Dancing Rabbit Golf Club (Oaks)

Overview: The Oaks Course at Dancing Rabbit Golf Club is a Tom Fazio and Jerry Pate design in the rolling woodlands of east-central Mississippi. It works through pine and hardwood forest, gentle hills and valleys, with spring-fed streams appearing as both visual boundaries and strategic hazards. The course has a woodland identity, but it is not a flat corridor course: changes in elevation, tree lines and the direction of the creeks alter the preferred route from hole to hole. Its par-72 layout offers a range of tee positions, and the design team used the natural character of the property to create a course that can be approached in different ways depending on the player’s line and confidence.

History: Dancing Rabbit was developed for the Pearl River Resort and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians as a 36-hole destination. The Azaleas Course is dated 1997, followed by The Oaks in June 1999. Fazio and Pate collaborated on both courses, which share the same broad setting but are not simply duplicated routings. The Oaks is the later course in the pair and is the profile attached to this record. The resort’s development gave the designers a large tract of woodland and allowed them to build two par-72 courses with different hole sequences within the same landscape.

Did You Know? More than two miles of spring-fed creeks and streams weave through the two Dancing Rabbit courses. The water is part of the property’s natural drainage pattern, so the feature appears repeatedly across the round rather than being limited to a single lake or finishing hole.