The Front Nine
Full eighteen — played from the white tees
You can feel this isn’t an average course the second you pull in. Employees come out to your vehicle, take your clubs out of the trunk, walk them over and load them into your cart for you. Then you make a pit stop at the driving range on your way out, where a bucket of balls is already waiting so you can warm up before the round. That is not how our mornings usually start.
The golf course backs it up. It’s a Nicklaus Design layout and it looks like one — everything is shaped, nothing is where it is by accident, and the whole property is flat-out beautiful. We said some version of “okay, that’s nice” to each other more times on the front nine than we’d like to admit.
The conditions are where it separates itself from most of what we’ve played around here. The course is very well maintained — fairways, tee boxes, bunkers, all of it looked genuinely cared for.
The greens were the highlight, and they’re also the hardest part of the nine. They’re fast, and they are anything but flat — hills and uneven terrain running right through them, so you’re reading break in more than one direction and the speed punishes you the second you guess wrong. Difficult, but the fun kind of difficult. If you’re coming off the slower local stuff, take that seriously on your first few putts, because they get away from you quicker than you’re expecting.
The carts have GPS, too, which for two guys who normally pace off a sprinkler head and guess felt like a genuine luxury.
The Back Nine
The back nine is more of the same, and we mean that as a compliment. The maintenance holds up the whole way through — there’s no point where it starts to feel like they spent all the attention on the front and coasted home.
One thing we weren’t expecting: actual restroom buildings out on the course. Real structures, not a portajohn parked in the trees. They’re locked, and the cart’s GPS puts the access code up on the screen once you get close enough. That’s a genuinely nice touch, and it’s the kind of detail that separates a place like this from most of what we play.
The GPS giveth, though, and the GPS taketh away. The carts are geofenced, and at the skill level we’re working with, that turns into a problem. Put one far enough offline and you drive into a restricted area, and the cart simply locks up. Done. We ended up out of it, pushing the thing back to the fairway by hand. If you keep it in play you’ll never know the feature exists. We do not keep it in play.
They bookend the round the same way they start it, too. When you bring the cart back at the end, employees are standing by to clean your clubs and get them squared away so they’re ready to grab and go the next time you head out. That’s a really nice touch, and it’s the last thing that happens to you here — which is probably the point.
Watch the Round
Watch on YouTube
Course Photos
The Verdict
Timber Banks is a very nice golf course. If you’re an above-average golfer, give it a try — you’ll get a beautifully kept track and greens that make you earn every putt, and you’ll walk off glad you played it.
We are not above-average golfers. For people who golf like we do and don’t always keep it in the fairway, there are courses around here that are more forgiving, cost a good bit less, and still give you a great time. That’s the honest math on it for us. None of that is the course’s fault, though — what you get for $140 is genuinely there, we’re just not good enough yet to get the use out of it. At that price and at the level we’re playing right now, we won’t be back for a while.