Date played: 10/20/2013
If you’ve been reading this blog from the very beginning, you’ve already been to Hyatt Hills with me. It’s where, on October 15, 2015, a pair of Manhattan commuters asked to join my group on the 6th hole, and one of them – a man named Kermit – told me he and his wife were trying to play every public course in New Jersey. That conversation is the reason this site exists.
But that wasn’t my first trip to Clark. Five days after a random Tuesday round at Cranbury, I played Hyatt Hills for the first time on October 20, 2013, with the same coworker who joined me at Stonybrook earlier that year. That same coworker would be with me again two years later, the day Kermit played up on us. At the time, though, neither of us had any idea we were standing on the spot where the whole thing would start. It was just a new nine-hole course in Union County.
I wish I had more to tell you about that first round. Truthfully, I don’t remember much of it, and the scorecard doesn’t help – nothing on it stands out. Luckily, the place itself has a better story than my round did.
The course
Hyatt Hills is a nine-hole, par-36 layout that plays 3,220 yards from the back tees, with two par-3s, five par-4s, and two par-5s. The interesting part is how it handles an 18-hole round. Plenty of nine-hole courses send you around a second time from a different set of tees. At Hyatt Hills, on both of my visits, every green had two flags – one in each of two distinct holes – so the second nine played to different targets. I haven’t seen that setup anywhere else on the journey. It’s also why the 6th hole was the 15th on the day I met Kermit.
The heart of the course is holes 6 through 8, with the latter two playing alongside a large pond. Elsewhere, the 2nd is a roughly 500-yard par-5 and the #1 handicap hole, while the par-3 3rd is the shortest on the card at 157 yards from the tips.
Everything else
Hyatt Hills bills itself a golf “complex,” and it earns the name. There’s a 50-station driving range (11 bays covered and heated, now with Toptracer), a putting and chipping area, an 18-hole miniature golf course called Mt. Hyatt with waterfalls and streams, and Oh’ Brian’s, a pub with a long craft-beer list.
Back to where it started
As for where it ranks: I’ve only played Hyatt Hills twice, in 2013 and 2015, and I haven’t been back since. On golf alone, it’s a middle-of-the-road public – a solid nine that isn’t likely to blow you away. But no course on my list holds a bigger place in the story of this blog.
When I walked off the 9th green in October 2013, I filed Hyatt Hills away as a decent nine-hole course and moved on. Two years later I’d come back with the same coworker, a twosome would play up on us on the 6th, and everything would change. In that very first post, I wrote that I might even run into a man named Kermit again. The closest I’ve come was at Ramblewood, where my playing partner told me they knew Kermit through an amateur golf tour. All these years later, I’m still waiting.
