{"id":875296,"date":"2026-08-31T18:30:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T18:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/875296\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T18:30:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T18:30:12","slug":"inside-frontier-club-a-new-gil-hanse-course-taking-shape-in-ann-arbors-backyard-australian-golf-digest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/875296\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Frontier Club, a new Gil Hanse course taking shape in Ann Arbor’s backyard \u2013 Australian Golf Digest"},"content":{"rendered":"

About a half mile from his GPS destination, Gil Hanse\u2019s interest was piqued. He had gotten a call from one of Frontier Club\u2019s founders, James Housler, about a 350-acre parcel outside Ann Arbor, Mich., which timed nicely with Hanse\u2019s upcoming trip to Oakland Hills Country Club. Now he was driving through Lodi Township, and he loved what he saw.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m driving in and I was passing all this beautiful, rolling, heaving farmland,\u201d Hanse said. \u201cI kept thinking, \u2018I hope that\u2019s it.\u2019 \u2018Oh, I hope that\u2019s it.\u2019 \u2018I hope that\u2019s it.\u2019 You know, because I wasn\u2019t quite sure how far I was going until the gate where I\u2019d meet them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen when we got out on the property, we kind of got into the wooded sections and it was a little bit more difficult to tell. And then we popped out into one of those big fields that I was hoping it was, and it was. And then we popped out into another big field that I hadn\u2019t seen before that had all these big rolls.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"https:\/\/www.golfdigest.com\/content\/dam\/images\/golfdigest\/fullset\/2026\/8\/MW-13 <\/p>\n

Gil Hanse (left) reviews plans with Frontier Club co-founder Scott Kovanda.<\/p>\n

Hanse agreed with the assessment from Housler and co-founder Scott Kovanda that their land would be perfect for golf. Seventeen of the 18 holes, Hanse recently told Frontier Club\u2019s 50 founding members who assembled for a meeting, were waiting to be discovered. Frontier Club is golf\u2019s latest destination club, and construction is slated to begin later this year.<\/p>\n

This former farmland became available late last year to Kovanda and Housler\u2014long-time friends and Michigan natives. They were driving around the land and couldn\u2019t shake the idea of building a golf course\u2014which will sit about 10 minutes from the Big House, the University of Michigan\u2019s famous football stadium.<\/p>\n

\"https:\/\/www.golfdigest.com\/content\/dam\/images\/golfdigest\/fullset\/2026\/8\/MW-14.jpg\"\/ <\/p>\n

Frontier Club will be built on a 350-acre section of former farmland in Lodi Township.<\/p>\n

The property features two prominent ridges with a valley in between, plus other ripples and folds, plus a water feature that Hanse used for the routing. Hanse gives credit to Ben Hillard, one of his design partners, and Russ Myers, the firm\u2019s director of agronomy, for nailing the layout.<\/p>\n

RELATED: The best courses in Michigan, ranked<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know that I\u2019ve ever said this before,\u201d Hanse said, \u201cbut as you\u2019re doing a routing, there\u2019s always a point where you occasionally second-guess and ask, is that the right decision, or should we have gone in that direction or you know, was that the right green site or should we have picked that one?<\/p>\n

\u201cI think [Ben Hillard] said it to me at one point, as we were finalizing the routing, he said, \u2018I think we got everything we could out of this site.\u2019 I mean, I think we really maximized the potential.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"https:\/\/www.golfdigest.com\/content\/dam\/images\/golfdigest\/fullset\/2026\/8\/frontier-club-ann-arbor-michigan-aerial.jpg\"\/ <\/p>\n

An aerial of Frontier Club.<\/p>\n

Asked for any comparisons to the land or the vision for the course, Hanse said his team has called it a \u201csmaller-scale Crystal Downs Country Club,\u201d referring to the legendary Alister MacKenzie and Perry Maxwell design that tops our rankings of the Best Courses in Michigan and is #15 on America\u2019s 100 Greatest Courses. In terms of presentation, Old Elm Club in Illinois also matches Frontier Club a bit with a routing that utilizes rolling topography and meanders into flat valleys and back into the interesting land.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0Rare footage of C.B. Macdonald will power Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner\u2019s latest big-time restoration project<\/p>\n

Kovanda and Housler pointed to what they felt was a void in the private club scene in southern Michigan, with many great country clubs but not a true destination club like those that continue to attract strong interest around the country such as The Fall Line in Georgia, Golf Digest\u2019s Best New Course in 2025, or Ohoopee Match Club, also a Hanse design and former Best New winner. Frontier Club has an impressive list of founding members and is partnering with leaders in the industry to bring this project to life, including former USGA President Fred Perpall, whose Beck Group is designing the cottages and clubhouse.<\/p>\n

\"https:\/\/www.golfdigest.com\/content\/dam\/images\/golfdigest\/fullset\/2026\/8\/MW-8 <\/p>\n

Gil Hanse told members at Frontier Club that his new course in Michigan will be \u201cone of the most special\u201d places he and partner Jim Wagner have built.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear Frontier Club has the potential to be the next great destination club as Hanse has said he and his partners continue to find themselves in \u201cpinch me\u201d mode with the great places they\u2019ve worked in recent years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know, in my heart of hearts, this will be one of the most special places we\u2019ve ever built,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

For more info, visit the club\u2019s social media pages (@FrontierGolfClub).<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About a half mile from his GPS destination, Gil Hanse\u2019s interest was piqued. He had gotten a call…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":875297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[4225,64,63,38935,755,138747,85],"class_list":["post-875296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-article","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-courses","tag-golf","tag-golf-digest","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=875296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/875297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}