Mossy Oak Golf Club

When most golfers think of golf in Mississippi, they are probably thinking of the Gulf Coast and the Biloxi area. But if you want to experience the best golf in the state, you’ll need to head about four hours north, past Jackson and Hattiesburg, to the little town of West Point, MS. That’s where you’ll find Old Waverly and Mossy Oak, two of the best golf course layouts in the state.

West Point, MS isn’t near any large city – Memphis is the closest and it’s 2 ½ hours away – so it provides a great sense of tranquility and solitude. However, it’s also a convenient location - most major southern cities can be reached by car in less than 4 hours, so you can drive over in the morning and get in an afternoon round.

Mossy Oak is one of the newest courses in the State of Mississippi and was built in conjunction with Toxey Haas, founder of the Mossy Oak brand. The course was designed by Gil Hanse, the world’s top minimalist golf course architect. In true Hanse style, not much dirt was moved to build the course; according to Co-Founder George Bryan, the work could have “been done with a mule and a plow.” However, the dirt that was moved helped to create the ponds you see as you make your way around the layout.

Mossy Oak is built on 180 acres of what used to be the Knob Hill Dairy Farm, complete with rolling terrain and significant elevation changes. One feature I found quite helpful was the guideposts that helped steer you toward the fairway on several blind tee shots. Elevated greens with tightly mowed surrounds make for challenging up and downs if you miss the green.

Two of the course’s more memorable holes are Numbers 3 and 4. Number 3 is a very short par 4 that plays 253 from the White Tees. Long ball hitters can have a go at the green; it plays uphill, so you’ll need to carry the ball about 275 yards off the tee. Whether you go for it off the tee or not, the deep, cavernous bunkers on either side of the fairway are an intimidating sight. Number 3 requires a very accurate approach shot; the green is its plateau. Anything not on the green will either drop off the grid behind the hole or find one of the bunkers. It’s a short but demanding hole!

Number 4 is Mossy Oak’s signature par 3. The hole plays 162 yards from the White Tees and is fronted by a massive bunker that sits well below the putting surface. You’ll need to carry the ball onto the green from the tee to avoid the false front. Find one of the two bunkers in front of the green and par just became a lot tougher!

Another challenging par 3 is the 11th hole. From the White Tees, the hole plays 224 yards and is all carry over water. The green is shallow and finding one of the two pot bunkers in the back can make for an intimidating sand shot with the lake looming in the background. Take a par and run!

Both Old Waverly and Mossy Oak offer accommodations. At Mossy Oak, guests stay in spacious cottages and villas directly on the golf course. Four-bedroom “cottages” give way to a large, spacious common area, each equipped with a giant flat-screen TV, tables for take-out dining, and comfortable furniture, as well as all the amenities you’d find at a first-class hotel.

Old Waverly and Mossy Oak offer some tremendous packages that allow you to play both courses and experience everything they have to offer.

Great course, great layout, excellent conditions. This was my first time booking through GolfNow, the process was seamless once I got to the course. The nicest course I’ve played in MS.

This course is beautiful yet challenging. Only complaint is there could be better signage to know what hole you are at.

Best course I’ve played in MS by far! 100% Recommend to everyone if they get the chance to play it!

Only reason for 3 star is the punched greens. Everything else was literally perfect!!!!!

Mossy Oak gets a lot of accolades. It is a very nice course. When I played in November 2020 it had wonderful conditions throughout. The greens were very fast. Add in the slopes on the greens and they were certainly a challenge. Most had at least two tiers.

As a first time player my impression was a wide-open course. Very few trees, a couple of lakes, but nothing much looked like it would pose a challenge. I also noticed the lack off rough. Many Southern courses have deep bermuda rough-even in the fall/winter season. You generally have the fairway, and then a first cut. But the challenge comes after that, where tall native grass will make your play both unplayable and unfindable, See the photos for a sample. The course reminded me a lot of Cuscowilla, a Crenshaw/Coore design near Lake Oconee/Reynolds in Georgia. It also had the same wide open feel of Sweetens Cove, a much celebrated 9-hole course in Tennessee.

The course is fairly flat with some rolling hills but no dramatic elevation changes. It seems that the course boundaries constrained some holes that needed to be "tucked in" to make an 18 hole layout. Take the very short par 4, 3rd hole and the par 3, 9th hole as examples. With 5 sets of tees you get a choice of yardage challenge but the scoring difficulty is on and near the greens.

Another interesting feature is the placement of the tee boxes close to the previous green. Some would call that "old school" but I found it a nice touch.

All in all a wonderful course. The course offers caddies for walking and fore-caddies for riders (available if you arrange ahead of time). Next time, I might take them up on that as I had a hard time finding my way around on a few holes.

The first time I played this golf course I shot 74 with 2 double bogeys. I hit 14 greens and only missed a couple of fairways. The course seemed scoreable. The next time I played, the course reached out and bit me. I was a little off of my game and fired an 80. The course was just a grind and missing these greens is a grind to get a par. The course is the perfect balance where, if you play well, you'll score well but if you're off or miss one in the wrong place then you're going to be punished. It's a great layout and an extremely fun course. Can't wait to get back.

As soon as you finish your first 18, you'll assuredly already be thinking about your next 18 here. Mossy Oak Golf Club is as good as a links-style course can be without being on the coast. Gil Hanse was the ideal architect for this tract, as his minimalist approach was perfect for a course that feels like it was meant to be a part of the land. The course is tough but fair with a lot of risk/reward shots that give you plenty of options to think about, including a couple of drivable par-4s. Paired with Old Waverly across the road, West Point has one of the top 36-hole golf destinations in the Southeast. While Mississippi has hot and humid summers, a cart is often going to be necessary on hot days. But this course is best experienced walking, and the close tee-to-green layout makes the course a perfect walk when the weather is cooler in the spring and fall.

The balance that Gil Hanse struck at Mossy Oak is truly remarkable. It's got rolling topography without feeling Fazio-ish; it's got sneakily positioned hazards without feeling unfair; it's got a huge diversity of hole designs without feeling like the design was forced; it's got tricky recovery shots with almost no trees on the course. It's just a remarkable track. Once the native grasses finish coming in (you've gotta figure that all the sun and rain that comes in an average July will finish that off), it's going to have a legitimate claim to the title of most authentic links-style experience in the Southeast.

The first thing you notice about Gil Hanse's new course when you pull onto the property is that despite its name - Mossy Oak - there aren't many trees to be found on the vast, mostly windswept landscape. Although the club opened for preview play after Labor Day 2016 and gave golfers a glimpse late into the year, Mossy Oak officially opened this week. The course still lacks maturity, but the bones are there for this course to stretch its legs and become a truly great destination site. The course is emerging from dormancy but I found it surprisingly green for this part of the country in early March. It played firm and fast, shorter than the advertised yardage of 6,497 from the blue tees. The tips play to 7,212. There are also three shorter sets of tees ranging from 5,089 to 6,087 yards. The greens were firm and can be difficult to hold, even with a well-struck approach, to certain pin placements. I highly recommend taking a forecaddie. Mine, Tyler Cunningham, did an excellent job of showing me lines and where to land balls on greens to avoid the dreaded runoffs to closely-mown greenside areas. Here are two design aspects that I really appreciated about Hanse's work here: 1. I really enjoyed the use of bunkering that made some traps appear closer to greens upon approach, but were really in some cases 40-50 yards removed from the putting surfaces. This created a visual anomaly that I think worked very well. 2. I enjoyed the utilization of shared some fairways on the front nine. This is something that I think should be done more in modern design for obvious reasons. I walked the course and found it to be very doable, as greens and tees were very close to each other. Once the fescue grows in natural areas the course will look even better aesthetically. I really liked the use of the short par 4s throughout. No. 3 is one of my more favorite holes I've played. Nos. 8, 10, 13 and 16 also fit the bill and offered multiple strategies. The Bermuda greens do not break as much as they appear. Playing here reminded me of Streamsong and had characteristics of Kiawah, though Mossy Oak is not yet in that company. The practice facility was first rate and the staff was top notch. A special thank you to Thomas Gallagher for making me feel as if I were the only one playing that day. This course is going to get better and better with time, and I think it will inevitably work its way onto the various Top 100 public course rankings.

Where Mossy Oak earns that coveted fifth star are two main characteristics - a tricky, but totally engaging layout by Gil Hanse on a nice piece of rolling land that used to be a dairy farm and a high-class experience that's more affordable than other caddie-only experiences. Currently, players can walk or ride, but they must take a fore-caddie or caddie. In the future, there may be walking-only dates during the season, but that is to be determined.
Mossy Oak, which opened in September, is a great complement to Old Waverly across the street. Here's why:
* Old Waverly is mostly private, only accessible by guests who stay and play, while Mossy Oak is open to the public.
* Most holes on Old Waverly are tree-lined. Mossy Oak's site feels vast and wide open, sometimes with fairways that bleed into one another.
* Mossy Oak has those modern touches good players appreciate - falloffs and kick points near the greens that affect approach shots, multiple short par 4s (including the great driveable 10th) and mega-wide fairways that depend more upon angles than bunkers to defend par.
* While Old Waverly's challenges are all very apparent, Mossy Oak throws a pair of blind shots and some visual tricks to deceive players approaching the greens.
It's a course you need to play three or four times before you figure out how to attack it. That's just what Hanse wanted, a course with plenty of strategy and options. And like the Olympic course in Rio, he succeeded.

This course is a true test of your golf game. It has fast greens, large bunkers, and a layout that requires every club in the bag. Even so, I had a blast playing it. Combine a stay at the Cottages at Old Waverly with a round on it's course, and you have the makings of a legendary guy's weekend.

Just want you to know that I was asked to write the first review of our work at Mossy Oak, and while I am slightly biased, I am also immensely proud of the work we did on this course. Along with my design partner Jim Wagner, we set out to maximize the potential of this beautifully rolling piece of ground in central Mississippi and to create a course that looks like it fits on this site but might not look like it belongs in Mississippi if you just looked at the photos. The land has a series of ridges and valleys that move across it and the holes were placed to take advantage of the natural contour of the land. We emphasized the creativity of the short game shots around the greens with a lot of tightly mown approaches and chipping areas. The bunkering is a slightly cleaner look for our work and the greens rely more on slope and subtle breaks than large undulations for their challenge. The native roughs are a work in progress but we are certain that when they mature they will become the highlight of the landscape and provide much of the aesthetic appeal of the golf course. One interesting highlight is that from the 6th green, if you scan the landscape you can see all 18 green sites. This is an example of the open nature of the property and our desire to retain the meadow feel of the ground that we inherited. Green to tee walks are purposely short as we hope that the walker friendly nature of the course will lead people to walk during their round at Mossy Oak. The course also has several holes where the intended line and the correct line of play may not be readily apparent and that is something that Jim and I believe adds character to a course. A course that is worthy of further study and appreciation, is a course that will keep the golfer engaged and thoughtful in their approach to play. I could go on and on, but I just want to thank the Bryan and Haas families for all of their support at Mossy Oak. We feel like we have all worked together to create a golf course that will age gracefully, and they have adopted that same attitude to attention to detail in the club amenities as we did to the golf course. We hope you enjoy our course, we believe it offers a great example of fun and interesting golf played in a natural setting.