Hawk Hollow Golf Course Review

Hawk Hollow Golf Course
Bath, Michigan

Grade: B
Teacher’s Comments: Very nice, but there’s no excuse for not allowing walkers here.

Located in Bath, just north of Lansing, Hawk Hollow is a fun, well-kept course that was well worth an hour’s drive from GolfBlogger World Headquarters in Ann Arbor.

Hawk Hollow offers players a lot of variety. Holes, in turn, cut through thick woods and across marsh; there are older-style parallel parkland holes and holes that skirt the edges of lake; a couple are big and wide enough to be considered meadow or links-style. Elevation changes—though not pronounced—came into play on quite a few holes.

Hole alignments have a nice variety, too. There are six doglegs right, and five left. The four threes are naturally straight shots, so that leaves three others that play out in a relatively perpendicular fashion.

There are sure to be several holes in your round that perfectly suit the eye of the bogey golfer.

Hawk Hollow 18th Hole

Special mention needs be made of the 18th, which is a great risk-reward design. A 362 yard par 4 (from the middle tees), it wraps to the right around a sizable lake fronting the clubhouse. A good tee shot the middle of the fairway leaves a player with a long carry over water to a tightly placed double tiered green. If that carry isn’t in your game, then there is still the opportunity to bail to the fairway left and pray that a pitch from there to the green leaves you close enough for a one putt. Another alternative is to play your tee shot closer to the lake, but the fairway slopes to the water and that adds additional risk.

Hawk Hollow 18th

My shot hit the fairway in a nice flat lie. From there I decided to go for the green. I cleared the water, hit the green and then watched my ball skip up the back of the green to the thick grass on the steep upward slope behind. The club I needed to close the distance had not enough loft to hold. I was extremely lucky to get up and down from there.

The course has three nines. Playing 1 – 18, it stretches 6,974 from the Championship tees, where it plays to a 73.9/140. From the middle tees, it measures 5,789 and plays to a 70.2/131. I played the middle tees, and did not think the course was as difficult as a 131 suggests.

Conditions on the day I played were quite good, even though I was playing after a period of several days of rain. I had expected quite soggy fairways, but was surprised when they did not emerge.

The only downside to Hawk Hollow—and for me this is a big one—is that the course does not permit walking. There’s no real reason for this, as there are no heart attack inducing elevation changes, or places with ten minute walks between holes. If management really believes that walkers somehow sully their course, they could at least condescend to allow it on weekdays when traffic is low.