Drive through Orland Park long enough and you'll notice it: seven water towers, each carrying the same phrase. World's Golf Center. It's on the village flag too. The kind of civic branding that looks like hyperbole until you learn where it came from, and then it looks like something stranger. In 1996, village spokeswoman Jodi Marneris told a reporter that someone had counted 1,089 golf holes within a 15-mile radius of the village. That number went on the water towers. It's been there for three decades.
Here's the part that gets lost every time someone repeats the nickname: a 15-mile radius from Orland Park reaches Lemont, Palos Park, Tinley Park, Frankfort, and a good chunk of the south suburbs. The claim was never that Orland Park itself had more golf than anywhere on earth. It was that the region around it did. The town just happened to be the one that put the number on its water towers and kept it there.
So if the marketing math is regional, what actually earns the name locally? Not a slogan. Three institutions, still standing, that have spent decades proving the reputation is more than paint.
The Course That Predates the Slogan by 70 Years
Long before anyone counted holes in a radius, three Coghill brothers were laying track for the Indiana and Illinois railroads. At a summer barbecue and golf outing, they got introduced to the game. They liked it enough to buy land in Lemont and build what became Cog Hill, the club whose Dubsdread course would later host the BMW Championship. A few years after that, the brothers diversified further and bought two more properties, including a course in Orland Park called Silver Lake Golf Club. Silver Lake's own roots stretch back to the late 1920s, and the Coghills have run it ever since.
That connection tends to get lost in local retellings. The family behind one of Chicago's most nationally recognized golf names is the same family that has run Orland Park's home course for very close to a century.
Today, Silver Lake Country Club sits on more than 300 acres and carries 45 holes across three courses: North, South, and the executive nine called Rolling Hills, which broke ground in 1962 under Ray Didier and John Coghill and opened the following year. The North course hosted the U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship in 1958, a rare honor for a public facility at the time, and the property has since hosted the National Lefthanders Championship, U.S. Open qualifying rounds, CDGA qualifiers, and Illinois State Senior Amateur qualifying. In 2025, the Village of Orland Park named Silver Lake its Business of the Month and declared an official Silver Lake Country Club Day, a recognition that reads less like a favor and more like an acknowledgment of what the club has actually meant to the town for four generations of Coghill ownership.
Why It's Still Open When So Many Aren't
Plenty of golf facilities built in the 1920s didn't make it this far. Some closed outright. Others survive as private clubs that have drifted away from the towns around them. Silver Lake did neither, and the reason has less to do with golf than with a decision the family made in the late 1970s: expand the banquet operation and add racquetball courts, turning a seasonal golf business into a year-round hospitality one. That diversification is what carried the club through industry downturns that closed comparable facilities across the Midwest.
The decision wasn't permanent insurance, either. In 2022, after fifteen months of what the family publicly called soul searching, the Coghills confirmed they had taken Silver Lake off the market and would continue operating it themselves. Amy Coghill, the fourth generation to run the club, cited pandemic-era demand for golf as part of the reasoning to keep it in the family. That near miss is worth sitting with. The anchor of Orland Park's golf identity almost changed hands within the last few years, and the town's water tower slogan would have meant something different if it had.
A Second Name Worth Knowing
Silver Lake isn't the only club carrying the reputation. Crystal Tree Country Club, also in Orland Park, hosts competitive play including IPGA Pro-Scratch events and has its own standing in the local golf community. It's also, as it turns out, where three families who didn't yet know they'd go into business together first crossed paths over a shared love of the game. That connection becomes relevant in a minute.
Here's how the town's three named golf institutions stack up against each other:
| Institution | Format | Signature credential | Founding story |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silver Lake Country Club | 3 courses, 45 holes, 300+ acres | Hosted the 1958 U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship | Coghill family, same lineage as Cog Hill, roots trace to the late 1920s |
| Crystal Tree Country Club | Golf club | Hosts IPGA Pro-Scratch competitive events | Meeting point for the founders of X-Golf Orland Park |
| X-Golf Orland Park | 8 indoor simulator bays, 8,000 square feet | Runs two full winter league seasons annually | Opened November 2021 by three local families |
Golf Stopped Waiting for Spring
That third row is the newest chapter, and it's the one that shows the identity is still evolving instead of just being defended. X-Golf Orland Park opened its doors on South La Grange Road in the Lake View Plaza in November 2021, an 8,000-square-foot venue with eight simulator bays that track club path, ball speed, and smash factor through camera systems and infrared sensors. It was founded by three local families: John and Cindy O'Malley of Lemont, and longtime Orland Park residents Ed and Marylou Parsons and Joe and Jessica Andrews. They met, fittingly, at Crystal Tree Country Club.
What makes this more than a novelty add-on is the calendar. X-Golf Orland Park runs actual structured winter leagues, not casual open play. The 2025-2026 season split into two blocks: Season 1 ran from late October or early November 2025 through late January 2026, and Season 2 ran from early February 2026 through early April 2026. For a town whose golf identity was built entirely on outdoor course counts, that's a real shift. The fairways at Silver Lake close for the season. The simulator bays don't, at least not for the months that count most.
There's a thread connecting the two eras that's easy to miss. John O'Malley, the X-Golf co-owner, joined WGN Radio's Chicago's Afternoon News to talk about Orland Park's "World's Golf Center" reputation, framing the simulator venue as part of that same identity rather than a departure from it. The same person keeping the nickname alive on the air is also the one who built the business that lets it survive January.
The Name Outlived the Marketing Stunt
A regional hole count from 1996 was never going to sustain a town's identity on its own. What has sustained it is a small number of institutions that kept adapting the definition of what playing golf in Orland Park actually means: a family that turned a course into a banquet business to survive the lean years, a private club that quietly produced the next generation of local golf entrepreneurs, and a simulator venue that made the game available on a Tuesday night in January. The water towers still say what they said in 1996. What's underneath them has changed more than the paint ever suggests.
If you're the kind of Orland Park resident who tracks details like this about your own town, you probably think about your home the same way, as something worth understanding in full rather than taking at face value. When you're ready to see what that kind of close attention means for your own property, Aaron Gaines offers a free home valuation built on the same local knowledge.
