found only a couple of spots where I was bothered by bare ground or poor maintenance.

Castle Creek is really too far from GolfBlogger World Headquarters to make a return visit, but if I lived closer, I’d be happy to play it again.

The Castle Creek Golf Course review was first published December 21, 2021, from notes and photos taken on a round played July 9, 2021.

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