I played Foxford Hills yesterday and had a great time. Before we start the discussion, you should know that everything may be tainted by the fact that I’m on a hot streak. I’ve been striking the ball as good as I ever have in my life for the last five rounds and this could cause an overly rosy view of anything. I carded a 76, my third round in the 70s in the last five rounds. I’ve posted five single-digit differentials in a row. Go figure, this after a horrendously bad June where I struggled to break 90. Messed up I tell you.

Let me start off with the signature hole, the par five 15th, which I highly anticipated.

Approach to the short par five 15th at Foxford Hills in Cary, IL

The tee shot is daunting but I still hit the driver. It was a stupid decision though and I got lucky with a good bounce off a tree and lucky hop off the cart path. The best play may be a four wood (205 yards) and a five iron (175 yards) to leave a short iron approach, like the one you see on the left.

Conditions were good but the place is drying out fast. We need some rain in the region for sure. They were running the sprinklers in-round and had staffers throwing water on trouble spots on greens and tee boxes. You can see some of the brown in the rough in the picture above. But I never had a bad lie and the greens were smooth with decent speed. The fairways on the 15th and 16th were fine, which is a credit to the maintenance staff because there isn’t much air moving in those fairways.

The 5th at Foxford Hills viewed from behind.

This place has a lot of great holes. I love the the par four 5th hole. It’s a great looking downhill par four with a potentially tricky pin placement on the right. You can see from the picture at the right that the day was pretty cloudy so I couldn’t get all of the detail in the pictures. I played the second tee from the back and this hole played all of it’s 382 yards.

The tee box I played, the Gold, ran 6,590 yards and posed a fair test. The par fours, however, were beautiful to look at, but didn’t have much teeth today. There was only one lengthy par four (the 18th) where I had to take something greater than a six iron in. Granted, I had the driver dialed in, but I don’t hit it much farther than 230 yards that often (see my note in the first paragraph). I could have played the back tees, but I probably would have crumbled under the pressure and gotten bludgeoned.

The view from the tee on the par three 12th at Foxford Hills.

The par three 12th was looking nice. It was playing about 165 yards yesterday from the Gold tees. It shares a lake with the short par four 11th and both have big, nasty bunkers guarding things. Visually, they are cool holes to look at. The official website refers to those large, meandering bunkers with lots of fingers and inlets as “MacKenzie-style bunkers,” which seems to be an accurate description. Check it out in the picture at the left. I would love to get a professional’s opinion on that usage of the term “MacKenzie-style.”

I didn’t hit the practice range, didn’t try the food, and didn’t see if they had a locker room. But it was a great facility regardless. The scorecard is one of the best. I’ve seen the same style at Village Links of Glen Ellyn, it has the yardage book built in to each card.

This is classic Chicago area public golf; beautiful bent grass all over the place, challenging design by a local guy, municipally owned, and with a fair price.

Nice, very nice.