Anthem Golf & Country Club: Ironwood Course

The Ironwood Course opened in January 2004 as Greg Nash's second design at Anthem, routed along the edge of Daisy Mountain with dramatic elevation changes and deep canyon washes. Its back-nine stretch known as Anthem Alley — the 10th through 12th holes, which play around water — is recognized as one of the toughest sequences in the Phoenix area, and the course plays to 7,200 yards from the back tees.

Anthem Golf and Country Club was developed as an integral component of the master-planned community of Anthem, a Del Webb Corporation project established in 1999 in the desert community north of Phoenix that shares its name. Del Webb, the development company that pioneered the active adult retirement community concept with Sun City, applied similar planning principles to Anthem but created a community serving all age demographics. Golf was central to that vision, and Greg Nash was engaged to design the club's two championship courses.

Nash, one of Arizona's most prolific and respected course architects, created the Persimmon and Ironwood courses using the high Sonoran Desert terrain north of the New River Mountains as his canvas. The Persimmon Course opened in 1999, establishing the club's design vocabulary: fairways routed through native desert with saguaro cactus and desert washes as both visual elements and strategic hazards, greens complexes with multiple hole locations, and tee boxes positioned to capture mountain views. The Ironwood Course followed in January 2004, expanding the club's golf capacity and creating a complementary second layout with its own distinct character.

The two courses together span a range of difficulty appropriate for the mixed demographic that Anthem attracted. Both designs acknowledge the inherent drama of Arizona desert golf—the visual contrast between intensely cultivated turf and surrounding native desert, the bright light and blue sky that define winter rounds, the challenge of managing wind across the open terrain—while providing the playing conditions that private club members expect. Anthem Golf and Country Club is managed as part of the Invited Clubs network, a structure that provides operational consistency and programming resources while the community's master association oversees the broader residential amenities.

The club's tennis center, fitness facilities, swimming pool, and dining complement the golf in creating the full-service lifestyle club that Del Webb's community planning envisioned. The Anthem community itself, situated at the intersection of Interstate 17 and Anthem Way north of Phoenix, grew from a planned development into one of Arizona's larger master-planned communities. The golf club's role as the community's social and recreational center gave it a captive membership base while also drawing golfers from the broader Phoenix metropolitan area who sought access to Nash's courses.