Harbor Club ranks No. 3 on Golfweek magazine list

Harbor Club ranked No. 3 on Golfweek magazine’s “2017 Best Courses You Can Play” list for the state of Georgia.

The list for each state is decided by Golfweek’s rating panel — which consists of some 700 voters from all 50 states and 12 countries. They rely on 10 criteria to rate a golf course, including overall land plan, variety and memorability of golf holes, conditioning and ecology, and the “Walk in the park test,” which rates the sense of the course as worthy of spending four hours on it.

Harbor Club is a family-owned, 1,000-acre golf and lake community located an hour east of Atlanta and framed by nine miles of pristine shoreline along Georgia’s Lake Oconee

Harbor Club’s sweeping lakefront design was the first offering on the east coast from the esteemed architectural partnership of Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish back in 1991. The course touches the shoreline of Lake Oconee, Georgia’s second largest lake, six different times, while also skirting four creeks and a number of interior ponds.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Golfweek rating system created by the magazine’s architecture editor, Brad Klein. In describing the system’s inception Klein allowed that, “The trick was to devise criteria that emphasized diversity, interest, fun and strategic pleasure rather than superficial first impression. We wanted to appeal to golfers and their experience, not encourage an owner to chase ratings through massive outlays in pursuit of sensory overload.”

Photo: Harbor Club