River Hills Golf & Country Club

The course

The golf at River Hills Golf & Country Club

Jackson built River Hills in 1989 on rolling ground in Little River, and it plays to a par of 72 across 6,923 yards with a slope of 136 and a medium difficulty rating. Champions Bermuda greens, a full practice setup including chipping green, driving range, practice bunker and putting green, and a course record of 62 held by Ted Potter Jr. give a sense of the standard the course can reach.

The layout is the thing players talk about first. Reviewers describe it as narrow and challenging with no big open fairways, and one counted water in play on 16 of the 18 holes, which he considered too much. Whether that reads as a virtue or a flaw depends on the golfer. Accurate players tend to love it, and the review language is full of words like beautiful, excellent and challenging alongside repeated praise for the conditioning of fairways and greens. One group liked it enough to play it twice in the same week. Another player noted it was not too hard for golfers shooting in the nineties, so the narrowness is not disqualifying for mid handicaps.

The rating profile is solid and stable: 4.23 across 643 reviews, with 279 five star and 265 four star scores against 78 threes, 13 twos and only 8 ones. Service draws consistent praise, with staff described as friendly and professional and one reviewer calling the service phenomenal. Complaints cluster in two places. Conditioning of the first cut has been criticized as hard packed dirt and dead grass in dry periods, though the fairways and greens themselves are rarely faulted. Pace is the other issue, with at least one six hour round reported. Some players also rank it below the marquee names in the area while still rating the course highly, which is a fair reading of where it sits. The course record of 62 shows what is available to a player who can shape the ball into these corridors, and the low count of one and two star reviews suggests very few groups leave feeling short changed.