Boyne Highlands Resort - Donald Ross Memorial Course

The Donald Ross Memorial Course at Boyne Highlands Resort is a unique "greatest hits" compilation that reconstructs 18 of Donald Ross's most celebrated individual holes from courses across his portfolio. Opened in 1989, the layout offers a rare opportunity to experience the genius of the Golden Age master's design philosophy in a single round near Harbor Springs, Michigan.

The Donald Ross Memorial Course at Boyne Highlands Resort in Harbor Springs, Michigan is among the conceptually unusual golf courses in American resort history — an 18-hole layout designed by Bill Newcomb and opened in 1989 that attempts to recreate the greatest holes that Donald Ross, the Scottish-born golf architect who shaped American golf more than any other designer of his era, distributed across his portfolio of more than 400 courses during a career that spanned from the 1890s to the 1940s. The result is a course at the Emmet County resort that draws golfers who want to play the design genius of Ross without the private club membership requirements that access to most of his original courses demands. The conceptual genesis of the Donald Ross Memorial came from Bernie Frederick, The Highlands' Senior Vice President of Golf, and resort owner Stephen Kircher, who traveled the country researching Ross's most celebrated holes and identifying which of them could best be adapted to the terrain available at the Harbor Springs property.

The process of selecting the holes — from the canon of a designer whose work at Augusta National (before Alister MacKenzie's redesign), Pinehurst No. 2, Seminole Golf Club, Oakland Hills, Scioto, and hundreds of other courses created the most extensive legacy in American golf architecture — required deep knowledge of Ross's body of work and careful judgment about which holes would translate to Michigan terrain. The holes that Newcomb interpreted for the Memorial Course include legendary originals from across Ross's geographic range: the 2nd hole at Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio; the 16th hole at Oakland Hills Country Club in Birmingham, Michigan; the 18th at Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio; and others drawn from the Ross portfolio that together represent a curated selection of the architect's finest hole-by-hole work. Newcomb's challenge in adapting these holes was to capture their strategic essence and design character while fitting them to the Boyne Highlands terrain — a task that required both architectural skill and an intimate understanding of what made each original Ross hole function as its creator intended.

The inspiration behind the project was explicitly democratic: so many of Donald Ross's finest courses are private clubs inaccessible to public golfers, and the creators of the Memorial Course wanted to give public golfers the experience of playing Ross's design thinking without requiring private club membership. This mission gives the course a character unlike any other in Michigan golf — it is simultaneously a resort course serving Boyne Highlands guests and an educational experience in the history of American golf architecture, where each hole carries the context of its Ross original and the story of why that hole was considered worthy of memorial reproduction. The 6,814-yard, par-72 layout with bentgrass greens and fairways provides the playing conditions appropriate to the northern Michigan resort season, while the 2020 renovations undertaken by the Boyne Golf team in conjunction with Michigan-based course designer Ray Hearn updated selected features for contemporary standards while preserving the memorial character that Bernie Frederick and Stephen Kircher established when they conceived the project in the late 1980s.

The course's position within the Boyne Highlands four-course portfolio — alongside the Moor, the Heather (designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr.), and the Arthur Hills Course — gives Memorial Course golfers the full context of what the resort's multi-decade golf development program created on the Emmet County terrain.