Coldwater Golf Course Review

Coldwater Golf Course Review

Coldwater Golf Course
Coldwater, Michigan
Grade: A
Teachers’ Comments: Coldwater is a course I could play every day for the rest of my life.

Coldwater GC is a classic 1920s parklands course designed by Tom Bendelow. Additional work was done in 1971 by Robert Beard.

The course is routed along and near Morrison Lake, and a narrows that connects Morrison to nearby Randall Lake. It’s a clever routing that takes advantage of the land’s rise and fall across the drainage basin. Nearly every hole has an interesting elevation change. In some cases, it is quite sharp, as with the par four twelfth, which plunges from a hilltop down to the lake level. With others, it is more rolling.

The one hole that really doesn’t have any elevation change is the thirteenth, which wraps around the shores of Morrison Lake. It’s such a pretty hole that it’s relative flatness is not noticed.

Fairways at Coldwater Golf Course tended to be tight-looking, tree-lined affairs, with the exception of much of the stretch of the third through the eighth, which were more open. Interestingly, two of those — the fifth and eighth are dual par. The fifth can be played a four or a five. The eighth can be either a three or a four.

Three through seven also are across a road from the rest of the course, so I wonder if they were added later. If they were, the architect did a good job of staying in character with the available land. The sixth was one of my favorites on the course.

Coldwater Golf Course has some charming quirks. Aside from the aforementioned dual par holes, the back nine begins with two par threes. That’s not something one sees every day, but it fit the available land well. The downhill tenth plays right next to the clubhouse down to the narrows, while the eleventh starts on the hill behind, dips down and then back up to the clubhouse hill.

I was also struck by the variety of greens shapes and sizes. A lot of courses of this age seem to default to small round greens. Coldwater’s ran the gamut from small and round to large, elongated, bean shaped (with a bunker in the corner) and amoeba-like.

Also interesting to me was that only one of the holes was an obviously straight shot from tee to green. The rest bent in interesting ways.

Absent from the design were the trench bunkers I have come to anticipate in Bendelow designs. These are long, narrow bunkers I’ve seen on Bendelow courses that run the length of one or more sides of the green.

My favorite hole was the par four seventeenth. The tee shot is a straight, if narrow line through the trees that opens up quite a bit a hundred or so yards out. The entire hole bends to the right. At about 250 out, there’s a fairway bunker to catch longer hitters.

It is that point the hole gets tricky. The fairway dives down to the right of the bunker, curls right, and then rises to the green, which is perched on a small hill. A large bunker is on the front right side.

The seventeenth at Coldwater to me is a great example of incorporating interesting land forms in a hole.

Conditions on the day I played were quite good. The course is obviously well-loved, with lush fairways and smooth greens. The tee boxes also were in good shape. Areas off the fairways also were well maintained.

I really enjoyed my round at at Coldwater and just wish that it were cloer to GolfBlogger World Headquarters so I could enjoy it more often.

The Coldwater golf course review was first published February 13, 2024 from notes and photos taken on a round played in the summer of 2023. For all of GolfBlogger’s Michigan Golf Course Reviews (as well as golf course reviews from other states), follow the link.

A Coldwater Golf Course photo tour follows: