The North Course

Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner tore the old Champions Course down to the dirt in a two-year, roughly $30-million rebuild, reopening it in June 2024 as the North Course. This is the ground that hosted the PGA Tour's Tournament of Champions from 1969 to 1998 and seven straight World Golf Championships from 1999 to 2007, and Hanse's brief was to make it worthy of a bigger job—the permanent home of the NCAA Division I men's and women's championships. The original bones trace to Dick Wilson's 1965 layout with companion holes by his associate Joe Lee. What Hanse left is wider off the tee than you'd expect and far more punishing around greens that fall away in every direction.

The par is a conventional 72 but the routing is anything but—Hanse loaded it with muscular par 4s past 500 yards, a drivable par-3 12th under 300, and a closing par 5 near 605. From the championship tees it runs to roughly 7,500 yards, and the tournament setup asks players to think on every shot rather than overpower it. Bunkering is bold and irregular, the greens are large and heavily contoured, and the college fields who play here rarely go low. For a visitor it plays as a genuine test with real pedigree—you're walking the same corridors as three decades of tour winners.

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The finish at the clubhouse

The North closes on a muscular par 5 of just over 600 yards that bends back toward the Spanish-Colonial clubhouse, water pressing the approach and the hillside 'La Costa' crest watching over the green. It's the hole three decades of tour champions finished on, and it still asks whether you lay up or take on the carry with something riding on it.