Ballyneal Golf Club pin flag Colordado Tom Doak open ryder british pga top 100

Description

Circa 1979, Ballyneal was simply a vision of a young, local golf enthusiast, Jim O’Neal. Jim recognized the swath of sand dunes just south of Holyoke that the locals call the “chop hills” as being reminiscent of the dunes in faraway Ireland and Scotland where golf was born. The dream of creating an authentic links course stayed on the back burner until older brother Rupert fanned the flames of creation when he brought up the idea of building a course to complement the family-owned hunt club.
The two purchased 700 acres of land from a local farmer and in 2002 hired Tom Doak of Renaissance Golf Design (who had just finished the highly regarded Pacific Dunes course in Bandon, Oregon). Tom and his Renaissance team studied, discovered and refined the routing for two years before construction finally began in earnest on Ballyneal. Letting Mother Nature dictate the flow instead of forcing the flow was paramount in his approach to routing the course.