Top 100 Golf Courses of Canada – 2012
Top 100 Golf Courses of Canada – 2012
22nd January 2012
Top 100 Golf Courses updates its Canadian golf course rankings
Top 100 Golf Courses, the most informed and dedicated ranking website, presents its 2012 golf course rankings for Canada. It’s reckoned there are around 1,700 courses in the country and, although we feature only around 6% of them, hopefully you’ll agree that these are the very best layouts in play around the country.
In the summer of 2006, we added fifty Canadian courses to our website then, over the weeks and months that followed, we added a steady stream of courses until we were in a position to compile our first Top 100 for Canada in 2010. This is now the first update of that inaugural chart.
You’ll find seven new entries to the ranking chart but, somewhat surprisingly, only two of these layouts are modern courses.
The first of these at number 30 is Sagebrush, a Rod Whitman collaboration where the big course matches the big views beside Nicol Lake in British Columbia. The other course is Tom McBroom’s Memphremagog, a private layout that he created for Paul Desmarais in 2007, and it enters our rankings at position 33.
The remaining five new entrants are all courses that are at least half a century old.
At number 53, the charming pair of nines at St Charles (Ross & Mackenzie) date back to 1919. The new number 65, Maple Downs,is a William Mitchell layout from 1954 (subsequently upgraded by Doug Carrick with Graham Cooke) and the number 73 slot is now occupied by Dick Wilson’s 1959 design of Royal Montreal (Red).
Herbert Strong’s 1925 course at Fairmont Manoir Richelieu(renovated by Graham Cooke in the late 1990s) comes in at number 77 and Stanley Thompson’s 1922 design at Burlingtonis positioned at number 98, and they complete the quintet of classical courses debuting in this Top 100.
There are many mightily impressive upward movers in the listing.
Two recently constructed private courses, Tom Fazio’s Coppinwoodand Tom McBroom’s Oviinbyrd, each enter the upper quartile of the chart by soaring an astonishing forty places up the list.
The prolific Doug Carrick designed a fantastic hat trick of fast risers – Eagles Nest(up twenty six to 22), Humber Valley (River)(up twenty seven to 26) and Cobble Beach(up fifty six to 36) while, in the bottom half of the chart, there are substantial climbs in the ratings for Stanley Thompson’s Thornhill(up twenty four to 59), Walter Travis’s Lookout Point(up nineteen to 61) and Donald Ross’s Pine Ridge(up nineteen to 68).
On the flip side, a number of courses have plummeted down the chart. The title of biggest faller belongs to Le Geant(down forty to 72), closely followed by Salmon Arm(down thirty nine to 81) and King Valley(down thirty seven to 70).
And, completing the bad news, for those who would like to know, the seven courses that have dropped out of our listings are: Gallagher’s Canyon, Westwood Plateau, Granite, Lake Joseph, Brudenell River, RedTail Landing and Royal Oaks.
We actively pursue feedback at Top 100 Golf Courses – which Canadian courses are too high or too low in the standings? Are there courses in our chart that shouldn’t be there at all or are there others that we have missed which really deserve to be included in the rankings? Please let us know what you think.
Top 100 doesn’t claim to be “definitive” but we do think we are the “most informed” golf course ranking outfit in the business. If you’ve played any of our featured courses in the Land of the Maple Leaf then we’d be only too pleased to hear from you so why not post a course review and share your views with us?
Jim McCann
Editor
www.top100golfcourses.com
Click here to see the detailed Canadian Top 100 list.