A golfer named Owen wrote in and asked us to draw Falls Road Golf Course in Potomac, Maryland.
I'd never heard of it. That's usually a good sign. The requests that turn into the best stories are almost never the famous ones.
A course built on a farm
In 1961, Montgomery County opened its first golf course on 150 acres of former farmland east of Potomac Village. Edmund Ault and Al Jamison laid it out. Tom Clark, Dan Schlegel, and James Cervone came through in 2003 and tightened it up, and a new clubhouse went in around the same time.
Sixty-five years later, Falls Road is still there and still public, and that first course has grown into a county system that now runs nine of them, one of the largest county-run golf operations in the Mid-Atlantic.
Worth sitting with the address for a second. Falls Road is a few minutes from Congressional. It's down the road from TPC Potomac and Bethesda Country Club. This is municipal golf sitting cheek-by-jowl with some of the most exclusive real estate in the country, and anybody can walk up and play it.
The front nine is friendly. The back nine is not.
Par 70. A shade over 6,100 yards from the tips. On paper that's short, and on paper it looks easy.
The front opens up and lets you settle in. Wide enough, rolling, generous, the kind of golf that convinces you you're playing well. Then you make the turn and the course stops agreeing with you. The back nine runs tighter and the trees close in, and it starts asking questions the front nine never bothered to ask.
It's a short course that plays longer than it looks, on land that remembers being a farm, lined with trees that have no interest in giving your ball back.
The greens are bent grass and they're big, which sounds like a gift right up until you've got forty feet of downhill left. Fairways are rye. Four sets of tees. Nothing about it is trying to impress you.
Golf.com wrote it up as one of the best bargains in the D.C. area. Locals go further, you'll find people who'll flatly tell you it's the best public course in the metro. Weekend tee sheets fill fast. That's not an accident.
Why we drew it
There's a thing we keep running into doing this: the courses people love most are almost never the expensive ones. They're the ones people can actually play. The muni where you learned. The course you can get out and walk after work. The one where somebody's kid is hitting balls on the lighted range until dark.
Nobody makes merchandise for a course like Falls Road. There's no poster of the 14th green. No print in the pro shop. But there are a few thousand people around Potomac who've played it a hundred times and could walk that routing in their sleep.
So we drew it. Every hole, by hand, from the actual routing. Not generated. Drawn.
If you've played Falls Road, you'll recognize it. That's the whole idea.
Thanks to Owen for the request.
Falls Road Golf Course Map Tee →
