Ballyneal Golf & Hunt Club (Mulligan Course)

Overview: The Mulligan Course at Ballyneal Golf & Hunt Club is a private 12-hole par-3 layout by Tom Doak and the Renaissance Golf team near Holyoke, Colorado. It sits among the sandy chop hills of eastern Colorado, using small rises, native grasses, wind and shaped greens to create a compact course with a distinctly strategic character. Unlike a conventional 18-hole card, the Mulligan is designed around choice: the holes can be played in different orders and in shorter loops, so the round changes according to the player’s time, imagination and preferred sequence. The scale is intimate, but the shot-making is not simplistic. Doak used bowls, high grass lines and varied green shapes to make recovery and trajectory important on almost every hole. No standard total yardage is stored because the exact routing is a flexible 12-green par-3 experience rather than a fixed championship scorecard.

History: Ballyneal developed the Mulligan as a second course to complement Tom Doak’s main 18-hole inland links. The Renaissance Golf team finished shaping it midway through the 2016 season, and the club opened it for play soon afterward. Its name honours Charlie Mulligan, Ballyneal’s original caddie and a friend of the club. The project gave the property a different kind of golf: a shorter, more playful layout that still uses the same sandy ground and wind-exposed landscape as the main course. Rather than repeating the full-length design, the Mulligan adds another way to explore the site and gives Ballyneal a course where creative short-game shots are the central event.

Did You Know? Doak describes the ninth green as the smallest he had built at the time, while other greens were deliberately made much larger and wilder. That contrast is part of the point: the Mulligan treats each green as an individual problem instead of asking every hole to follow the same template.