There’s a particular wind that lives out on the Kansas plains—a living, howling thing that slides off the Smoky Hills, rises through the sagebrush and whistles its way across Prairie Dunes Country Club. It’s not just a meteorological reality: It’s a tester of patience, a teacher of resilience and for the teenagers from Hutchinson High School, an oftentimes loud reminder that they’re playing somewhere different. Because this is their home course.
Many high school teams get to load up a van and head to the local country club for practice. Even my farm-town Nebraska high school got to step inside the club in the nearby “big city” (until range balls started going missing and we got shunned to the muni).
But Prairie Dunes isn’t some local country club.
The Perry and Press Maxwell masterpiece is one of the crown jewels of American golf. Home to a litany of past and future USGA championships, there’s a reason some say it’d have a case to be No. 1 if it was near an ocean. The course was born from the vision of Perry Maxwell in 1937, when he designed the original nine holes to flow effortlessly through the area’s natural sand dunes. His son, Press, added a second nine in 1957 that perfectly matched the elder Maxwell’s style—making Prairie Dunes one of the few father-son collaborations to achieve such architectural harmony and acclaim.
Walk the fairways today and you’ll find both serenity and challenge. Greens that fall away into tightly mown runoff areas. Tees perched above rumpled landscapes that channel the wind like a funnel. And “gunch” that’ll swallow every golf ball in your bag when that wind shows its teeth.
It’s the kind of place golfers worldwide make pilgrimages to. The Hutchinson High boys’ and girls’ golf teams make the trip after their last bell. And they can thank Charlie Pierce. He’s coached the Salthawks for 23 years and been a member at Prairie Dunes for 35.
“I went to the board and asked for two tee times a couple days a week,” Pierce, a biology teacher and golf lifer, said. “The answer was ‘Yes’ 23 years ago, and it still is. No matter what, the folks here at Prairie Dunes have always understood that the club is a part of Hutchinson.”
Since then, boys and girls from Hutchinson and nearby Buhler have been gifted more than just practice time. Since Pierce’s request, Prairie Dunes has become a place where local kids caddie and work summer jobs that bring them into the rhythms of the game. Beyond hitting balls on a top course, it’s a system designed to teach young people how to be an adult.
About a decade ago, the club took its relationship with local players even further. Inspired by the story of Johnny Miller, who was born and raised in San Francisco and in 1963 was invited to join the Olympic Club to develop in an elite environment his family wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford, Prairie Dunes adopted a similar model. With Pierce acting as a kind of local scout, the club has offered access to young players who demonstrate talent, work ethic and maturity from families without the means to join a private club.
Ty Adkins was one of them. Now playing Division I golf at Wichita State, Adkins was just an eighth grader when he sat in front of the Prairie Dunes board as a candidate. “I knew what an opportunity it was,” he says. “I was nervous, but ready. I wasn’t going to blow it.”
He didn’t. Adkins has been part of the Prairie Dunes family ever since as both an honorary member and a caddie. And it’s not just his short game he credits to the course.
“Prairie Dunes taught me how to carry myself,” he says. “It’s a place that expects something from you, that changes how you show up. Not just in golf, but in life….You’re out there, caddying for members from all over and they talk to you like you belong. I still get texts from some of them, wishing me good luck before a college event.”
He learned how to read people and how to hold conversations with executives, doctors and architects for 18 holes. “You get to see what success looks like, just riding alongside it,” Adkins says. “That was big for me.”
The exposure not just to better playing conditions, but to people, conversations, and habits has been life-changing. “It’s more than just being on the golf course,” Adkins says. “It’s seeing what’s possible. I owe everything to Prairie Dunes.”
For the national members who fly in from around the country, the presence of high schoolers on the course may seem surprising—but it’s also endearing.
Pierce estimates nearly half his current team is playing with donated clubs thanks to members who pass down their used sets to his players. One left-handed freshman girl showed up with nothing but a desire to play. After a phone call to a member, she had a full set and a spot on the team.
“People come from all over to play here,” Pierce says. “But the kids who grow up here, who learn here, they give it soul.”
It all happens because the board trusts Piece to run a tight operation. “I tell the kids every year: This is not a right. This is a privilege,” Pierce says. “If you mess around out there, you’re done. That’s not a punishment. That’s a fact.”
It’s not said with malice, but with care. Pierce has served on the Prairie Dunes greens committee for three decades and worked 34 U.S. Opens in operations for the USGA. He knows how to maintain a course. He also knows how to protect its culture.
“This place is second only to my family in terms of what it means to me,” Pierce adds. “And the kids know that.”
Safe to say they don’t slip the Pro V1 range balls into their bags like some of my high school teammates. They fix divots. They rake bunkers. They say please and thank you. Every year the team steps in to help maintain the course, scattering across fairways with bottles of sand and seed on a Saturday.
Their reward? Continued permission to enter the gates. And pizza. Pierce brings it in after the work is done—a tradition now baked into each year.
There’s something deeply Midwestern about it all. Just kids giving back to the local course that gives so much to them, then grabbing a slice or three in the clubhouse. Mitchell Rice, a senior on the team, says it’s one of his favorite parts of the season: “We get to see what goes into keeping a place like this in shape. It makes you appreciate it even more.”
And while that is all quaint and nice, the players still have to go out and play one of the most demanding courses on the planet.
“You can’t fake your way around Prairie Dunes,” says Pierce. “It forces these kids to think and play a lot better when we go elsewhere for tournaments.”
Other teams notice, too. When Hutchinson hosts its annual invitational at a municipal course across town, players from Kansas City and beyond make a point of swinging over to the Prairie Dunes pro shop to grab a hat or headcover.
“I’ve had guys come up and say, ‘Wait, you get to practice here?’” Rice says. “It’s cool to see it through their eyes. It reminds us not to take it for granted.”
Alumni certainly don’t. Some come back just to visit with their old coach. Some to play. “They stop by to say thanks,” Pierce says. “They don’t always understand the opportunity when they’re kids, but they get it now.”
In an era when private golf can often lean further into exclusivity, Prairie Dunes offers a quiet alternative: a place where world-class architecture coexists with real-world access. Golf doesn’t always get things like this right. But in Hutchinson, Kansas, population 40,000, there’s a model worth our attention.
