Treetops-Threetops

While par 3 courses and short courses have become all the rage in recent years at big golf resorts, before then, they were mostly downscale, standalone courses with minimal maintenance budgets, intended for beginner golfers. These types of courses served an important role, especially when the game was growing. But no one really thought of par 3 courses and short courses as courses which could be really interesting and worth playing in their own right. And golf resorts certainly weren’t thinking about what type of short course they could add.

All of this may have changed recently but back in the 90s, there was one golf resort that built a 9 hole par 3 course that was not only not meant to be lesser than the main courses, but one that many people saw as a highlight of the resort: Treetops. The course was Threetops, a 9 hole par 3 course designed by then-pro and now part-owner Rick Smith, which opened in 1992 alongside the Fazio Course. Unlike the new par 3 courses (in addition to having a standard number of holes…9, as opposed to 10 or 12 or 17), the par 3s on this course are all of conventional lengths, ranging from just over 100 yards to about 220 yards. Overall, the holes are still on the short side—some kind of wedge will be enough on most of them. But they’re long enough that they can’t be played with some alternative method, like a bump and run, putt, or throwing the ball on the green, unlike some of the newer short courses.

The other, not so positive thing about Threetops that distinguishes it from the new short courses is that it’s not walkable. This isn’t great for a 9 hole par 3 course, but this was never intended to be a place where you go out in the evening in your bare feet with your friends and carry 3X as much weight around in beer as you do in golf clubs (like at the Sandbox at Sand Valley). They took full advantage of the dramatic, almost mountainous property and created something that, like most of the other Treetops courses, feels like an adventure. But it’s easier to carry all that beer in a golf cart any way, so load it up and drive over to the first tee.\


The first hole is one of the easier holes on the course, about 140 yards, but to a much larger green than most. The green is receptive but not too steep and there’s plenty of width—which won’t be the case for many of the rest of the holes.

Like the first hole but unlike most of the rest, the second is pretty flat but features two greens: a smaller one to the left on a ridge to the left where missing left or long is a lost ball and a larger one to the right that slopes heavy from right to left. I didn’t get a shot from the tee, but we can see the pitch in this photo from behind the green.

While the 120 foot downhill par 3 sixth on the Jones Course gets most of the attention at Treetops, the third on Threetops is…150 feet downhill. It’s also longer, about 220 from the back tees. I had no idea what club to hit, so I guessed 7-iron—which was probably the right club, but a slight push sent the ball sailing off toward the woods on the right. It’s really hard to judge such an extremely downhill shot and I think that this applies as much to accuracy as distance.

The third...you could build a pretty good rollercoaster from here.

After a downhill flick with a wedge over a bunch of bunkers, we come to the fifth, which cranks up the difficulty. Three of the first four holes are pretty short and with receptive greens, but five is not only difficult for this course, it would be a difficult par 3 on any course…about 165 yards uphill to a deep but narrow green. You’ll want to stay below the hole here, but accuracy is by far the most important thing.

The flick on four.

Five is no flick...it demands good distance control and especially, accuracy.

After a drive to the sixth tee that’s longer than any of the holes, we face another tough mid-iron shot. This time, the green is fairly shallow but wide. It’s receptive but distance control is important because you don’t want to be in the back bunkers.

The sixth...again, definitely not a pitch-and-putt par 3.

The par 3 seventh is a very short (~100 yards, but about 70 feet downhill) hole where Lee Travino won $1 million for a hole-in-one in the 2001 shootout that he used to play here with Phil Mickelson, Lee Janzen, and some of Rick Smith’s other students and friends from 1999-2006. While I’ve said that this isn’t a pitch-and-putt course, this is the one hole where you probably could throw the ball on the green…and you’d probably have a better chance of making a hole-in-one that way.

The best club choice here may require only one arm.

The eighth is another downhill wedge to a fairly small green surrounded by bunkers. That brings us to the last hole, which is similar to the first but is a bit more intimidating because it’s uphill and you can’t see the surface of the green. They had been blasting the bad weather siren since were were on the eighth tee, but we’re not going to sit in the clubhouse for two hours just to have to play 9 minutes worth of par 3s, so we quickly hit, lost our balls (well, one of us), and called it a morning.

The eighth.

The ninth. If you're really terrible (or drunk), you might take out a windshield in the parking lot if you pull it about 20 yards left.

So that’s Threetops, the predecessor to the current trend of short courses at golf resorts. While they’re clearly going for a different concept than a place like the Sandbox at Sand Valley—you don’t want to play this one barefoot and too much drinking may result in you losing more than a few golf balls—Threetops is a lot of fun and is an integral part of one of Michigan’s best golf resorts. Even though they haven’t played it in almost 15 years, they got good publicity for the Threetops Shootout and it seems that everyone is still pretty excited to play this course—they were lined up on the first tee when we headed out later in the afternoon to play the first Smith big course right next door.