Ak-Chin Southern Dunes Golf Club

Ak-Chin Southern Dunes is a 320-acre Australian Sand Belt-style layout designed by Schmidt-Curley Design and Fred Couples on the Ak-Chin Indian Community’s reservation south of Phoenix. The course features 129 bunkers, large waste areas, and towering mounds that transform the flat Sonoran terrain into a links-inspired challenge that defies typical Arizona desert golf conventions.

Ak-Chin Southern Dunes Golf Club opened in 2002 in Maricopa, Arizona, designed by the partnership of Brian Curley of Schmidt-Curley Design and PGA Tour champion Fred Couples. The course was the sixth collaboration between Schmidt-Curley and Couples, following previous projects including The Plantation and The Palms in the Palm Springs area, Southern Oaks Country Club in Houston, Talega in San Clemente, California, and The Crosby Estate in Rancho Santa Fe, California. At Ak-Chin, the two set out to build a course that was explicitly not a desert course — something more reminiscent of Scotland or Ireland — resulting in an Australian Sand Belt-style layout on 320 acres of land that defies the conventions of Phoenix-area resort golf. The land on which Southern Dunes sits has deep historical significance. The Ak-Chin Indian Community inhabited this territory as part of their original May 1912 reservation before a Presidential Executive Order removed them from their ancestral lands later that same year.

The Ak-Chin Southern Dunes Golf Club — built on that land — represents both an economic development tool and the community's stake in the regional landscape. For its first six years, Southern Dunes operated as a private men's club. In 2010, the Ak-Chin Indian Community recovered its sacred homeland through a land purchase settlement and acquired the facility outright, converting it from a private club to a public-access course managed by the community as part of its economic development portfolio. Brian Curley and Fred Couples designed a course that has earned consistent competitive recognition since its opening. Southern Dunes serves annually as a U.S. Open qualifying site — one of the more significant designations a public-access course can receive from the USGA, reflecting the course's quality and challenge relative to U.S. Open standards. The course has also hosted the PING Southwest Section PGA Championship and multiple collegiate championships for both men's and women's programs. The design employs more than 100 bunkers distributed across the property, along with large waste areas and towering sand mounds that transform the flat Sonoran Desert terrain into a course with visual drama more associated with British links than American desert golf. The 320-acre footprint allows for generous separation between holes and the creation of a self-contained landscape that reads as a coherent design environment rather than a series of individual holes laid across open land.

The course plays to 7,440 yards at par 72 from the championship tees — a length consistent with its status as a U.S. Open qualifier venue. Maricopa has grown substantially since Southern Dunes opened in 2002, evolving from a small agricultural community into one of Pinal County's fastest-growing cities. The course has grown with the community, serving a broader market as Maricopa's population has expanded, and the Ak-Chin Community's ownership has given the facility a stable long-term stewardship that private club operations often lack.