June 10th, 2025 • By Cade Schafer

The Greener Golf Journey Map is a specialized service that equips golf courses with a clear, actionable strategy for their future. Through a comprehensive portfolio of supporting documents, it identifies opportunities to enhance course design, operations, and community integration while honoring each course’s unique heritage. At its core, a Journey Map seeks to weave together the rich tapestry of a golf course’s past, present, and future into a cohesive narrative that informs, guides, and inspires future development and management practices.

Building upon the foundation of a traditional golf course master plan, the Journey Map offers a more holistic scope, a stronger commitment to sustainability, and an evidence-based approach to long-term planning. While it includes core components like strategic design recommendations, it goes far beyond by integrating environmental stewardship practices, operational performance metrics, stakeholder insight, and cultural preservation. The result is a holistic framework that helps courses evolve responsibly, both as a memorable golf experience and as a meaningful ecological and community asset.

The Past: Tracing the Origins of the Course 

Greener Golf’s exploration of Radrick Farms’ past began with the land itself. Shaped by glaciers and centuries of human activity, from Indigenous stewardship to farming, timber harvesting, and gravel mining, the site’s complex history gave rise to a diverse and dynamic landscape. Rolling hills, glacial outwash plains, and oak-hickory forests became more than scenery; they shaped the strategic foundation of the course. When Pete and Alice Dye arrived in the 1960s, it was this terrain that guided their routing, with course features placed in direct response to the natural and human forces that had shaped the landscape for millennia.

Documenting the creation of the golf course itself was a key focus of the Past section. Greener Golf traced the formative years between the Matthaei family’s land donation in the early 1960s and the course’s official opening in 1965, a period marked by risk-taking, ambition, and collaboration. During this time, a range of individuals shaped the project’s trajectory: university leaders, students, architects, contractors, and advocates for the land. While Pete and Alice Dye ultimately designed the course, it was the combined influence of these figures that brought Radrick Farms to life. 

Capturing this history was about more than recounting a construction timeline; it was about preserving the spirit of cooperation and care that made the course possible. For any golf course, this origin story matters. It defines the values, priorities, and relationships that continue to shape how the course is maintained, played, and understood today.

The Present: Evaluating Where Radrick Stands Today

With a strong foundation in place, Greener Golf turned its attention to understanding where Radrick Farms Golf Course stands today. This phase of the Journey Map focused on evaluating current operations across economic, environmental, and social dimensions to establish a clear baseline for improvement.

To guide this assessment, Greener Golf applied a structured set of sustainability and performance criteria to evaluate a wide range of indicators, from water use, chemical inputs, and greenhouse gas emissions to financial health, labor structure, habitat quality, and waste management. This comprehensive analysis helped Radrick benchmark its operations against regional and national standards, highlighting both areas of strength and opportunities for improvement.

But numbers alone cannot capture the full picture. To better understand Radrick’s broader impact, Greener Golf also conducted in-depth interviews with long-time staff and members. These conversations offered insight into how the course shapes the lives of those who work and play there, revealing a deep sense of connection, pride, and purpose that statistics cannot fully express. 

In 2022, Radrick Farms Golf Course partnered with Greener Golf to embark on a comprehensive Journey Map process aimed at guiding the course into its next chapter. The project set out to foster a sustainable and prosperous future for the course, one grounded in environmental care, economic viability, university engagement, and an enhanced golfing experience.

Radrick Farms Golf Course is a semi-private golf course owned and operated by the University of Michigan. It is a championship caliber, 18-hole golf course located on 507 acres of natural, rolling terrain just east of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Being one of Pete and Alice Dye’s earliest 18-hole designs, Radrick Farms has a truly extraordinary history filled with important figures, events, and stories that have all helped Radrick Farms become one of the top collegiate courses in the United States today. Since opening its doors in 1965 to University of Michigan faculty and staff, Radrick Farms Golf Course has left a meaningful imprint on the University, the broader Ann Arbor community, and the ecosystems it inhabits.

The structure of the Journey Map was organized around three key components: The Past, Present, and Future, each delivered as a standalone document with its own purpose and depth. While each component can function independently, together they form a cohesive narrative that captures the full identity, performance, and long-term vision of Radrick Farms Golf Course.

Radrick Farms Golf Course layout drawing by Pete Dye, 1964 (Source: RFGC Legacy Archive) 

Final Thoughts 

The Future: Shaping What Comes Next

The final phase of the Journey Map brought everything full circle. Greener Golf translated the lessons drawn from Radrick’s past and present into a strategic vision for its future.

From ecological enhancements and infrastructure upgrades to design refinements and campus engagement, the recommendations addressed every corner of the course. These included reducing maintained turf and expanding native habitat, modernizing irrigation, increasing accessibility through mini-tee programming, and building stronger ties with the University of Michigan through research partnerships and educational initiatives. Each recommendation was designed to help Radrick evolve intentionally, aligning with its mission while contributing to broader university goals like climate action, environmental stewardship, and human health.

A key feature of this phase was a comprehensive hole-by-hole analysis. For every hole, Greener Golf documented its design evolution, evaluated current playability and environmental condition through heat mapping, and offered targeted recommendations, such as restoring original bunker placements, adjusting mowing lines, and enhancing aesthetics. This archive not only preserves the course’s architectural legacy but also gives Radrick a clear guide for phased restoration and renovation work in the years ahead.

More than a report, the Radrick Farms Journey Map stands as a living framework, meticulously designed to evolve with the course. By thoroughly documenting its past, analyzing its present, and planning for its future, Greener Golf has equipped Radrick Farms with a clear and intentional path forward, grounded in its foundational values and informed by data, design, and a deep respect for the land. Their Journey Map ensures that their story is not only preserved, but actively used to shape better decisions, stronger stewardship, and more meaningful connections with the community. Beyond Radrick Farms, this journey map sets a precedent for the golf industry, demonstrating how strategic, long-term planning can enhance the environmental and social value of golf courses worldwide. It serves as a blueprint for continuous improvement and innovation, inspiring other courses to follow suit.

To learn more about our Radrick Farms Golf Course Journey Map project, visit our Greener Work page.