Tot Hill Farm

Tot Hill Farm is the rougher and more punishing of Mike Strantz's North Carolina designs, sitting twenty-five miles south of Greensboro near Asheboro on a piece of Uwharrie Mountain country foothills. Strantz routed the course in 2000, near the end of the brief and intense design career that produced Tobacco Road, Royal New Kent, Stonehouse, and Caledonia. Tot Hill Farm carries Strantz's most aggressive routing decisions — fairway-cuts that drop directly off into rough, green complexes set into hillsides at angles that make every approach a partial blind shot, and a routing that climbs and descends through enough vertical to require careful club selection on nearly every hole.

The course plays around 6,550 yards from the back markers, par 71. The yardage is short by modern standards, but the routing carries a slope in the upper 140s from the championship tees because of the elevation changes and the green-complex geometry. Strantz's signature throughout is the moundwork and the visual deception — fairways that look narrower than they are, greens that appear smaller than the actual playing surface, and bunkers placed where the eye wants the ball to go rather than where the routing demands it.

Tot Hill Farm is open to public daily-fee play, which is unusual for a Strantz design — Tobacco Road is the only other one that runs as a fully public daily-fee. The pricing is moderate by North Carolina standards. Caddies are available; the resort allows walking but most rounds use carts given the climbs.

The North Carolina Piedmont climate keeps the course playable year-round with the firmest conditions in September through November. Summer heat and humidity compress mid-day rounds; the smart play is early-morning or late-afternoon tee times through June, July, and August. Strantz died in 2005 at age fifty, and Tot Hill Farm — along with the other six courses he completed — represents a body of work that ended too early for the architectural era he was reshaping.