Prestwick Country Club

Prestwick Country Club opened in 1923 on a piece of Frankfort, Illinois suburban land south of Chicago, with the founding membership taking the name from the famous Prestwick golf club in Ayrshire, Scotland — the venue where the Open Championship was first played in 1860. The American Prestwick is unrelated to the Scottish original in architectural lineage, but the membership has maintained the institutional connection through generations, and the club's identity is partly built on that name-association with the founding venue of championship golf. The course has been redesigned multiple times since the 1923 opening; the modern routing reflects Dick Nugent's 1980s work and subsequent agronomic updates.

The course plays around 6,800 yards par 71 from the back markers, with bent fairways and a slope in the upper 130s. Prestwick has hosted the Western Amateur — a major amateur tournament — multiple times across the 1980s and 1990s, when the club's Chicago-area location made it a routine regional-amateur venue. The fairways play firm given the Illinois prairie subsoil. The fifteenth hole is a 543-yard par-5 with a creek crossing in front of the green; the seventeenth, a 175-yard par-3 across a natural pond, is the routing's most-discussed mid-round hole. The greens are bent and the fairways run quick given the corn-belt agronomy.

Prestwick is private and access is members and accompanied guests only. The membership is regional Chicago south-suburban business and professional families with multi-generation ties through the club's early-1900s era. The hospitality model is traditional country club, and the club has stayed largely outside the destination-private trend that has reshaped many other Chicago-area clubs.

Chicago southern suburban climate gives Prestwick a playing season of April through October. The course closes through Chicago winter and reopens when the soil thaws. The mature tree canopy keeps the routing cooler in mid-summer than the open prairie courses elsewhere in southern Illinois. The autumn color through October is part of the routing's seasonal signature.