The definition of a links course fluctuates wildly depending on the golfer. Some apply the strictest criteria: hugging the coastline, built on the sandy terrain that links farmland to the sea, holes cut primarily by wind and saltwater. And there are those with looser parameters: few trees, some wispy fescue, occasional bagpipe music in the grill room.

In the U.S., where the vast majority of golf is played inland, the courses in the conversation could be divided primarily into two categories: those that play like a links, and those that at least look the part. Both have their appeal, but only one would allow you to attempt the ground game on display each year in the Open Championship.

The Ohio Golf Journal celebrates some of the best golf in Michigan including the new South Course at Arcadia Bluffs. Check out what they had to say.

Michigan Golf Live returns to Arcadia Bluffs but this time to provide their viewers a full tour of the new South Course.

Fry/Straka Global Golf Design is honored to have the South Course at Arcadia Bluffs recognized by the American Society of Golf Course Architects (ASGCA) Design Excellence Recognition Program.

New golf course construction has slowed way down in the last decade or so. Brand new courses are still coming online, though, and one of the most acclaimed openings from 2018 was the South Course at Arcadia Bluffs in Michigan. Matt Ginella recently spoke with golf course architect Jason Straka of Fry/Straka Global Golf Course Design, the firm responsible for the South Course. The architects drew inspiration from one of the world’s greatest courses, but this project was not without risk.

The South Course at Arcadia Bluffs, Arcadia, Michigan/Dana Fry, ASGCA, and Jason Straka, ASGCAThe project is a unique design inspired by the Chicago Golf Club design from early American golf course architects CB Macdonald and Seth Raynor.

Thankfully, public golfers now have another opportunity to play the sort of course Macdonald and Raynor would have designed, the South Course at Arcadia Bluffs, at the resort of the same name in northern Michigan. When pictures of the new layout—a mile inland from the resort’s tremendously popular first course, which fronts Lake Michigan and was designed nearly 20 years ago by Warren Henderson and Rick Smith—began appearing last year, the reaction was almost universal shock and astonishment at the rectangular bunkers cut into wide, straight-edge fairways or bordering huge, square greens, geometric features common to Macdonald/Raynor courses.

Jimmy Hanlin and Fox Sports Holly Sonders join Dana Fry to introduce you to the new South Course at Arcadia Bluffs.

Once you start playing the South Course, you’ll realize that all its right angles and parallel lines are less noticeable at ground level than from aerial views or diagrams in the yardage book. What is important isn’t the trigonometry of the various features. It’s their positions on each golf hole that make the difference. In carving this course out of a bland barley field, Dana Fry ran the risk of producing golf’s equivalent of a game of Checkers. But his brilliant bunker placement and green contours elevate Arcadia Bluffs South to a game of three-dimension Chess.

With the sun shining and warm breezes blowing every Golfaholic’s mind wanders to traveling to new and exciting golf destinations.

Last summer, a few photos started to leak out on social media and elsewhere on the internet, to a reaction of ‘What the #$@&! is that?’ from incredulous viewers. The first word that springs to the mind of anyone who sees pictures of Arcadia South is ‘square’. For what Fry has built is a love letter to Chicago Golf Club, one of the oldest clubs in America, possessor of a CB Macdonald/Seth Raynor course that, although rarely seen by outsiders (the club’s membership is tiny and a guest invite is among the most highly sought-after tickets in golf), is universally regarded as among the world’s finest.

Enhancements at Arcadia Bluffs and Belvedere Golf Club make golf even greater in the Great Lakes State.