This aerial view shows the Detroit Golf Club clubhouse and course.
By: Jonathan Szczepaniak | Metro | Published August 5, 2024
DETROIT — When the gates open at Detroit Golf Club for the 2025 Rocket Mortgage Classic on June 23, spectators should make an effort to walk around each hole and take a different approach on how they view it this time.
They should inspect the greens, take note of the surrounding trees, and most importantly, just take inventory of how the course is laid out, because when the 2026 RMC rolls around, everything they had noticed in 2025 will have been significantly altered.
Detroit Golf Club, specifically the North Course that holds 17 of the 18 holes at the RMC, has been in the public eye for the last six years, as it’s been the home of the Rocket Mortgage Classic, and with that came self-reflection as to what the club needs to improve on as the host of a PGA Tour event.
“Golf has sort of exploded in the last several years, so we’re benefiting a lot from what other people are benefiting from,” club President Michael Pricer said. “There’s no question that the PGA’s RMC event has created a lot of local and national exposure, which has significantly, I think, helped. Our member levels, up until last year, were at the highest or equal to the highest they’ve ever been. We had a little bit of changes this year with economic things, like we have a lot of mortgage people at the club and with interest rates and things, we’ve had some minor adjustments, but nothing material. I think we’re still over 740 members. It’s a big number.”
Once the final putt falls into the cup and another champion is crowned in 2025, it will be all systems go as the club begins phase one of its $16.1 million renovation, beginning with the North Course and with the South Course following after its completion.
It will be the first major transformation in Detroit Golf Club’s storied history, and the finished product is expected to captivate the 2026 RMC crowd, when the North Course is set to be completed.
Areas of focus for the club are upgrades to its 30-year-old irrigation system, reshaping and rebuilding greens, adding bunkers and tees, removing trees, and improvements to the club’s drainage, which has been a massive area of concern. Pricer said the club’s future was potentially in jeopardy without the passing of the project.
“I think it would be really hard to maintain this course in the next three to five years,” Pricer said. “What that looks like is just more time that the course is closed because we can’t get it in a place to be able to play. Do I believe that there could come a point where we would have failure of systems? Yes. On the irrigation side, the irrigation is 30 years old. We’re buying parts off-market because you can’t buy these parts anymore direct from the dealers. There’s kind of an end of life situation we have to look around and say, while not every aspect of the golf course is at the end of life, there’s enough parts that show that if we don’t do something, that we’re going to have some serious trouble.”
The iconic pond in front of the 14th green with the RMC sponsor signage is also expected to be removed and replaced by two large bunkers.
Over the RMC’s tenure at Detroit Golf Club, weather delays have been a consistent issue for the course, but it extends far beyond the weeklong PGA tournament.
In comparison to how an Oakland Hills Country Club can drain water at nearly 20 inches an hour, Detroit Golf Club sits more near 6-7 inches an hour of drainage. According to Pricer, the ongoing issue became too significant to be overlooked.
“We’ve been sort of piecemealing the problem for at least five or six years,” Pricer said. “Strategically and as club fiduciaries, we realize that having weather events is going to greatly decrease our ability to provide the club to our memberships as they expect it. When that golf course shuts down, we lose revenue.”
Leading the renovation project is Philidelphia-based architect Tyler Rae, who specializes in restoring Donald Ross-designed golf courses like Detroit Golf Club.
In 2023, Rae won Golf Digest’s 2023 Restoration of the Year award for his work on the Lookout Mountain Club in Georgia and received third for his restoration of the Wampanoag Country Club in Connecticut, a Donald Ross course.
“Tyler specializes in restorations of Ross courses, and a huge part of the emphasis was restoring it back to a lot of the original Ross design,” Pricer said. “Everyone asks us if we’re going to take all the trees out like Oakland (Hills), and the answer is no. We’re going to take trees out, but we’re also going to plant trees. One of the things that I really didn’t understand until I became immersed in this project was when you put fertilizer down on a golf course, trees grow faster than they’re expected to, and they grow in ways that you didn’t expect them to grow. They start impeding on the course, and one would say that trees are pretty. Yes, they are, but it creates issues for growing grass.”
Regardless of how well someone’s work speaks for themselves in Rae’s case, bringing on a different look can be tough for members to accept, as is being unable to play the course for two weeks because of the RMC tournament.
The Detroit Golf Club realized this when member voting concluded for the renovation project on March 16, leaving the approval rating at 57 percent.
Funding via membership is based on an equity assessment with full Class A members paying the full $5,760 assessment and a monthly dues of $170 and seniors, juniors and immediate or social members paying based on membership details.
“A lot of people don’t deal with change very well, especially when the change is hitting their pocketbook,” Pricer said. “I think it’s normal for some percentage of people to say they don’t want it, but there’s a broad base of support for the project. I’ve had members that voted no come up to me since the vote, and they literally apologized to me on the driving range, and they told me that they totally understand now why we need to do this project. I’m not saying that it’s 20 people, but it’s been a handful of people. If five or six people are telling me that, and I’m just one person of many at the club, I would bet others are hearing it from other friends of friends who are in the club that were mostly against the project.”
From the perspective of El Ryans, who’s been a member of the club since 2011, the project became more of a necessity than a burden to members.
“It’s a lot in terms of expense, but infrastructure is so important,” Ryans said. “I don’t care what it is, whether it’s your city, your state, your country, or your golf club, you got to have infrastructure, because without infrastructure, it just collapses and gets worse.”
Ryans and his wife were often visitors to East Lake Golf Club, located in Atlanta and home of the The Tour Championship as part of the PGA Tour Playoffs for the FedEx Cup.
“I was marveling at the amenities of the club (at East Lake), and this is what my wife said that really put it into perspective, and I think we’d only done three PGA events at the time (at Detroit Golf Club), and she said how these guys (at East Lake) had been doing it for 40-60 (years),” Ryans said. “She was like, ‘If we had 40-60 PGA events, just imagine how our club would look.’ I think what that taught me was that when you can count on revenue from a tournament, you can do a lot more planning and a lot more amenities.”
Courtesy of the RMC and its assistance in helping membership numbers skyrocket, Detroit Golf Club last year concluded a massive in-house renovation to its clubhouse and various amenities.
Amenities currently offered at Detroit Golf Club include tennis courts, pickleball, an adult and child pool, dining experiences, a wine club, and family-oriented activities as well.
“We renovated the Champion’s Grille, which essentially is a gathering place after golf, before golf, and breakfast in the morning,” Pricer said. “It’s a full utility space for our members to enjoy. There’s dining up there. It’s not formal dining, but it’s what I would call limited dining up there. We also finished the women’s locker room. It might be one of the nicest women’s locker rooms in the state of Michigan. We did that for a lot of reasons. People would say, ‘Oh, why would you spend money on that,’ but if you think about the perspective of banquets, showers and weddings, the product that we have now is very attractive to women who want to get ready up there and prepare for one of their events. The third aspect was fire suppression and safety for the club. We had some things going on with our water pressure, and we recognized that we needed to improve the ability to get the pressure up.”
It was money well spent for Detroit Golf Club, as Pricer said weddings and events have seen an increase over the last year.
“It would be hard for me to quote an exact change, but I do notice when I’m here that they’re busy,” Pricer said. “Our banquet team, who deals with all that stuff, is very busy. I would say it’s been a growing revenue source for us as a club. I think the answer is yes. It doesn’t hurt when you have TV coverage for four or five days straight, and media coverage for a week and a half straight, around the Rocket Mortgage. This is a little gem that’s tucked around Seven Mile and Woodward that people know more about now than they ever knew about it.”
With more renovations and more exposure from the tournament, it wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone if Detroit Golf Club is back at over 800 members fairly soon.
If one thing’s for certain, young golfers are now becoming members, and it’s a welcome change for the club,
“The club was trending in the right direction, but slowly,” Ryans said. “Right when the Rocket Mortgage came in, a lot of real golfers, young guys, have started joining the club, and that’s a good thing. I saw an increase in younger membership and increase in, what I call, real golfers, like people who have played in college. I’d say families as well.”
Call Staff Writer Jonathan Szczepaniak at (586) 498-1090.