Skokie Country Club

Donald Ross redesigned Skokie Country Club in 1904, working on an existing routing that had been laid out by club founders in 1897. Ross was just beginning the prolific stretch of American course design that would produce more than four hundred courses over the next four decades, and Skokie represents one of his earliest Midwest commissions — work that pre-dates his major-rotation routings at Inverness, Oakland Hills, and Pinehurst No. 2. Tom Bendelow contributed updates to the routing through the 1910s, and the modern Skokie course reflects the combined Ross-Bendelow design history with subsequent agronomic updates.

The course plays around 6,700 yards par 70 from the back markers, with bent fairways and a slope in the upper 130s. The yardage is short by modern championship standards, but the routing's defense is the green complexes — small, crowned, set on natural rises in the manner Ross established as his signature throughout his early-career Midwest work. Skokie hosted the 1922 U.S. Open (Gene Sarazen won his first major) and the 1909 U.S. Women's Amateur. The seventeenth hole is a 458-yard par-4 with a tee shot played over a creek; the eighteenth, a 451-yard par-4 with a green set on a natural rise above the clubhouse, has decided multiple championships staged on the routing.

Skokie is private and access is members and accompanied guests only. The membership is regional Chicago North Shore business and professional families with multi-generation ties through the club's late-1800s founding. The hospitality model is traditional country club, and the Ross architectural pedigree and the 1922 U.S. Open history are part of the institutional identity.

Chicago North Shore climate gives Skokie a playing season of April through October. The course closes through Chicago winter and reopens when the soil thaws — typically late April. The mature tree canopy through the property gives the routing a parkland character that has been preserved through generations of restoration work.