Sharon Heights Golf & Country Club

Sharon Heights Golf & Country Club sits on the edge of the San Francisco Peninsula, a mile or so west of the Stanford campus, in a part of Menlo Park where the residential landscape gives way to mature native oaks and the gentle topography of the Bay Area foothills. It is a private club — members-only, well-established, and quietly significant in the context of California golf — and it has been part of the peninsula's social and sporting fabric since it opened in 1962.

The course was designed by Jack Fleming, one of the most productive architects working in Northern California during the mid-twentieth century. Fleming trained under Alister MacKenzie, the Scottish-born designer responsible for Augusta National, Cypress Point, and Pasatiempo, and he brought that influence to bear on a series of courses across the Bay Area and beyond. At Sharon Heights, he produced a layout shaped around the natural contours of the site: gentle elevation changes, a seasonal creek running through several sections of the course, and fairway corridors defined by the surrounding oak and sycamore canopy.

The course passed through subsequent adjustments over the decades, including work by Bill Love and Mark Rathert in 1993, but its most significant transformation came much more recently. In 2019, the club selected Todd Eckenrode and his Origins Golf Design team to develop a master plan for a comprehensive renovation. The work, budgeted at approximately $23 million, was completed in 2024. Eckenrode's approach was sympathetic to the Fleming bones: he widened fairway corridors by removing non-native trees, reconstructed greens with short-grass surrounds that opened up short-game variety, installed wild grasses, and introduced native plantings that connect the course more closely to its Northern California setting. The renovation won Sports Illustrated's award for Best Modern Private Course Renovation of 2024 and drew attention nationally as an example of thoughtful, historically grounded design work.

The course plays to a par of 72 from five sets of tees. From the Gold tees — the longest option — it measures 6,837 yards, with a course rating of 73.4 and slope of 134. The layout includes four par-fives, four par-threes, and ten par-fours, routed across both sides of the property in a design that makes consistent use of the creek as a natural strategic feature. Rye grass surfaces throughout provide firm, true playing conditions and hold shape across the year-round California season.

The club hosts the LPGA Tour's Fortinet Founders Cup in March 2026 — the first professional tour event to be held at Sharon Heights, and a reflection of both the renovation's impact and the course's standing in the game. The Founders Cup is one of the LPGA's more storied events, celebrating the thirteen women who founded the association in 1950, and bringing it to a course with this kind of history and Peninsula setting adds considerable weight to an already meaningful occasion.

Sharon Heights has long been considered a fixture of Bay Area golf culture. It has attracted a membership drawn heavily from Silicon Valley's technology and professional community, and its relatively low public profile has been part of its character — a private club that competes on the quality of what it offers its members rather than on visibility. The Platinum Club designation it holds is a formal acknowledgement of the breadth of its offering, which extends beyond golf to dining, tennis, and other facilities.

For those familiar with the Peninsula golf corridor — a dense stretch of private courses that includes Stanford Golf Course, Menlo Country Club, and Palo Alto Hills — Sharon Heights occupies a distinctive position: older than most, more recently reimagined than any, and now carrying genuine tournament credentials into the next chapter of its history.