Fox Hopyard Golf Club

Overview: Fox Hopyard Golf Club is an 18-hole Roger Rulewich design in East Haddam, Connecticut, set beside Devil's Hopyard State Park. The official course tour lists the black tees at 6,912 yards, while the profile carries par 72 for the current routing. Rulewich uses the broad 530-acre property as a sequence of distinct rooms: wooded slopes, open pasture, wetlands, brooks, ponds, exposed rock and old stone walls all appear in the round. The result is a course that asks for placement and trajectory as much as length. Fairways can look generous from the tee, yet the best lines are often defined by a wetland edge, a diagonal hazard or a green approach that narrows late.

History: Fox Hopyard opened for play in 2001 after Bill Sandri developed the East Haddam property with Roger Rulewich, a longtime associate and protégé of Robert Trent Jones Sr. The design has a clear Golden Age influence without pretending to be a restoration: it borrows the value of strategic angles, varied green approaches and natural land movement, then applies those ideas to a modern woodland site. Rulewich's routing lets the property do much of the visual work. Holes turn through forest and pasture, cross small streams and use changes in elevation to separate one challenge from the next. The club's official handbook and course-tour material continue to identify Rulewich and the 2001 opening, making the course's identity unusually well documented.

Did You Know? Fox Hopyard's official tour describes the opening hole as a downhill par four and the second as an uphill par four whose wetland carry makes it play longer than the card suggests. That early contrast captures the course's central idea: the number on the scorecard is only the start of the decision.