Orchards Golf Club

About the club

For students, college courses should be places of peace and respite. Few are better at diffusing the stresses of tests and campus life than The Orchards at Mount Holyoke in central Massachusetts. The course roams 160 acres of a beautifully secluded site with holes falling across natural grades lined with pines and fescue meadows. Donald Ross designed the first nine in 1922 and added the second in 1927 using little more than the sloping ground, a minimum of bunkering and a creek that crosses several fairways and fronts the 10th and 16th greens, the latter a short par 5 that begs players to try for the green with their second shots. The historically spartan maintenance budget has ensured the course's architecture hasn't strayed far from the original design, and restorative projects over the years, including a renovation by Ron Prichard, have primarily concentrated on expanding mowing lines, cleaning up bunkers and refurbishing the turf. Ross designed hundreds of courses in his career, sometimes drafting plans off topographical maps for properties he never personally visited. The Orchards wasn't one of them: Ross had good reason to visit the course repeatedly in the years after its completion because his daughter Lillian was a student at Mount Holyoke, graduating in 1932.