Oak Hills Country Club

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Typically, a course’s rating on this site takes many factors into account: the course condition, quality of grasses, layout, course maintenance, grooming, beauty, difficulty, hospitality of staff, the fun quotient and other tangible and non-tangible factors. The rating of Oak Hills Country Club in Dixon, MO is admittedly a bit high (3.5 out of 5) but its quirkiness and fun quotient won me over. As regulars to this site can attest, I love funk and Oak Hills has more than its fair share. For example, the third hole is a par 5 with a large oak tree smack dab in the middle of the fairway about 300 yards from the tee (see picture). While there are about 10 courses in Missouri with trees in the middle of a fairway, I just cannot figure out why a course designer would purposefully use this strategy . . . but I love it. Another quirky example is the 5th hole, a par 4. If you are playing the hole for the first time, you will be confused about where you are supposed to direct your drive since there is not an obvious path from tee box to fairway. There is thick natural grass just a few yards in front of the tee box and a group of medium size trees about 130 yards in the middle of your driving path guarding the entrance to the fairway (see picture).

Oak Hills Country Club is a wonderful rural 9-hole course, servicing a small town (Dixon, MO) with a population of about 1,400. There are only 2 employees who maintain the course. As a result, all of the grasses (tees, fairways, greens and roughs) have some issues but the course more than compensates for these inadequacies with its layout, uniqueness and greens, which are not typical of rural courses. The stereotypical rural course greens are small, postage stamp-size with no undulation besides an extreme slope from the back to the front of the greens. Oak Hills’ greens are small to medium size, in a variety of shapes with some dramatic breaks and undulation. The course is also very reasonably priced, for both members and non-members. The green fee for 18 holes is one of the cheapest in the state. If you going to be driving on I44, midway between Springfield and St. Louis, block off 2 hours to at least play 9 holes on this course, a few miles north of the highway.