Oakland Hills Country Club: North Course

Oakland Hills Country Club's North Course is the quieter companion to the famed South "Monster," a Donald Ross design that opened May 13, 1924 — just three weeks before the South hosted the club's first U.S. Open. After operating as a daily-fee public course through the Depression and postwar decades, it was redesigned by Robert Trent Jones Sr. in 1968-69 and reborn as Oakland Hills's second private course for members.

Oakland Hills Country Club's North Course opened on May 13, 1924, just weeks before the club's South Course hosted the first U.S. Open staged at Oakland Hills. Donald Ross designed the North in 1922 and construction took place through 1923 under the supervision of Walter B. Hatch, a Ross associate who lived on-site during the build. The original layout stretched approximately 6,300 yards and carried fewer than twenty bunkers — a restrained design compared with the heavily fortified South that would come to define Oakland Hills's championship identity.

The North's history took an unusual turn during the Great Depression. In 1933 the club elected to operate the course as a public daily-fee facility under the name North Hills Golf Course. The arrangement lasted more than three decades. Only in 1967 did the membership vote to return the course to private member play; the reconversion required a thorough redesign, carried out by Robert Trent Jones Sr. in 1968 and 1969. Jones reversed the first and ninth holes, exchanged the sequence of the fifteenth and sixteenth, and expanded the bunker complex from roughly twenty traps to more than ninety.

The modernized North reopened for member play at the beginning of the 1969 season and extended to approximately 6,668 yards. Further renovation work arrived in 2013 when Shawn Smith of Hills and Forrest — the firm of Arthur Hills — redesigned the fifteenth and sixteenth holes, removed a substantial number of trees to restore playing corridors that had narrowed during the preceding decades, repositioned bunkers, and realigned several tee complexes. The course stretched to approximately 6,908 yards following the project. In 2019 the club swapped the positions of the fourteenth and sixteenth holes, producing the current routing sequence. Unlike the South Course's continuous championship role, the North has hosted regional and amateur events rather than professional majors.

It staged the 2002 U.S. Amateur, the 2007 International Final Qualifier for the British Open Americas, and Michigan Amateur championships in 2012, 2019, and 2023. In 2024 the North shared hosting duties with the South Course for the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship, the first USGA national championship to use both layouts simultaneously. For the club's members the distinction is practical as well as historical: the North offers a genuine championship-caliber test while the South is being rested or prepared for major events, and its Ross-era routing — preserved in its essential form through Jones's work — remains a well-regarded example of the architect's Midwest parkland style.