Sweetgrass Has Something For Everyone

By Tom Lang

With the 2022 National Golf Course of the year award and routinely high rankings in golf publications, it’s fair to say Island Resort & Casino’s Sweetgrass golf course speaks for itself. 

Yet, the conversation about this Upper Peninsula treasure goes so much deeper. When international golf course architect Paul Albanese designed the course that opened fifteen years ago, he incorporated more than the features of the landscape around him, infusing it with the very heritage of the Hannahville Indian Community – a federally recognized Potawatomi Indian Tribe, across whose land the course sprawls.   

“I do design golf courses for players, but also for a lot of non-golfers,” Albanese told me. “Especially for my Native American clients. I’ve said it many times about Sweetgrass specifically, I would say this golf course is designed not just for the golfers; it was designed for the community.

“We designed each hole with a story behind it, that is reflective of the whole cultural history and the heritage. That was intentional, so people who don’t play golf can still come out and say, ‘oh, this 8th hole has a story behind it; this beautiful landscape has a rhyme and a reason,’ for how and why it was created.”

Golfers encounter the rich history of the Hannahville Indian Community throughout the course, through design features and holes named after traditional Potawatomi clans, villages, allies, medicines and symbols. The dedication to nature and the area’s heritage makes for a unique golf experience.

“We put some wooden posts in the side of a hill (along the fairway) that are representative of (the remains of) a fort, from the 1650’s,” Albanese said about one of the design elements at Sweetgrass. “And the green complex itself worked out very nicely to be a redan style green. And a redan is the French word for fortress.”

The Hannahville Indian Community was so pleased with the Sweetgrass golf course, they once again called upon him when ready to expand with a second course, Sage Run.  Hiring the same architect to design additional courses at the same resort is rare, due to the desire for variety and the lure of touting multiple designers.

“I intentionally don’t have a style,” Albanese said. “I don’t carry things over from one project to another.

“I think the leaders at Island Resort appreciate that and knew that if I designed a second course there, it wasn’t going to look like, or feel or be like the first course. The courses are going to speak for themselves, and they will get variety even with the same named architect. And I think we achieved that. You can see that Sage Run and Sweetgrass are very different styles and they play differently.”

Speaking of Sage Run, the annual Island Resort Collegiate is coming September 3-4, with the University of Michigan heading the field for two days and 54 holes on the 7,309-yard layout.

“Sage Run has proven to be fun and challenging for the players, who are tested with a variety of short and long par 4s and reachable par 5s,” said IRC General Manager Tony Mancilla. “It will be interesting to see how the golf course holds up to top-flight talent and how the players react to the challenges the course presents. With several blind shots off some tees and some very demanding long par 4s, this isn’t typically a course that players go low on their first time out.”

The NCAA teams competing at the 2023 Island Resort Intercollegiate tournament are:

• South Dakota State University

• Ohio University

• Bowling Green

• Michigan

• Boise State

• Central Florida

• North Texas

• Coastal Carolina

• Illinois State

• Miami (OH)

• St. Mary’s