Oak Ridge Golf Club

The greens are fantastic and rolling nicely. Albeit a bit slow but not terribly so. The course has a nice mix of holes and a few forced carries over water to keep you on your toes. Not a long course either, so off the tee you don’t always have to hit driver. Also not a lot of hills so you typically get flat lies in the fairway. All this makes for a very fun round of golf.

I played Oak Ridge for the first time earlier this week.

To get to the golf course, one has to take a very scenic and lovely drive and when you pull into the parking lot, you can tell right away that the golf course has a very old school, non updated look to it.

I was very surprised to see that the practice putting green did not have any cups which you can put into, and this proved to be an omen for the remainder of my experience.

I checked into the pro shop and the gentleman behind the counter was friendly enough, but didn't go out of his way to ask me if I ever played the course, therefore I was forced to ask him about the process of getting a cart, where the first tee is, etc.

As I was making pretend putts on the practice green, I observed multiple golfers wearing t-shirts, gym shorts and other non-golf attire, and this further supported my initial opinion at this golf course is not intended for anyone who plays the game seriously.

The conditions on the golf course were average at best, with the greens receiving a higher rating in my opinion, then the fairways and tee boxes. The greens had a good appearance to them, and rolled pretty slowly but without many bumps.

All the ponds on the golf course were laden with algae, therefore were an eyesore for sure.

Ultimately, I regret to say that Oak Ridge should not be a course that a golfer makes a special trip to, and should only play it if you are able to get a very good deal.

This onceposh private course is having trouble keeping up with publics close by.tees and most fairways are in need of tlc some total restorations irrigation is not happening greens are the saving grass although hard to keep approach shots on as well dry conditions. Overall could be the place it once was .publics nearby charge less with better conditions Chicopp cc veterans,Agawam muni and Franconia to name a few.

Decided to try and find place to play as rainy forecast never happened and was not disappointed in Oak Ridge after 45 min drive from Central CT.

Great pro shop with high quality merchandise at reasonable prices and friendly and knowledgeable staff!

As many mention, course greens are fabulous! Some of the boxes could use some work and some fairways in spots have taken toll by heat and drought, but none of the greens!

Very nice layout. Just enough differences in hope design and challenges with some target golf and water in spots. Overall, nice rural traditional New England golf course. Glad we found it and will add to our course rotation play list.

This course got baked out real bad a few few years ago and is getting back to its previous better conditions. Some of the fairways have some patchy spots and some of the tee boxes are in rough shape still. The greens however are spot on!

Course was in very good condition given the high temperatures and minimal rainfall over the past month.

Good course to play. Present challenges that are fun.

Greens were excellent. Fairways were in good condition considering the weather we have had lately (very dry). Tee boxes need some improvement espec1ially #18. Would definitley play there again.

Greens are in good shape. Played in 3 hours 40 minutes.

The course is in nice shape...good value for the money.

Having heard good things about Oak Ridge from a very accomplished golfer, my son and I wanted to give it a spin. And neither of us came away disappointed—quite the contrary.

Oak Ridge is a classic, smartly laid-out parkland course, the product of George and Tom Fazio (more about them later), which opened in 1974. I found none of the holes to be weak at Oak Ridge, and every one of them is grounded in the fundamentals of great architecture. The course design, then, features essentials over ornamentation; its holes run over the landscape naturally; its green sites appear to have been ‘found’ as part of the terrain; its putting surfaces certainly undulate a bit, but they are neither fussy nor intricate. Be aware, though, that rolling the ball well is no simple task on these greens.

Still, course challenges stem primarily from the fairways, which are typically ample enough but far from vast, and their surroundings. Your tee shots, that is, may wander a bit from them; yet, after an errant drive on any of the more heavily tree-lined holes, you may well find yourself chipping or knocking down a shot back to the fairway. Ground contour here is undulating, but the movement tends to be more subtle than dramatic on most holes. Large trees are also placed strategically to tighten up many of the fairways.

The architects prove themselves to be masters of variation at Oak Ridge, particularly with the mix of hazards and their placement. The first five holes are a case in point: on hole one, we find a yawning bunker to the right of the green; on the second, it is two, almost equally large traps found greenside; holes three and four, on the other hand, are devoid of bunkers, but a pond is introduced on the former and the green is a sizeable plateau on the latter; hole five uses two strategically placed bunkers, both on the right, to toughen up the ‘weaker’ side of both the fairway and the green, a green that is broader and thus more accessible on its right side. These two bunkers at five also have the effect of forcing the better player to hit a draw for the optimal route to the hole, which opens up from the fairway’s left side. As you may expect, these variations continue over the course’s duration, and they should keep even the best golfers on their toes.

What you need most to score at Oak Ridge is not a particularly strong performance on a certain stretch of holes—all of them are demanding in some respect—but consistent approach shots throughout your round. Aside from the aforementioned bunkers, this design includes forced carries over three ponds (at 7, 8, and 15), a trio of long par three’s (4, 11, and 16), all of them difficult, and a quintet of par-4’s all in the vicinity of, or longer than, 400 yards. Not daunting enough? Let’s add in the three par-5’s. Only one of them, the 16th, is reachable at 493 yards from the blues, but the other two verge on the monstrous: six, at 570 yards, and twelve, weighing in at a ‘mere’ 559. After it may stingily accept your downhill tee shot, by the way, the twelfth fairway wriggles straight up a long hill and around a bend to a green perched at the finish of a massive upsweep. It’s not for the timid, and, no matter what club you’re hitting into this green, it must be struck—once again—with precision.

The two best holes on this course, in my judgment, come back-to-back at 9 and 10. Both long par-4’s, they will challenge most golfers to hit a solid mid-iron—if not more—to their well-protected greens. On nine, I drew a six iron over the right-hand trees (which are just low enough to cause some angst) and the ball found the green—I felt tickled. The tenth may be a 431 yard bruiser, but the elegant scenery that forms the backdrop to the green is stunning. The toughest hole at Oak Ridge is hard to pick, but my vote is for the 17th, a 200-yard par-three with a plateau green guarded by sizeable, flanking bunkers.

The quality and playability of this course is so strong that one must ask what, if anything, it lacks. The answer, and it’s not quibbling, is to say that its conditioning falls somewhat short of the standards set by top public golf courses of this class. Tee boxes and rough around the greens were above average; fairways were very good; the rough good but not quite manicured. The greens, having been aerated not long ago, were impossible to truly judge, but I’m told that their conditioning is high-quality (no rough patches were visible at all, anyway). But this should deter no one from playing the course.

More about the Fazios: I feel fairly certain that uncle George mostly took the reins in this design, given that nephew Tom—who now seems destined for entrance into the World Golf Hall of Fame—was only 29 at the time. Besides, the layout looks much more like George Fazio’s work from what I’ve seen elsewhere (I’ve played two of George’s courses prior to this: Ridgefield GC in Connecticut and the highly-revered, and private, Legacy Golf and Tennis Club in Port St. Lucie, Florida). I would not argue that it strongly reflects either of these courses, though there are some clear similarities. Yet I do suspect, having looked closely at excellent photographs of the 2013 U. S. Open site Merion (its East Course), that this layout actually is echoed a bit by Oak Ridge. This is not to say that an affordable public course can possibly ‘compete’ with a $400 per round (if it were public) iconic masterpiece, but the greens here, along with a few other features, are uncannily similar to Merion’s in at least a few cases. How can this be? Merion, along with Pine Valley, is reputed to have been one of George Fazio’s chief influences as a designer.

Today I enjoyed meeting and chatting with—for some time following our round—the engaging and genial Anthony Strycharz, Club Manager and part of the family that owns Oak Ridge. Anthony goes greatly beyond the typical public course norm to make his guests feel fully welcome here.

Sometimes the acid test of whether a golf course is worth playing is the considered opinion of a sixteen-year old. My son, a league ‘all-star’ on his high school team (he can also hit 300-yard-drives), thought this to be a very good layout that challenged him. And he wants to come back. Yes, Golf Digest has rated Oak Ridge highly in past guides, but my son’s endorsement has that immediacy and first-handedness which, for me, precludes all substitutes.

Make the trip to Agawam and play it. If you’ve got any time left over, you might just try—as well—Six Flags.