St Bernard Golf Club

Par 68 courses have a reputation for being afterthoughts — short layouts that serious golfers pass over on the way to something longer. St Bernard Golf Club in Richfield invites a second look at that assumption. A card heavy with par 3s and short par 4s rewards precision and course management over raw power, and players who treat it as a warm-up round often find themselves humbled by the end.

Richfield sits in Summit County, in the rolling terrain of northeastern Ohio between Akron and Cleveland — a region with a surprisingly deep recreational golf culture fed by those two metro areas. The landscape here is characteristic of the glaciated Western Reserve: modest but persistent elevation changes, mature hardwoods, and the kind of open-sky midwestern light that makes late-afternoon rounds worth lingering in.

Without a long card to hide behind, every hole at a course like this has to earn its place on its own merits. St Bernard is the sort of club where local knowledge matters, regulars develop genuine affection for specific holes, and a scratch player can be made to feel very ordinary indeed.