Point O’ Woods Golf & Country Club

Point O’ Woods Golf & Country Club is a private club in Benton Charter Township, in Berrien County in southwest Michigan, a few miles inland from Lake Michigan and about five miles east of downtown Benton Harbor in a straight line. Its 18-hole course was designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr. and opened on June 14, 1958. It is best known as the longtime home of the Western Amateur, one of the oldest amateur championships in the world, which it hosted 41 times between 1963 and 2019.

The course is a par 72, with two nines of par 36. On the hole-by-hole page the club currently publishes, it measures 7,043 yards from the back (Blue) tees; course directories, Golf Digest and the GolfBlogger site give 7,075 yards, with a course rating of 75.1 and a slope of 140. Golf Digest ranks it ninth in Michigan in its 2025-26 state ranking. Those figures, and the places where the sources disagree, are set out below.

From a 1954 idea to a 1958 opening

The club dates its founding to 1954. According to Wikipedia, which draws on a history once published by the club, five local residents, C. E. (Bud) Blake, Charles W. Gore, Richard Merrill, Malcolm Ross and Frederick S. Upton, wanted a new golf club for the Benton Harbor and St. Joseph area that year. When land owned by a Donald H. Ross became available, the group asked Robert Trent Jones whether the site could carry a championship course. Jones inspected it, liked it and agreed to design the course. Ground was broken in the spring of 1957 and the course opened on June 14, 1958.

Jones led a movement that shaped American course architecture in the second half of the 20th century, and the GolfPass site describes Point O’ Woods as a textbook example of his approach: long runway tees, tree-lined fairways of medium width, fairway bunkers that dictate the line, and large, undulating greens. The course has been altered since. The GolfPass directory lists Jones himself and Arthur Hills for work in 1987, and Roger Rulewich, Jones’s longtime associate, for work in 2005; we found no other source giving the scope of those projects. A Golf Digest panelist notes that the original 9th hole was rebuilt, without giving a date.

The GolfPass site describes the property as a quiet, self-contained wooded tract under a high canopy of elm and oak, and notes that since its founding the club has been a summer favorite of Chicagoans who spend the season in Michigan. Beyond the course, the club lists a turf driving range, a five-acre short-game area, a clubhouse with dining, a swimming pool, and tennis and pickleball courts.

The home of the Western Amateur

The Western Amateur, organized by the Western Golf Association since 1899, is a grueling week: two rounds of stroke play, a cut, 36 more holes of stroke play, then four rounds of match play among the top 16 over the final two days. A finalist can play as many as 144 holes in five days, as GolfBlogger points out.

According to the list of champions on Wikipedia, Point O’ Woods first hosted the event in 1963, when Tom Weiskopf won, and again in 1965. It then held it every year from 1971 to 2008, 38 consecutive editions, before the championship began to rotate among clubs, mostly around Chicago. It returned in 2019 for a 41st edition, won by Garrett Rank, a Canadian mid-amateur who also works as an NHL referee. No course has hosted the Western Amateur more often.

The roll of champions at Point O’ Woods reads like a list of future tour players. It includes Andy North (1971), Ben Crenshaw (1973), Curtis Strange (1974), Andy Bean (1975), Hal Sutton (1979 and 1980), Scott Verplank (1985), Chris DiMarco (1988), Phil Mickelson (1991), Justin Leonard (1992 and 1993), Tiger Woods (1994) and, in the last year of the long run, Danny Lee (2008). The club celebrates many of them on its history page.

The club has added a new event since. Its website says it hosted the first Jim DeLapa Collegiate in 2025, a 54-hole college tournament for 15 Division I teams, with Central Michigan University as host school, held on the fourth weekend of September and scheduled through 2028. Proceeds go to the Point O’ Woods Educational Foundation, which funds scholarships.

What it asks of you

Every source agrees on the main point: Point O’ Woods is a driving course. GolfBlogger, writing after a round in 2019, describes a park-and-woodland layout on mostly flat ground, with trees lining nearly every hole and numerous fairway bunkers threatening the tee shot. GolfPass adds that the corridors feel tighter than they are because of the tall canopy. Water is in play on three holes, and only a few shots are forced carries.

The greens are the other half of the test. Reviewers describe them as large and undulating, which forgives a missed approach but puts pressure on lag putting. The bunkers around them catch most misses. GolfBlogger, who plays to a bogey handicap, sums the course up as tough but fair, in the spirit of Jones’s own idea of a good hole: a difficult par and an easy bogey. The advice that follows is to choose a club that finds the fairway, lay up short of the bunker complexes where needed, and rely on the short game.

The club’s hole-by-hole page gives the following pars and Blue tee yardages, with its own short descriptions. The front nine measures 3,518 yards and the back nine 3,525.

• 1st: par 4, 431 yards. A rising fairway framed by trees, to a slightly elevated green guarded by bunkers.
• 2nd: par 5, 566 yards. A rolling, tree-lined par 5 whose approach narrows toward an elevated green set above a slope. GolfBlogger counts the second or third shot here as a carry, and a former champion recalled being unsure how he would ever play this hole the first time he saw it.
• 3rd: par 5, 541 yards. A gently sweeping hole where fairway bunkers shape the drive and the layup.
• 4th: par 3, 181 yards. An elevated green surrounded by bunkers on all sides.
• 5th: par 4, 372 yards. A hole about positioning, with fairway bunkers setting the line.
• 6th: par 4, 445 yards. A long par 4 in a tree-lined corridor.
• 7th: par 4, 458 yards. The longest par 4 on the front nine; the club calls it one of the toughest tests on the course and gives it the first stroke index for men on its page.
• 8th: par 4, 327 yards. A short par 4 that the club presents as a risk-and-reward hole; one reviewer counts it among the standouts as a drive-and-pitch hole.
• 9th: par 3, 197 yards. The hole reviewers remember. GolfBlogger and GolfPass describe a redan, with a long, narrow green set at an angle to the tee, wider than it is deep. The club describes a shot over water, with the hazard short and right.
• 10th: par 4, 397 yards. According to GolfBlogger, the hole crosses a ravine and bends left around a fairway bunker; the open line to the green is from the right.
• 11th: par 3, 213 yards. GolfPass describes a tee about 70 yards long and a green about 50 yards deep, so the hole can play anywhere from about 125 to 230 yards.
• 12th: par 4, 479 yards. The longest par 4 on the course.
• 13th: par 5, 548 yards. A tree-lined par 5 where bunkers shape the layup.
• 14th: par 4, 355 yards. A shorter hole to a green set below the clubhouse.
• 15th: par 5, 489 yards. The shortest of the four par 5s, and a scoring chance.
• 16th: par 4, 413 yards. A green bunkered on both sides.
• 17th: par 3, 210 yards. Played over a pond to a contoured green; GolfPass names it among the standout holes.
• 18th: par 4, 421 yards. A finishing hole toward the clubhouse, with water on the left near the green.

The club page lists six yardages per hole. Added up, they give 7,043 yards (Blue), 6,643 (White), 6,343 (Black), 5,968 (Maize), 5,409 (a Maize and Green combination) and 5,058 (Green). The GolfPass directory gives ratings for a slightly different set of tees: 7,075 yards from the Championship (Blue) tees (75.1 and 140), 6,640 from the Back (White) tees (72.9 and 136), 6,353 from the Members (Black) tees (71.4 and 135), 6,001 from the Middle (Maize) tees (69.9 and 128), 5,461 from the Forward (Green) tees (67.3 and 120) and 5,251 from the Front (Orange) tees (66.2 and 118). For women, it gives 76.0 and 143 from the Maize tees, 72.8 and 134 from the Green tees and 71.4 and 132 from the Orange tees, all at par 74.

For a club golfer, the numbers matter less than the tee shot. With four par 5s, four par 3s and ten par 4s, three of them over 440 yards from the back, the course rewards a player who keeps the ball in play far more than one who hits it a long way.

What golfers are saying

As a private club, Point O’ Woods has very few public reviews: two on the GolfPass site, a detailed write-up by GolfBlogger, a short Golf Digest panelist comment and a handful of articles written around the 2019 Western Amateur. The points below summarize what recurs in that small body of material. They are other people’s opinions, not ours; nobody from Panxis has played the course, and we name no reviewer.

What comes up in its favor

• Conditioning is rated highly by every reviewer who mentions it, with top marks for conditions on GolfPass.
• The architecture is seen as a pure example of mid-century Robert Trent Jones design, with strategic fairway bunkers and big, rolling greens.
• Reviewers find the course demanding but fair: a bogey golfer playing from the right tees can post a decent score with patient strategy.
• The redan 9th, the drive-and-pitch 8th, the 10th across its ravine and the 17th over the pond are singled out as memorable holes.
• The caddie program, with forecaddies running ahead on every hole, is praised, as is a membership described as friendly and unpretentious.
• The championship history, and the chance to play a course where Mickelson, Woods and Leonard won as amateurs, is part of the appeal.

What comes up against

• The tree-lined corridors severely punish a wayward drive, and several writers find the course tight from the tee.
• The greens are described as vexing on a first visit, the kind that pay back local knowledge.
• A longtime member writing in 2014 found the rough very difficult when grown up for championships, and the greens slower than he remembered.
• A Golf Digest panelist considers the rebuilt 9th still good but less distinctive than the original hole.
• The layout itself scores a little lower than the conditioning on GolfPass, and one 2019 review notes that a wet spring kept the course from playing as firm as it could.
• The main limit is access: most golfers will never play it without a member.

Who can play

Point O’ Woods is a private members’ club. Its guest page says that guests play through the sponsorship of a member and that guest access is extended by invitation; there is no public tee sheet and no published green fee. Membership categories on the club’s site include regular, regional, national, junior, corporate and social memberships.

Several GolfPass articles from 2019 report another route: non-members could arrange tee times by staying in one of the on-site cottages near the clubhouse. The sources describe these cottages differently, as six member-owned three-bedroom cottages in one article and as 2,000-square-foot cottages with four master suites in another. The club’s current website does not mention a cottage program, so we cannot confirm that it still exists; ask the club directly.

The club’s guest rules ask for traditional golf attire, with collared shirts tucked in, hats worn brim forward and no denim on the course or practice areas. Rounds are expected to take four hours or less. Carts must stay on the paths near tees and greens and on every par 3. The club calls caddies an integral part of the experience and encourages guest groups to take at least a forecaddie; additional caddies can be requested 24 hours in advance. Its caddie program is tied to the Western Golf Association’s Evans Scholars Foundation, and the club says 37 of its caddies have earned an Evans Scholarship.

Getting there

The club’s address is 1516 Roslin Road, Benton Harbor, MI 49022; the course itself lies in Benton Charter Township. It is about five miles east of downtown Benton Harbor and seven and a half miles from St. Joseph. The Southwest Michigan Regional Airport is about three and a half miles to the west; South Bend International Airport, in Indiana, is about 30 miles to the south, and downtown Chicago about 68 miles to the southwest across the lake. These distances are measured on the map and not by road.

Green fees

The club publishes no green fees, and none are given here. The course is open only to members and their guests.

How this page was made

The factual frame comes from public sources: OpenStreetMap for the location; the Point O’ Woods website for the address, the founding year, the hole-by-hole yardages, pars and descriptions, the guest and golf policies, the caddie program, the facilities, the memberships and the Jim DeLapa Collegiate; Wikipedia for the founders, the opening date and the list of Western Amateur champions and venues; Wikidata for the identifiers; Golf Digest for the rankings and a panelist comment; the GolfPass directory for the ratings, slopes, tee names and the list of architects; GolfPass articles for the cottages, the 11th hole and the setting; GolfBlogger for the terrain, the 9th and 10th holes and the strategy. We could not consult the USGA course rating database, which refused our requests, so the ratings come from GolfPass and GolfBlogger only.

Where sources disagree, we say so. The club’s current page adds up to 7,043 yards from the Blue tees, while GolfPass, Golf Digest and GolfBlogger give 7,075; the hole yardages differ by a few yards on most holes (431 against 436 on the 1st, for example), which may reflect re-measured or new tees. The forward tees also differ: the club lists a Green set of 5,058 yards and a combination of 5,409, while GolfPass lists Green at 5,461 and Orange at 5,251. The stroke index differs too: the club page makes the 7th the hardest hole, GolfPass the 2nd. The Wikipedia article on the club gives only the 1971 to 2008 run of Western Amateurs, while the championship’s own list of venues on Wikipedia, GolfBlogger and the club include 1963, 1965 and 2019. One GolfBlogger article refers to the Western Open where it means the Western Amateur. The 9th hole is described as a redan with a vegetated slope in front by GolfBlogger and as a shot over water by the club. The list of architects after Jones comes from a single directory. The club’s history page mentions Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus among famous visitors, which we could not tie to a specific event and have left out. The Golfweek ranking that Wikipedia cites dates from 2009 and is not repeated here.

The opinion section summarizes reviews by golf blogs, a rating panel and directory users, read in October 2026. We report recurring themes rather than individual voices. Nobody from Panxis has played or visited this course, and this page is no substitute for a round. The public material is thin, and this page is shorter on player opinions than it would be for a public course.

The club has not paid for this page, has not seen it before publication and has no say over its content. This page contains no commercial link and earns us no commission. If you know the course and something here is wrong or out of date, write to us and we will correct it.

Other courses nearby

Closest to this one in our United States directory:

• Eastern Hills Golf Club — 45 mi
• The Meadows at Grand Valley State University — 62 mi
• Beverly Country Club — 74 mi
• Sunset Ridge Country Club — 74 mi