Somewhere around the 14th hole of your third straight full loop at Bandon, with the wind doing its level best to relocate your golf ball to the Pacific, a thought creeps in. What if the next round did not require a forced carry, a long iron, and a sports massage afterward. That is where Shorty's comes in.

Opened in May 2024, exactly 25 years to the day after the resort first swung its doors open, Shorty's is the seventh course at Bandon Dunes and the work of WAC Golf, the trio of Rod Whitman, Dave Axland, and Keith Cutten. It is named for Shorty Dow, the property's first caretaker and self-appointed governor, mayor, and sheriff, and it carries a little black bear on the logo in his honor. Like its neighbor Bandon Preserve, it is a course with a mission, with net proceeds going to the Bandon Dunes Charitable Foundation. Golfweek already has it ranked among the best public short courses in America. None of that, however, is the reason to play it.

Why Shorty's Has Become an Instant Favorite

You play it because it is the most fun a foursome can have at Bandon with money on the line. The walk is a fraction of a full loop at Bandon Dunes or Pacific Dunes, which means tired legs get a reprieve and the round moves. The holes are short enough that an ace is genuinely in play on most of them, so the skins game stays alive and somebody is going to make a number that ends an argument.

Bring two, three, even four groups and you can play in separate foursomes and still watch most of the shots go down, because there are no trees in the way and the holes huddle close together. That is a buddies-trip format if there ever was one.

Short Doesn't Mean Easy

Now, do not mistake short for soft. From the tips the 19 holes range from 51 to 161 yards, with the bulk of them sitting in that nervy 100 to 110 yard range where you have got too much club for a stock wedge and not quite enough to swing freely.

And here is the part the scorecard does not warn you about. These are not punch bowl greens funneling everything toward the cup. There is serious movement in these putting surfaces, falloffs on every side, and bunkering penal enough to turn a tap-in into a bogey. Shot making gets rewarded here. Lazy ones get punished.

Some folks will tell you these are the wildest greens on the entire property.

The Holes Worth the Trip

From where I stood, the 7th is the one that grabs you first, a tucked green guarded by large mounds down the left and falling away deep behind. Miss it in the wrong spot and you will be improvising a recovery you did not plan for.

My favorite, though, is the 13th. It plays to an elevated green and sets up like a dogleg right, daring you to take on a long forced carry over a waste area and a deep crevasse to chase the flag.

The smart play is to thread it down the left side, take the trouble out of the equation, and give yourself a look. The good news on a miss is that long is not jail. The green is long, and it shares its real estate with the 9th, so you can sail it 20 to 40 yards past your number and still find yourself on a putting surface.

Granted, it might be the ninth green, but a putt is a putt, and that is the kind of quirk that makes you grin instead of grind.

It is one of two unique double greens out here, the other being the horseshoe shared by the 6th and 18th.

Small in Scale, Big on Character

The rest of Bandon is grand. The lodges, the championship layouts, the pro shops you could happily get lost in for an hour. Shorty's is the opposite by design.

The pro shop is quaint and the footprint is small, and that is the charm of it. There is a little food shed near the start that puts out some genuinely excellent tacos and cold drinks, and that is your one and only chance to provision.

So here is the move. Grab a taco, then grab an extra beer for the walk, because this is a fun loop and a skins game always plays better with a fresh one in hand.

The Round Everyone Remembers

You do not come to Bandon to play Shorty's instead of the big courses. You come to play it because it is the round where everybody loosens up, the bets get loud, and somebody finally makes the hole-in-one they have been threatening all week.

Leave room for it.