Arcadia Bluffs - The South Course

The South Course at Arcadia Bluffs, designed by Dana Fry and Jason Straka in 2018, is an inland companion to the clifftop Bluffs Course, drawing inspiration from the great heathland courses of England and the Sand Belt courses of Melbourne. The wide, firm fairways and bold bunkering create a ground-game-oriented layout that rewards creative shotmaking across open, windswept terrain.

The South Course at Arcadia Bluffs opened in August 2018 as a companion to the original Arcadia Bluffs Golf Club that has commanded national rankings since its 1999 opening on the Lake Michigan bluffs in northern Michigan's Manistee County. Where the original Arcadia Bluffs course plays along the dramatic shoreline bluffs with Lake Michigan visible from virtually every hole, the South Course occupies a 310-acre inland property approximately one mile south of the existing course off Highway 22, on terrain whose rolling, largely treeless character gave designers Dana Fry and Jason Straka the material for a fundamentally different but complementary golf experience. Fry and Straka's design philosophy at the South Course drew explicitly on the Golden Age tradition of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor, using Chicago Golf Club — one of the oldest and most historically significant golf clubs in American history — as the primary design inspiration. Macdonald and Raynor's approach to design, which systematized strategic concepts from classic British holes into reproducible templates that they deployed with variations across their American commissions, informed the South Course's use of large, geometrically shaped greens, centerline hazards, and the intersecting bunker complexes that create the course's most distinctive visual character. No modern course in America was described as better deploying the angles and strategies made famous by Macdonald and Raynor than the South Course at Arcadia Bluffs.

The greens Fry and Straka designed for the South Course average over 9,400 square feet and frequently feature squared-off corners in their shapes — a direct reference to the geometric precision of Raynor's green design, which departed deliberately from the rounded, organic shapes that had become conventional in American course design. The large green areas and the squared corners create the variety of pin positions and approach angles that the Macdonald-Raynor tradition demanded: greens capable of presenting fundamentally different strategic challenges depending on hole location, rewarding both precise approach play from the correct side of the fairway and creative short-game responses to approaches that miss their intended position. Warren Henderson, the architect who designed the original Arcadia Bluffs course, provided project management and construction oversight for the South Course — a collaboration that ensured the new course would be developed with full understanding of the site and the original course's management requirements.

Fry and Straka, who had worked together for over twenty years at Hurdzan/Fry before establishing their own Fry/Straka Global Golf Course Design firm, brought the accumulated expertise of that partnership to the Arcadia site. The South Course at Arcadia Bluffs plays to approximately 6,900 yards from the championship tees, with no naturally occurring or constructed water features — a design decision that places all strategic interest in the shaping, bunkering, and green design rather than water. The combination of the inland setting, the Golden Age design vocabulary, and the Lake Michigan proximity (the course sits no more than a mile from the shoreline and is continually buffeted by lake breezes) gives the South Course a character distinct from both the original Arcadia Bluffs and from virtually every other course in the northern Michigan golf landscape.