Spy Ring Golf Club

There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from a golf course that has no business being as good as it is. Spy Ring Golf Club, a nine-hole layout tucked around the perimeter of a 55-plus residential development in South Setauket, should by rights be a footnote — a decent amenity for retirees, pleasant enough, forgettable by the time you reach the car park. Instead, it has become one of the most talked-about new public courses in the Northeast, the subject of serious architectural attention, and proof that constraints, handled by the right designer, can produce something better than freedom would have.

The site was the former Heatherwood Golf Club, an executive 18-hole layout that occupied this corner of Suffolk County for over half a century before Heatherwood Communities transformed it into a luxury residential complex. A lesser developer would have taken the housing and left the golf alone, or dispensed with it entirely. Instead, they stripped every trace of the old course, commissioned Tyler Rae — then an emerging architect known for his restorations of Golden Age layouts, now one of the most sought-after names in the field — and gave him the outer ring of the property and a simple brief: make it worth coming back to.

What Rae created from a pure sand base, pandemic-extended build time, and a nine-hole ring around someone else's housing is a course that rewards thinking. The fairways are wide and the corridors generous, but the cross-bunkers are positioned where they matter, the out-of-bounds is real, and the greens are large, contoured, and unapologetically demanding from positions above the hole. The design plays firm and fast in a way that almost no Long Island public course manages, because Rae started with sand and built for it — stripping all the topsoil, seeding turfgrass adapted to drain quickly, and deliberately leaving the conditions to do the work that length and rough do elsewhere. A running punch shot bounces and releases here in a way that feels genuinely links-like, unusual in a region where most public courses ask you to stop the ball from the air or suffer the consequences.

The course builds intelligently. The opening holes are the handshake Rae intended — a gentle, wide invitation — before the land rises toward the south end of the property and the final three holes arrive on dramatic dune ridges that feel like a different course entirely. Hole seven, the 145-yard par three that drops across a valley to a two-tiered green ringed by four bunkers, has been called the best short one-shotter on Long Island by multiple reviewers who have played it. The eighth bends over a dune ridge and tumbles toward a green that slopes viciously from right to left; the ninth closes with a par five that lets the better player think about the flag while punishing the presumptuous.

When Spy Ring opened in May 2024 — the first new public course built on Long Island in over twenty years — it did so with St. George's Golf and Country Club, one of the great Devereux Emmet designs in the state, a short drive down the road. Rae was well aware of the company he was keeping. The response from the golf architecture community, from the regional press, and from the daily-fee public that has filled the tee sheet since opening suggests he need not have worried.