Unsuspecting golfers will discover a vast and largely undeveloped inland links
This article appeared in the November 2024 edition of Chicago District Golfer.
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Landman Golf Club and its hilly terrain represent one of the most coveted tee times in golf.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he immediately made clear he wanted only its most “hardcore” employees to stay on and work for him at X. His idea of hardcore: Work all day, sleep at work, wake up and do it all over again the next day.
That’s sort of what it was like to take a driving tour of Nebraska’s best public-access golf courses, which a couple writers and a few friends did last summer. Our routine: Play a course, drive for hours, check in to a motel then do it again the next day, for a week. (See sidebar)
After many hours in a car, I can attest that the great state of Nebraska is, in fact, a giant inland links golf course in the making, its sand-based soil and wind-sculpted dunes just waiting to be discovered. Which is exactly what Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw did in 1994 when they designed the uber-private Sand Hills Golf Club, No. 11 on Golf.com’s “Top 100 in the World” list. Coore and Crenshaw started it all and others followed.
The half-dozen best public courses we hit in Nebraska – Landmand, Tatanka, Dismal River’s Red and White Courses, and The Prairie Dunes Club’s Pines and Dunes Courses – all share the main traits that made Sand Hills great: sandy soil, elevation changes, dunes and wind.
Here’s why you should go to Nebraska:
Landmand Golf Club - Homer
Landmand is in the northeast corner of the state, near Sioux City, Iowa, and is the closest course to Chicago on our itinerary – a mere 71⁄2 hours not counting pit stops.
If you’ve heard of Landmand, you probably read a news story about how they sold all 11,000 of their 2024 tee times in just three hours when their online tee sheet opened on Dec. 31, 2023. Landmand currently is the newest bright shiny thing in golf.
Named Golf Digest’s “Best New Public Course” in 2022, Landmand was designed by Tennessee golf course designers Rob Collins and Tad King, the team behind Sweetens Cove, a quirky nine-hole course in Pittsburg, Tennessee, near Chattanooga. On a scale of 1 to 10, Sweetens Cove is an 11 for extreme green complexes: wildly contoured greens and greens that can funnel shots and even wayward putts into bunkers – that sort of thing.
Landmand is a grown-up version of that. It, too, features dramatic mounding on its greens, most of them 40 to 50 yards deep and one 70-plus yards deep. So, a 100-foot putt is not uncommon.
No. 8, dubbed “Little Piggy,” plays downhill be tween 75 to 105 yards. It might sound like a “Mickey Mouse” hole until you realize three sides of the green drain into bunkers.
Landmand’s hilly terrain has many holes that climb and fall as many as 90 to 100 feet. Its holes play so differently depending on the wind direction that the same holes are handicapped accordingly. For example, from the tips, No. 1, a downhill 575-yard par 5, is the No. 17 handicap hole when played downwind, and No. 3 when played into the wind.
A par 73 that plays from 5,420 to 7,200 yards, Landmand will set you back $150, dirt cheap for such a highly ranked course. Its four-person occupancy cabins cost $600 a night. The nearest town with motel choices is South Sioux City, Nebraska about 12 miles away. A couple of more miles north is Sioux City, Iowa, gambling mecca of western Iowa, which has a few upscale hotels. If you want to play it in 2025, be prepared with your dates and a credit card, and be at your computer at 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 31. And Happy New Year.
Tatanka Golf - Niobrara
An hour and a half west of Landmand and just out the back door of the Santee Sioux Nation’s Ohiya Casino & Resort, Tatanka is 500 acres of hilly parkland golf. It boasts immaculate conditioning – amazing considering they have a grounds crew of just six people.
Designed by Paul Albanese and Chris Lutzke, Tatanka was included in Golf Digest’s list of the “Best New Courses of 2014”. The magazine’s architecture writer, Ron Whitten, called Tatanka “Sand Hills with trees.”
The par 72 plays between 4,784 and 7,450 yards from five sets of tees. Fairways are generous but some tee shots give the illusion of narrow landing areas. The fescue fringes of both fairway and greenside bunkers are left unmowed, which makes barely missing a bunker significantly more punitive than actually landing in one.
A round at Tatanka costs $80. A room at the Ohiya Casino & Resort costs less than $100 a night.
Dismal River is a 36-hole facility managed by KemperSports. The Nicklaus-designed White Course is pictured.
Dismal River Golf Club - Mullen
Operated by KemperSports of Northbrook, Dismal River is a 36-hole golf resort, as well as a hunting and shooting destination, in south-central Nebraska.
Dismal River’s par-72 White Course, designed by Jack Nicklaus, was ranked No. 7 in the state by Golf Digest in 2023. As a Nicklaus course, as you might imagine, it has numerous blind shots and his usual visual trickery, including a bunker hidden in plain sight in the middle of the green of the par-3 fifth. It plays 5,058 to 7,400 yards.
The par-71 Red Course, designed by Tom Doak and ranked No. 4 in the state in 2023, is a more accessible layout. Its generous fairways occasionally merge with those of an adjacent hole. Like the White Course, Doak’s Red Course follows the natural flow of low ridges and draws. Free-flowing is probably the best description of the Red Course, which has loosely defined teeing areas around colored stakes. It plays 4,869 to 6,994 yards.
Better players tend to prefer the White Course for its challenge, while higher-handicappers prefer the Red Course for Doak’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get aesthetic. Both courses have three sets of tees.
Two-night stay-and-play packages at Dismal River start at $1,300, depending on the season.
The Prairie Club - Horse Course
The Prairie Club - Valentine
The Prairie Club has two 18-hole courses and a 10-hole short course, tabbed The Horse Course.
Designed by Tom Lehman and Chris Brand, the Dunes Course at The Prairie Club is a true Nebraska sandhills layout, following generally flat terrain through tall, dry fescue-covered dunes. Greens are tucked away, often partially obscured by intervening dunes, and typically elevated. The par-73 course plays from 5,202 to 7,537 yards from six sets of tees.
The Pines Course, designed by former Australian tour player Graham Marsh, by contrast, skirts the edge of a canyon through which the Snake River flows. Part of your 18-hole journey is through a pine forest before you re-emerge into the dunes land. The course plays from 5,293 to 7,385 yards from six sets of tees.
The resort offers an array of on-site lodging, including The Prairie Club’s daily rate of $325 for unlimited golf across its property.
Also worth visiting: Wild Horse Golf Club, a Richard Daley design near Gothenburg, which was holding its member-guest on the day we needed to play it, and Awarii Dunes Golf Club, in Axtell, a Jim Engh design which has good bones, but it had re cently lost its superintendent and will need some months to recover its conditioning.
Dan Vukelich, formerly a Chicago journalist, is the online editor of Alabama Golf News and is a senior writer at Pro Golf Weekly. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.