Red Tail Golf Club

Few public courses in northeast Ohio carry the reputation Red Tail Golf Club has built since opening in 2004. Designed by Larry Gilhuly — a longtime USGA agronomist who spent decades studying turf science across the region — the course was conceived with a clear reverence for classic American parkland design. The routing moves through mature hardwoods and open meadow transitions, giving the round a natural rhythm that feels unhurried and deliberate.

Red Tail plays to a genuinely demanding standard, and the conditioning has long been a point of pride — fitting, given its designer's background in turf management. The course draws regulars from Cleveland and the surrounding suburbs who want something more considered than a standard daily-fee layout, and it rewards players who manage the ground game rather than simply throwing darts at flags.

Avon sits in Lorain County's gradual lakeplain terrain, west of Cleveland along the Lake Erie shoreline. The landscape here isn't dramatic, but Red Tail finds variety within it, and the tree canopy gives the course a sense of enclosure and scale that pure open layouts rarely achieve.