UW-Green Bay Closes 90-Year-Old Golf Course, Making Way For Student Recreation Center

Shorewood Golf Course has closed after 90 years in Green Bay. And the news could mean big changes for the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the surrounding community.

The university announced this summer that it would close the 9-hole course, which is nestled into a corner of its Brown County campus. The area will become a student recreation and engagement center.

“Times change, and it just felt like the right time to be able to make this decision,” said Chancellor Michael Alexander.

Shorewood has been losing money for years, and very few students used the course, he explained. There’s no shortage of golf courses in Brown County, and the extra space opens up new opportunities for the university, Alexander said.

The former golf course will become a hub for outdoor recreation — something students say they want more access to, he said.

Once maintenance staff stopped mowing the course, a rare “oak savanna” began to emerge, Alexander said.

“So that falls in line with our environmental mission and the ecological work that we do,” he said. “It also gives us an opportunity to maybe refocus where the trailheads are for our arboretum and provide more access to the community for that.”

The Cofrin Memorial Arboretum encompasses nearly 300 acres surrounding UW-Green Bay’s campus. There are plans to replace all the bridges on its trails, Alexander said. The university is always working to engage the local community, he said.

“We don’t have unlimited resources. We felt the best way to do that was really through the arboretum. We can engage a much broader group of people if we really do the arboretum right and that’s what we’re trying to do,” he said.

It’s too soon to say whether there’ll be new buildings in the area of campus where the golf course stood.

“At this point, we are very much still in the planning stages of how to move everything forward,” Alexander said.

But there could be some changes by this spring, he noted.

The course was built in 1931, making it decades older than the university. With planning underway for UW-Green Bay’s campus, Brown County purchased the course and donated it to the state in 1969, according to the university’s archives.

Some golfers have expressed sadness over the decision to close Shorewood, Alexander said. But the university must use its resources in ways that benefit its students, he said. The golf teams haven’t used the course in years.

“We hope that people will understand why we made the choice that we made and see all the exciting things that are happening on our campus, the enrollment growth, the fact that the university is in a really good position right now,” he said.

Approved earlier this summer, the two-year state budget includes nearly $100 million for UW-Green Bay to replace its library.