Arcola Country Club

Designed by Herbert H. Barker in 1909, Arcola Country Club in Paramus plays to 7,302 yards and has been shaped over the decades by Robert Trent Jones Sr. and later Roger Rulewich and Steve Smyers. Barker, a Huddersfield-born professional who turned pro in 1900, also designed Raritan Valley CC and Rumson CC in New Jersey.

Arcola Country Club in Paramus, New Jersey opened in 1909 on grounds designed by Herbert H. Barker, a talented young golfer from Huddersfield, England who had turned professional and emigrated to the United States to take the head professional position at Garden City Golf Club on Long Island. Barker was appointed to lay out the grounds for an eighteen-hole golf course at the club. The initial course was routed across farmland in Paramus, on property that had formerly grown melons, corn, and potatoes. The club took its name from the neighborhood in which it sat, which itself had been named after Napoleon's 1796 victory over the Austrians at Arcola, Italy. The course underwent its first significant renovation in 1930 when Willard G. Wilkinson, a former assistant to A.W. Tillinghast, was retained to address changes required by the widening of Route 4 through Paramus, which removed significant acreage from the club's property. The Garden State Parkway's construction through northern New Jersey in the 1950s dealt a more substantial blow: the state acquired additional club land for the highway's right-of-way, eliminating four holes and fundamentally disrupting the layout that Barker had established. Of the original holes Barker designed, only four remain in the current routing. Robert Trent Jones Sr. was commissioned to design a new 18-hole layout in the late 1950s to replace the holes lost to the Parkway, creating the championship-length course that largely defines Arcola today. The modern Arcola plays to 7,356 yards at par 72 from the championship tees, one of the longer and more demanding layouts in New Jersey.

The course is known for exceptionally fast greens—described by players and journalists as among the fastest in the entire metropolitan area. In 2019, architect Steve Smyers redesigned the 18th hole, changing the angle of the tees to make it more of a dogleg right and addressing the bunker complex at the green. The club's competitive history includes the Arcola Cup, one of the older amateur invitationals in New Jersey, first played in 1916 during the early era of Barker's course, and revived in 2007. Arcola hosted the 2015 NJSGA Mid-Amateur Championship, the 2018 Met Amateur Championship, and the October 2019 Carey Cup. In 2022, Arcola co-hosted the stroke-play qualifying rounds of the U.S. Amateur alongside neighboring Ridgewood Country Club—Arcola's first USGA championship—with the course converted to a par-70 championship setup that produced an average score of 75.7 among the 312 qualifiers vying for 64 match-play spots.

Arcola hosted the 2023 Met Open Championship, the 108th playing of that event. Among Arcola's approximately 100 single-digit handicap members, Jim Craffey stands as the club's dominant competitive force, winning 12 club championships. PGA Tour professional Morgan Hoffmann learned the game at Arcola before advancing to the professional ranks.