Shaker Run: Ohio's Best Public Round

Ohio's best public golf course is on the wrong side of the state for most of us. If you're anywhere near Cleveland, Akron or the Valley, Shaker Run is a three-and-a-half hour drive that ends near Lebanon, in the soft farm country between Cincinnati and Dayton. It is worth every mile of it, and here's the part that makes it worth planning around rather than stumbling into: you are playing a course that was never built for you.

A private club that stopped being private

Arthur Hills laid out the original eighteen in 1979 for ARMCO Steel, as a private club for the company's people. That matters more than any ranking. Corporate money in 1979 bought land nobody would buy for a public course today — ridges, ravines, a 135-acre lake, and crucially, room. No holes squeezed to make space for lots. No cart path snaking past somebody's deck.

In 1994 it went public. Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry added a third nine, the Meadows, at the back end of the nineties. So what you can now walk up and pay a daily-fee rate for is a golf course that spent its first fifteen years being maintained for a membership that never had to justify the budget.

Ask for Woodlands and Lakeside

This is the single most useful thing in this article, so don't skim it. Shaker Run has 27 holes across three nines, and they are not equal.

• Woodlands and Lakeside are the Hills original. No houses. Ridges, ravines, water, and the quiet that comes with land that was only ever meant to be golf.
• Meadows is the 1990s addition. It's a perfectly decent nine holes. It also has homes along it, and it doesn't have the character of the other two.

Nobody at the shop is going to stop you booking the wrong combination. When you call, ask for Woodlands/Lakeside specifically. If the tee sheet only has Meadows in your window, consider moving your time rather than your expectations.

What it actually asks of you

Water is in play on fourteen of the twenty-seven holes, which sounds punishing and mostly isn't — the fairways are generous. Shaker Run's defence is subtler than that. The land moves, and the trouble sits exactly where a slightly overcooked shot finishes. You can miss here and still make bogey. You cannot miss badly here and still make bogey.

Everything is bent grass — tees, fairways, greens — which is why it holds up in August when a lot of Ohio golf goes shiny and thin.

The course hosted the 2005 US Amateur Public Links, the year a fifteen-year-old Michelle Wie made the final four before losing to Clay Ogden. That's not a marketing line so much as a useful calibration: it was set up to identify a national champion and it did the job without needing 7,400 yards to do it.

The one honest gripe

You cannot walk it. Carts only, on terrain that is entirely walkable. For a certain kind of golfer — and if you've read this far you may be that golfer — that's a genuine irritation, and it's fair to know before you drive three hours. It doesn't ruin the day. It does mean this isn't the pure, quiet, on-foot round that the land itself is offering.

Making a day of it

Lebanon is a genuinely pleasant small town — worth an hour before or after rather than pointing the car straight home. There's a renovated clubhouse and restaurant on site if you'd rather not move, and if the weather turns there are simulators, which is a strange thing to be grateful for until the day you are.

If you're coming from the north and want to make it a full trip rather than a long round, this pairs naturally with a night in the Dayton area and a second course the next morning. From the Valley, the honest maths is that a Shaker Run day trip is nine hours of car for four hours of golf. Go for the weekend or don't go.

Ohio has better-known golf. It doesn't have much better public golf than the two Arthur Hills nines at Shaker Run, and the reason is simple — almost nobody builds courses on that land for people who just show up and pay.