It took just over a year, but what began as a definition of terms and followed with further input from the PGA of America, readers like you and lots of shoe-leather reporting from our editors, we’ve now picked four communities that we think represent the ideal of what golf should be.
We dispatched Golf Digest writers Mike Stachura, Joel Beall, Drew Powell and Tod Leonard to spend meaningful time in these towns to get to know the local leaders, the courses, the shops, the schools and driving ranges, and try to understand how they all fit together.
May these four towns serve as models for others. Because golf is best when it embraces its egalitarian side.
BEST LITTLE GOLF TOWNS: Aiken, S.C. / Sioux Center, Iowa / Dupont, Wash. / Cortland, N.Y.
Cattle outnumber people 11-to-1 in Sioux County, Iowa, but that’s not a knock on the golf culture. Sioux Center—a town of 8,500 humans near the border of South Dakota, Nebraska and Minnesota—has one of the largest junior golf programs in the country. There is an immaculate championship course that you can play for less than $50, a new nine-hole short course with template holes and a massive putting green like the Himalayas at St. Andrews. Several men’s and women’s leagues provide more than 400 folks with a social and competitive outlet. Local high school teams regularly feed players to Dordt University, an NAIA Division II program, so they can compete right at home.
Twenty years ago, the golf scene was more like what you’d expect given the population and remote location in the American farmland. Like many nearby towns, Sioux Center had a decent nine-hole course, Sandy Hollow, but that was it.
Corn, soybeans and junior golfers all grow in impressive numbers in Sioux Center, Iowa.
Jesse Rieser
Jesse Rieser
Jesse Rieser
“There’s always been a strong golf community, but it was much smaller than what it is now,” says Todd Arends, the longtime golf coach at Sioux Center High School. “Sandy Hollow served our community for years. Local members basically built it by hand out of the dust. Individuals would care for a hole.”
For a while, that was good enough. Then in 2009, The Ridge Golf Club—designed by Jerry Slack—opened off South Main Avenue, which bisects Sioux Center. The 7,200-yard 18-hole public course and the surrounding housing development was built on property purchased by the non-profit Sioux Center Land Development. The impetus for the project was economic theory. Build a course and more than 100 houses and thereby attract residents and businesses.
Sandy Hollow has since closed, but the amazing golf culture that has flourished at The Ridge is not simply a result of a town building a new course. Two key leaders, The Ridge’s head golf professional, Karrie Van Ravenswaay, and director of golf, Jon Crane, both recognized that the game grows best through its youngest participants.
Save for later Public The Ridge Golf Club Sioux Center, IA 3.5 1 Panelists View Course
In 2014, Van Ravenswaay brought PGA Jr. League to The Ridge. In that first year, just eight kids joined. In 2024, Sioux Center had 378 registered players, making it the fourth-largest PGA Jr. League program in the country.
“In Northwest Iowa in the last 10 years, junior golf has helped grow the game a lot,” says Van Ravenswaay, who is from neighboring South Dakota and played college golf at the University of South Dakota. “Our high school teams went from not having enough players to field teams to now the courses that have PGA Jr. League, they all have very big rosters.”
Head over to The Ridge on a weekday morning in the summer and you’ll encounter a seemingly endless stream of minivans and SUVs dropping off their 5-to-13-year-old passengers like an airport taxi stand, though the luckiest ones roll up on bikes. Weather not looking great? Practice moves indoors to the American State Bank Sports Complex, a massive 470-foot-by-250-foot dome on Dordt’s campus.
Watch as five groups of 10 to 15 young boys and girls, names printed on the backs of their jerseys, rotate through stations for driving, chipping, putting and agility. A game of golf tic-tac-toe teaches finesse while an obstacle course ensures the next generation of golfers will be even better athletes than the current.
“Hands out, eyes at the target, eyes on the ball, swing. Pose, pose, pose, pose,” says Crane, as a line of kids smash drivers synchronously, holding their finishes good shot or bad, just like Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy were taught. All the fist bumps and positive reinforcement build the confidence and camaraderie these kids need to stick with the game for life. And it’s not even 9:15 yet. There’s three more hours and more than a hundred more kids to come.
“They make practice way more fun and exciting to go to,” says participant Hadlie Town, 11, about her coaches. “We play games, and they encourage you to get out of your comfort zone. And they make jokes, too.”
Jon Crane and Karrie Van Ravenswaay (following photos) run golf clinics in elementary schools and offer free instruction to all high school golf team members. With 378 registered players, the small town’s PGA Jr. League was the fourth largest in the nation.
Jesse Rieser
Jesse Rieser
Jesse Rieser
Crane grew up 15 miles down the road from Sioux Center and after playing college golf in Missouri, worked at numerous prestigious clubs across the country, including Long Cove Club in Hilton Head Island, Old Waverly Golf Club in Mississippi and The Club at Porto Cima on the Lake of the Ozarks. In 2021, after returning to Sioux Center, Crane became The Ridge’s director of golf, teaming up with Van Ravenswaay to continue to build out the junior program. During the winter, they introduce golf in elementary schools. For families with limited means who otherwise might not consider golf, the two run the Rising Arrows program, which provides around 60 underprivileged youth with full scholarships to the PGA Jr. League.
The trickle-down effects of these initiatives has transformed the larger golf community. In 2024, The Ridge saw 35,600 rounds and sold 404 annual memberships. On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, more than 250 players compete in the men’s league. Thursday is ladies’ night, with more than 100 participants. When registration opens at 8 on a Friday morning for the monthly Couples Fun Night, “by 8:03, we’ll have 160 players signed up,” Crane says.
Local 20-somethings stay close with their childhood friends in the “Young Guns” league. One of those players is Caleb Dokter, who was part of that inaugural PGA Jr. League team in 2014. Dokter advanced through the Sioux Center pipeline, working from the PGA Jr. League to the local high school team to competing in college at Dordt, where Crane is also the head men’s and women’s golf coach with Van Ravenswaay assisting the women’s team. Another product of the pipeline is Caleb Douma, a sophomore on the team at Dordt, who like many kids followed a friend to the golf course when he was 10, joined PGA Jr. League and got hooked. Like many on the Dordt team, Douma helps coach the youngsters.
Kids sticking with the game and becoming collegiate golfers is one testament to Van Ravenswaay and Crane’s efforts, but maybe more important is the welcoming culture they have fostered at The Ridge, where juniors are viewed as equal members, not liabilities.
“When the kids come in after playing golf and ask for a Shirley Temple, they are not pushed off to the side because someone else is ordering a gin and tonic,” Arends says.
Courtesy of The Ridge
Courtesy of The Ridge
Courtesy of The Ridge
Courtesy of The Ridge
It’s rare to get a bad lie at The Ridge, thanks to longtime superintendent Stephen Roseberry and his blend of bluegrass and ryegrass that tends to tee up lies in the fairway and rough. The course, which hosted the 2019 Iowa State Amateur, meanders through strips of golden-hued fescue and has five sets of tee markers for every ability. There are few forced carries, and the thick fescue only punishes shots that travel well off the wide fairways. The near-constant Midwest wind is the real defense.
The most exciting holes at The Ridge, however, might be the newest. Slack’s recently built nine-hole short course, dubbed Lil Wispy, includes template holes of some of the most famous designs in golf, including Redan, Punch-bowl and Biarritz greens. Lil Wispy was created out of an overwhelming demand for more tee times at The Ridge but also as a more accessible way to introduce young kids and families to the game. The club funded the project in part with a $750,000 grant from Destination Iowa, a governmental program aiming to bolster state communities.
If you want your kid to fall in love with the game, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better place than Sioux Center. “There’s not a whole lot to do in these small communities, so people are just eaten up with golf,” Van Ravenswaay says.
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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
