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Andrew Jowett

Inside Tom Doak's transformation at his first-ever design, High Pointe

By Derek Duncan
January 16, 2026
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High Pointe qualifies as golf’s feel-good story of the year. This was the first course Tom Doak built beginning in 1987 as a 26-year-old getting his big break. Located outside of Traverse City, Mich., it was and remains the only course at which he personally shaped all 18 greens. In 2008, the daily-fee course closed and a large section of the property, primarily the first nine holes, was sold to become a hops farm with the remaining parts left to nature.

Though sitting fallow and inert, there was enough remaining of High Pointe’s ghostly form to continually tantalize Doak, who lives in Traverse City. Then, several years ago, Florida-based businessman and entrepreneur Rod Trump became interested in reviving the design after hearing Doak on a podcast express his desire to someday bring it back. The hop-farm land was not available, but Trump secured what remained of the course along with 160 acres to the east of the old routing and asked Doak to round out an updated version of High Pointe. He resurrected six holes and parts of another, but the other 11 holes are completely new, with nine of them routed within the eastern bloc that Trump acquired.

RELATED: The latest at Old Shores, Michael Keiser’s new course in Florida, where Tom Doak is working with features ‘unlike anything I’ve seen on a golf course’

High Pointe was always a tale of two courses, with the one rugged, tree-lined nine playing off the other more open and delicately shaped. That split character remains. The saved holes retain a fearless vigor that’s to be expected from the debut performance of a young and confident architect. They’ve been refined, but the topography and green shaping remain ambitious. These contrast with the additions that are more measured and mature, moving across subtler rumbles of meadowland. The greens are tempered, by the wisdom of the designer perhaps, or the preferences of the owner and modern green speeds, with more edge-to-edge slope than internal billowing. Driving the ball into position is the chief challenge—there’s room to miss but narrower lines must be tip-toed to be in position to attack greens. New holes like the par-5 fourth with a hogsback fairway and green anchored against a side slope of land behind a nest of bunkers, and the infuriating uphill par-4 seventh with a reachable yet inaccessible plateau green stand apart, as do wrinkles like alternate par 3s at the third, one long, one short, leading to different sets of tees for the fourth. High Pointe, when it opened, was a portrait by an artist as a young man. It’s still that, but the course is also now a portrait of an evolution.

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Doak won Best New Public Course the previous two years for The Lido at Sand Valley and Pinehurst #10 and has previously won new course awards for Pacific Dunes, Sebonack (with Jack Nicklaus) and The Loop at Forest Dunes. This is his first Best Transformation award.

Here's drone footage from High Pointe shot by Trey Wren:

RELATED: The full list of winners in our Best New Courses survey of 2025

SECOND PLACE
THE INTERNATIONAL (PINES)

Bolton, Mass.
7,082 yards, par 71
Architects: Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw

Since opening in the late 1950s, The Pines was known more for being the country’s longest golf course at over 8,000 yards than for architectural excellence. After Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw remodeled the property, those dynamics flipped. “We’re probably the only people who would try to make a golf course 1,000 yards shorter than it used to be,” Coore says. The Pines is entirely reimagined and follows almost none of the pathways of the old course—the par-4 fifth, case in point, cuts across the corridors of four former holes. The design is reassuringly Coore/Crenshaw with lovely old-world bunker shapes that match the deep-woods New England environment. Many of the green contours, on the other hand, rival in boldness anything the designers have previously done.

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THIRD PLACE
VAQUERO CLUB

Westlake, Texas
7,390 yards, par 71
Architect: Andrew Green

Vaquero is an upscale, Discovery Land Co. development north of Fort Worth that opened in 2001. Andrew Green remodeled the Tom Fazio design in 2023, retouching every element by converting long sandy buffers into native areas, greatly reducing the overall acreage of sand, reversing the direction of two holes, and removing the par-3 17th and replacing it with a new short 16th. The standout piece is the revamped short par-4 13th full of centerline bunkers, creating a myriad of driving options.

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