Benjamin Herms
America's Second 100 Greatest Golf Courses
It’s never been tougher to crack our rankings. Eleven courses built within the last three years are new additions onto Golf Digest’s America’s 100 Greatest and Second 100 Greatest lists, which means some mainstays got pushed out this year. The margins are tighter than ever. Four courses missed out on making our top 200 by less than a tenth of a decimal point: Grandfather Golf and Country Club, Karsten Creek (which just underwent a full-scale renovation), Dismal River’s Red course and Tradition Golf Club. Grandfather, a masterpiece mountain design by Ellis Maples, fell out of this ranking for the first time since we started ranking 200 courses in 2013. It missed out by less than two hundredths of a decimal point.
There are more new courses waiting in the wings. The Omni PGA Frisco’s East course by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner fell three tenths of a point shy of debuting on this list. Black Desert Resort, one of Tom Weiskopf’s last designs and a host to both PGA Tour and LPGA Tour events, missed by the same margin. As both venues get more exposure, it’s possible they enter our top 200.
If you’re a club that just missed making this list, you may return next time. But you’ll also face more contenders in two years as the golf industry continues to see a boom in creative and unique golf course construction. The competition is a great thing for golfers, but tough for the fringe clubs on this ranking.
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Scroll on for the entirety of our America's Second 100 Greatest rankings, listed from #200 down to #101. Be sure to click through to each individual course page for bonus photography and reviews from our course panelists. We also encourage you to leave your own ratings … so you can make your case for (or against) any course that you've played.
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Previous rank: NR
The Vintage Club proved to be the last collaboration between former tour golfer-turned-architect George Fazio and his young nephew, Tom. But while George was heavily involved in promoting this exclusive Palm Springs area club to prospective members, Tom was sweating the details out on the construction site. The opulent course was built for $6 million, considered an outrageous amount at that time (that's roughly $24 million, adjusted for inflation), but Tom explained that sum was necessary to “create an environment where none existed,” a phrase he would repeat later in the decade when constructing No. 24 Shadow Creek in Las Vegas. Tom spent $1.5-million building just The Vintage’s 16th and 17th holes, including three cascading waterfalls at $175,000 apiece. It was money well spent.
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Previous rank: 167
In the early 1990s, Tom Fazio, assisted by longtime associate Tom Marzolf, designed a sprawling golf-only layout just west of Nashville. They routed it over 317 acres, incorporating dense forest, rocky ridges and a river valley. Its first two holes play along the flat valley of Brush Creek, while the par-4 third runs uphill through thick trees to a greensite on a bluff overlooking the valley. Four, a 200-yard par 3, requires a carry over a chasm that drops to the river. The par-3 eighth plays directly over the river, while the dogleg-right par-4 ninth hugs its rocky edge. After the par-3 10th, in a box-canyon to a green backdropped by tall shale outcropping and cascading springs, much of the back nine is in open meadowland. Sixteen is yet another par 3 over Brush Creek, the short par-5 17th has narrow dual fairways, and the par-4 18th doglegs left over the river. Fairways are zoysia grass, greens are Penncross bentgrass and roughs are fescue, native grasses and wildflowers. The club's second course, designed by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner and called the Upper, traversing the forested foothills above the Fazio Lower course, opened for play in 2024.
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
Previous rank: 166
Kiawah Island Club’s Cassique Course (pronounced kah-SEEK) was created by Hall of Famer Tom Watson and his crew from old farm fields along the tidal marshes of the Kiawah River. As a five-time Champion Golfer of the Year, Watson wanted his design to demand the “touch, feel and imagination” of links-style golf, so he framed most holes with choppy faux dunes, rumpled the fairways and installed some of his favorite links features: a burn a la Turnberry, Carnoustie-inspired Spectacles and a Hell Bunker from St. Andrews. With the front nine in open land and the back nine among trees, Cassique poses bump-and-run opportunities everywhere, and even has a couple of blind shots.
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Martin Miller
Previous rank: NR
About a half hour north of the Golden Gate Bridge, Meadow Club opened in 1927 as Alister MacKenzie’s first design in the United States. Over the years, the original treeless links-style layout was lost as many trees were planted and greens shrunk, but a restoration project in the early 2000s recaptured much of MacKenzie’s original intent. Architect Mike DeVries expanded the greens to their original size and restored the bunkers to MacKenzie’s intended style. Set in a valley near Mount Tamalpais, Meadow Club once again plays as a sprawling design with large, undulating greens and well-placed MacKenzie bunkering.
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Previous rank: 172
Many 100 Greatest courses began as open fields, then had decades of green committees plant trees to frame fairways; many of those same clubs are now clear-cutting such trees to open up vistas and invite more sunlight and air to greens. Sahalee is not such a club. Its course was carved from a Pacific Northwest forest of cedar, spruce, fir and pine, and its dominant theme has always been narrow fairways framed by towering trees that reach to the heavens. To strip Sahalee of its trees would be to shave Samson of his locks, so when Rees Jones and Steve Weisser began a 2022 renovation of the famed North/South nines where the 1998 PGA Championship and 2016 and 2024 KPMG Women’s PGA Championships were held (Jones had previously remodeled the course in 1996), they were calculated in their approach to thinning the forest growth. Gradually, they pared back the treeline to better expose the site’s topography. They were able to expand fairways to enhance shot options and took out individual trees that had come to interfere with strategic angles into greens. What players may notice most are the new bunkers, each rebuilt, reshaped and repositioned to better engage with landing areas and putting surface hole locations. Sahalee seems at once refreshed while being absolutely the same carved-from-the-woods course it’s always been.
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Previous rank: NEW
From Golf Digest architecture editor Derek Duncan:
We may look back and realize that Panther National was the final new course built in the south Florida counties of Palm Beach, Broward or Dade. One of the most golf dense regions in the world, the counties are hemmed in by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and nature preserves and the Everglades to the west, and there’s almost no more land available upon which to construct a 200-plus acre, 18-hole course.
Several years ago, Swiss businessman Dominik Senn acquired what may end up being the last remaining buildable golf parcel, roughly 400 acres northwest of Palm Beach Gardens bordering a vast wildlife preserve where black panthers are often seen. The Jack Nicklaus/Nicklaus Design golf course—the centerpiece of a luxury residential.
Explore our complete review here—including bonus photography and ratings from our expert panelists.
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Previous rank: NR
Time, and previous renovations, tend to shrink and constrict golf courses. The mission of a major 2021 remodel by architect Keith Foster was to return Brook Hollow’s worn features to a better iteration of its first-generation A.W. Tillinghast design. Foster achieved magnificent results by accentuating the pedestal-like greens and bringing back their squared-off edges, installing steep-faced bunkers (as opposed to their previously flashed faces) and re-introducing several of Tillinghast's “great hazard” sand wastelands on holes like the par-5 15th. The result is a magnificent renaissance of one of Tilly's best courses and a first-time appearance in our Second 100 Greatest Courses ranking.
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Previous rank: 168
Glenwild Golf Club & Spa sits on a meadow valley north of Park City, offering invigorating vistas of the Wasatch Mountain Range surrounding the community. Tom Fazio was given first dibs on the land for his 18 holes, with developers agreeing to plot homesites only after he’d completed his routing. So he clustered holes together, positioned some holes along a couple of irrigation lakes and linked the lakes via a network of streams and cascading waterfalls. The outer rough framing holes consist of native sagebrush, along with patches of flowering purple flax and transplanted aspen, chokecherry, maple, willow, spruce and Austrian pine. Enough trees were transplanted to define targets, but not so many as to block panoramic views.
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Previous rank: 190
Anyone who has ever played Mike Keiser’s terrific nine-hole Dunes Club in New Buffalo, Mich.—one of the best nine-hole courses in America, if not the best—is familiar with the “lost dunes” that exist along that stretch of Lake Michigan in southeast Michigan. Lost Dunes Golf Club, a half hour north along the same sand ridge, was created from an old sand quarry, lined on three sides by 60-foot-tall forested sand dunes, bottomed by two deep pit lakes and traversed through the center by I-94. (Nothing wrong with that: No. 5 Oakmont is bisected by the Pennsylvania Turnpike.) There was still plenty of sand left in the quarry, which allowed Doak and his team to create some vast sandy waste areas as well as windblown dunes-style bunkers. Since the greens were shaped from native sand, the green contours are very bold. “The wildest set of greens I’ve ever built,” said Doak soon after it opened, but long before Ballyneal, Sebonack or Pinehurst #10. When Keiser played the course on opening day, he was considering hiring Doak to design Pacific Dunes. “I can’t have him build these kind of greens for the retail golfer,” Keiser said. “Doak’s a professional,” he was told by another in his group. “He’ll give you whatever you want.” Sure enough, Doak was hired for Pacific Dunes, the Bandon course that ranks No. 23 in the nation.
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The punchbowl ninth green at Streamsong (Black).
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Previous rank: 178
Gil Hanse’s Black Course at Streamsong, Golf Digest’s Best New Public Course of 2018, sits a mile south of the resort’s Red and Blue courses, with its own clubhouse and personality. Reshaped from a decades-old phosphate strip mine that produced tall spoil mounds, Hanse provided strategic character by building a hidden punchbowl green at nine, dual putting surfaces at 13, incorporating a meandering creek on the par-5 fourth and a lagoon cove to guard the 18th green. Both the putting surfaces and the chipping areas surrounding them were grassed in MiniVerde, and today both are mowed at a single height, resulting in some of the biggest, most complex greens found on our national ranking along with Landmand, No. 155. One Streamsong insider calls the Black greens “polarizing;” we call them tremendous fun.
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Stephen Denton
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Previous rank: 171
Like a football team searching for the right coach, the resort could never settle on the right identity for the #4 course despite a series of major alterations by different architects. It was first laid out by Pinehurst doyen Richard Tufts in 1952, then remodeled by Tufts and son Peter a decade later. Rees Jones reinvented it in the '80s, and Tom Fazio took it apart and put it back together as a stylized botanical garden in the late '90s. It finally found its match when it hired Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner to carry out a full-scale blow-up and rebuild in 2018 that infused it with the sweeping sand-and-pine character we identify with Pinehurst, while initiating a style of shaping in the greens and bunkers that’s confident and distinctly its own.
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Previous rank: 173
A mainstay of Connecticut golf since the 1960s, Stanwich has undergone modifications over several years by Tom Fazio and his team, all based on the club's master plan that addresses the course’s tees, bunkers, greens and mowing lines. The latest project was the rebuilding of five green complexes and the creation of a completely new first hole. “The first hole saw a complete re-imagining,” explained Fazio design associate Tom Marzolf. “The old hole was a quick dogleg-left that had many trees blocking the path around the corner. We looked to improve the options off the tee and allow alternate ways to play the hole. Earthwork to cut the inside corner and open up views to the green have completely changed the feel of the tee shot.” More changes to Stanwich, both big and small, are still to come, but what won't change is the demanding nature of the architecture that requires strong, precise driving and unerring approaches into elevated greens that are heavily defended in front.
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Previous rank: 181
Medalist is a long, demanding course that can stretch out to roughly 7,600 yards, a necessary requirement when the membership includes Tiger Woods, Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, Brooks Koepka and many more of the world’s top professional players. They like Medalist for the relaxed atmosphere and local convenience, but also because it’s a demanding driving course—the holes circle through an undeveloped sanctuary of wetlands and low scrub vegetation one parcel south of McArthur (No. 157) and are buffeted by the strong Atlantic crosswinds. Pete Dye designed Medalist with co-founder Greg Norman (this was one of Norman’s first U.S. designs), and the course features Dye’s S-shaped holes curling around sand buffers, slinky ground contours and small, low-profile greens that bleed into short-grass surrounds. The course had undergone numerous modifications and formalizations in the late 1990s and early 2000s, some by Norman, but Bobby Weed reclaimed much of the original Dye character during a 2015 renovation.
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Evan Schiller
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Architect David McLay Kidd has seen both ends of the golf site spectrum, from the incomparable ocean setting of the original Bandon Dunes course and the pine dunes of Sand Valley, all the way to lifeless land like the potato farm he inherited for St. Andrews' Castle Course in his native Scotland. He’s not likely to get a better one than GrayBull, the course he built for the Dormie Network in the sand hills of Nebraska. Located about 30 minutes northeast of North Platte, a few miles north of I-80, the 1,800-acre site provided the potential for dozens if not hundreds of golf holes, though the owners instructed Kidd to just build 18 of them and not to worry about leaving room for a second 18—or nine, or a short course—at a future date. Thus, the routing takes the long road around the site, moving in a big clockwise flow with gentle cascading movements and only a few switchbacks. There was a section of steeper dunes in the center of the property that were attractive, but they were essentially too severe, and Kidd couldn’t find a way to get in and out of them without having to make big cuts to the land, something you shouldn’t have to do in the sand hills. The fairways are larger than they appear but are obscured by angles around the dunes and elevated bunkers, and the greens are a continuing evolution of those at Gamble Sands and Mammoth Dunes, getting progressively more contoured at each course. The strengths of the design are the par 4s presented in a rich variety of lengths and orientations (the drivable fifth and 16th—in certain winds—are standouts, as is the 13th where the fairway kicks drives left into a hollow unless they challenge a large bunker on the right), adding up to a stellar addition to the sand hills, one of the world's vastest and most interesting of golf landscapes.
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Previous rank: 187
When Jack Nicklaus completed Sherwood Country Club for industrialist David Murdock in the late 1980s, critics immediately compared it to Shadow Creek, which Nicklaus felt was unfair, since his land—a river valley with homesites on high surrounding hills—was far more natural than the barren Vegas desert. But critics were comparing ledger books. They spent lots of money at Sherwood. Several hundred mature oaks were transplanted at an estimated cost of $6 million (over $15 million in today's dollars). The massive boulders edging some fairways were trucked in as well, and the ponds and streams guarding landing areas and greens were manufactured by experts in that business. In the end, it added up to producing one of the best courses money could buy, until the drought of 2014. Nicklaus returned in 2016 to approve agronomic improvements that reduced water use by 25 percent. Sherwood remains a great layout, but is more austere in presentation.
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Previous rank: NR
Situated in the Bitterroot Valley in western Montana near the Idaho border, Stock Farm Club was developed in part by finance executive Charles Schwab. The club features a Tom Fazio design ranked among the best in the state, with terrific views of the Sapphire Mountains. Fazio took advantage of the dramatic setting by creating numerous elevated tees, which were restored in 2019 along with the greens and bunkers. Other activities at this exclusive private club include fly-fishing, horseback riding and shooting. Over the decades, Fazio's new courses have frequently debuted in high positions in the top 100 and Second 100 Greatest rankings, but Stock Farm is the rare specimen that has matured into the club, gaining in stature in the 25 years since it first opened.
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Previous rank: NEW
Building Lost Rail, just southwest of Omaha, was something of a homecoming for Scottsdale-based architect Scott Hoffman, who grew up in the city and went to school at Creighton. The key to the design, named after an abandoned trainline that ran through the northeast corner of the property, was decoding the routing for this relatively small parcel of land, around 150 acres, or just large enough for 18 holes, a practice facility, clubhouse, parking and maintenance. The matter was complicated by the deep, wooded ravines that cut through the site and further limited the areas where holes could be placed. It was an exercise perfectly suited to Hoffman’s skills, who specialized in laying out the holes on numerous Tom Fazio projects across the western U.S. throughout the early 2000s. The ravines serve as both strategic and penal hazards, flanking and bisecting holes and creating dramatic, intimidating scenery.
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Previous rank: 196
Some of America’s greatest golf courses were designed by first-time novices and non-architects: Merion, Oakmont, Pine Valley and Pebble Beach all fall into this category. Sankaty Head on the eastern edge of Nantucket Island does, too. It was built by a local amateur player named Emerson Armstrong, but judging by the circuitous routing and attractive bunkering (honed in recent years by Jim Urbina) that recalls some of Donald Ross’ best work, you’d be excused for assuming Armstrong had done this dozens of times. The roomy holes unfurl across open fields of fescue, riding the site’s swales and ridges like an English links. True to the inspiration, the greens are open in front to receive running shots played under the exacting Atlantic winds, and the collection of par-3s is about as tough and beautiful as it gets.
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Darren Carroll for Golf Digest
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Darren Carroll for Golf Digest
Previous rank: 184
We give credit to Texas golf historian Frances G. Trimble for establishing the fact that Perry Maxwell, not John Bredemus, originally designed Colonial Country Club for Fort Worth businessman Marvin Leonard. Both architects submitted routings. Maxwell’s was used, while Bredemus supervised construction. Colonial sported the first bentgrass greens in Texas when it opened in 1936. In 1939, the USGA awarded Colonial its 1941 U.S. Open, the first ever in Texas, so Leonard brought Maxwell back to toughen the course. He added 56 bunkers and created the present par-3 fourth and par-4 fifth (two of the famed Horrible Horseshoe trio of holes) and a par-3 13th (since replaced following a 1968 rechanneling of the Trinity River). Keith Foster’s 2008 restoration wasn’t to everyone’s satisfaction. In 2023, Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner initiated a warp-speed, total renovation of the design using Maxwell's 1941 modifications as a roadmap, a similar treatment they implemented when remodeling Maxwell's Southern Hills in 2018, on display at the 2022 PGA Championship. This ranking does not reflect the Hanse/Wagner work: Their changes will be revealed in the 2027-'28 results.
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Previous rank: 176
The Reserve at Moonlight Basin was just the third course from Montana to appear in the national rankings when it debuted in 2023, joining Tom Doak’s Rock Creek Cattle Company and Robert Trent Jones’ Yellowstone Country Club, which surfaced in the 1960s on the list of America’s “Toughest” courses (a fourth joins this year, Tom Fazio's Stock Farm at 185th). Located near Big Sky at an elevation of 7,500 feet above sea level, the Jack Nicklaus design is the highest (in altitude) in the rankings. Big Sky is apt—the course was built on the site of an old ski mountain with 360-degree panoramas of the surrounding Rockies, and the impressively large holes race, slalom and dive across circuits of terrain that twist in different directions through the wilderness. With numerous downhill shots through the thin air, the championship yardage of 8,000 yards doesn’t seem egregious, and scoring well actually requires a high degree of control in judging where the ball will carry and settle. The epic vistas of holes like the par-4 first and par-5 17th (at over 700 yards) are sights to behold, for golfers and non-golfers alike.
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Previous rank: 192
In doing golf course restoration work, golf architects have to be like ghost writers, doing the best work they can while burying their egos and desire for personal attention. Nobody does that better than Bruce Hepner, who has consistently enhanced other people’s architecture without complaint. Canterbury Golf Club had long been considered one of the greats, the site of several major championships, including the 1973 PGA Championship won by Jack Nicklaus. But when Hepner first toured the Herbert Strong design, he found it over-treed and overdue for a bunker renovation. The club continues to understand the wisdom of fine-tuning rather than revamping classical architecture and now works with Keith Rhebb and Riley Johns, two talented associates of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, who have assumed the role of Canterbury caretakers by continuing to selectively address tree issues and other restorative detailing.
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Previous rank: 197
Though barely two decades old, The Harvester Club has led an adventurous life. It came into the world at the end of the 1990s as a course of its time: that is, an upscale daily-fee design 30 minutes northeast of Des Moines with snaking fairways and curvacious, modern-looking bunkering. A renovation in 2010 began to alter their character, roughing up the edges and giving the course a more rustic look. In 2017, the owners reversed course and took the club private, hiring original architect Keith Foster to remove trees to better highlight the site’s hills and prairie terrain and to revamp the holes with new tees and wider, less snaking fairways. Foster also reimagined the course as a paean to early 20th-century architecture, constructing more squared-off greens, shifting new flat-bottomed grass-faced bunkers to more interesting and impactful locations, and adding thematic riffs on a Road Hole green, a Tillinghast-inspired Hell’s Half Acre, a Short Hole and an Oakmont-like Church Pews bunker.
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Previous rank: 183
The winner of Golf Digest’s Best New Course of 2014 award, Gamble Sands sits atop a sprawling, treeless plateau of sandy desert overlooking Washington’s Columbia River Valley. The extremely playable layout is oversized in every respect, with enormously wide and slick fescue fairways, gigantic greens, no rough and some of the most panoramic vistas in the Northwest. In using “friendly contours” that divert shots away from bunkers and toward targets, designer David Kidd wants everybody to have fun. He hopes good players will relish opportunities to score low and high handicappers will post their best rounds ever. With three reachable par 4s on the 18, that’s a possibility. Of course, Gamble Sands was Kidd’s precursor to ideas fleshed out at Mammoth Dunes, currently ranked 165th. The difference is that Gamble Sands is more invigorating off the tee, presenting different lines and degrees of risk, while Mammoth Dunes is more diverse from 100 yards and in.
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Previous rank: 199
David McLay Kidd built Huntsman Springs Golf Club for billionaire Jon Huntsman on an old cattle ranch in tiny Driggs, Idaho, on the west side of the Grand Teton Mountains. The site was originally flat and lifeless, between a highway and a river, with lots of wetland bogs. Kidd’s solution was to recess the entire course into the landscape to screen out undesirable buildings and generate some interesting topography—no small feat of imagination and engineering. Digging down meant the holes filled with water, so he designed a course with acres and acres of lakes, ponds and interconnecting streams. If all that sounds more like a Tom Fazio design than a David Kidd one, that’s understandable. For a Scot who loves bump-and-roll, Huntsman Springs, with bluegrass fairways and rough, is a radical departure. It also demonstrates his range as a designer.
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Courtesy of the club
Previous rank: 174
Phil Mickelson wanted his course design debut to be something different than the typical Scottsdale desert layout, so he had some fairways recessed into the landscape to create elevation change, kept tee boxes flush with the ground and built mostly long, narrow greens edged by chipping hollows. Mickelson calls them “Pinehurst greens.” Bunkers are surprisingly shallow and fairways are uniformly wide, because he dislikes holes that bottleneck down for big hitters. There’s plenty of grass in which to play, and a surprising number of trees on the layout, including palo verde, juniper and mesquite. Phil considers his design to be a second-shot course, “and we don’t have the same second shot two times in a row,” he says. One second shot, on the par-5 third, must contend with a “ha ha wall,” a three-foot-high ledge of stacked rock that edges the putting surface. That’s definitely different than anything in Scottsdale.
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Courtesy of the club
Previous rank: 175
Real-estate developer Lowell Schulman hired Rees Jones to create his dream golf club on rolling linksland in Bridgehampton, one of the richest zip codes in the country, a few decades after founding Brae Burn Country Club in Westchester County. Jones created a strategic marvel with mounds, moguls and fescue framing the holes that test golfers—along with the seemingly ever-present wind. Jones' creation debuted on Golf Digest's America's 100 Greatest ranking in 1997 at 65th and was ranked on four editions until falling off in 2006. It reappeared on our Second 100 Greatest in 2023-'24, for the first time since 2016, and has held strong to its spot No. 175.
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Jon Cavalier
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Jon Cavalier
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Jon Cavalier
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Jon Cavalier
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Jon Cavalier
Previous rank: 159
Pete Dye and his son P.B. did the early routing of Secession, but when they left in a dispute with the developer, Bruce Devlin, a PGA Tour veteran who’d previously designed courses with Robert von Hagge, stepped in and finished something much in keeping with the then-prevailing Dye philosophy of low-profile architecture. Greens were set at ground grade, protected by low humps and pot bunkers with vertical stacked-sod faces. True to his Australian (New South Wales) roots, Devlin also left open the front of the greens for running approach shots. The site itself is a peninsula in a marsh, with several holes on individual islands. Secession demands a complete game, both aerial and ground, particularly in steady ocean breezes.
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Jeff Marsh
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Matt Gibson/Pinehurst Resort
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Jeff Marsh
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Jeff Marsh
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Jeff Marsh
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Matt Gibson/Pinehurst Resort
Previous rank: NEW
Sand is the defining character of Pinehurst, and Pinehurst #10 goes right to the source: a former sand mining site south of the resort, on a site known as the Sandmines, portions of which used to be a golf course called The Pit that closed in 2010. Several holes of this Tom Doak design, opened in 2024, plunge through the old quarries, including the turbulent eighth where players will want to pop Dramamine before tackling fairway swells that would pitch and toss a fishing vessel. Pinehurst Resort is also characterized by the tight cluster of its primary courses and synchronous relationship with the surrounding village, but #10 is a world apart. The grandeur of the isolated holes roller coasting through the quiet sand barrens creates tension between the sublimity of the environment and the heroism of the architecture, demonstrated most intensely in the uninhibited green shapes, many of which are bowl-shaped and heavily segmented.
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Courtesy of Michael Clemmer
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Courtesy of Michael Clemmer
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Courtesy of the club
Previous rank: 155
The Highland Course at Primland sits atop a mountain plateau overlooking some of the most unusual scenery in America, a deep river valley dotted with tall spirals of rock called the Pinnacles of the Dan River. The course design by veteran British architect Donald Steel is austere in its green contours and bunkering, as if not to overpower the setting. Aided by his then-associates Tom Mackenzie and Martin Ebert (who have since formed their own very successful partnership, Mackenzie & Ebert), Steel routed holes along ridges, over chasms, down valleys and into sideslopes, always offering a safe alternative to every perilous carry. There’s a stretch of three straight holes—13 through 15—with no sand, because dense trees and deep gulleys are hazards enough. Primland is Smoky Mountain majesty.
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Previous rank: 147
Although he owned his own turboprop for over a decade, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that Tom Fazio agreed to work in the Pacific Northwest. Previously, it seemed just too far to travel for someone with six children at home. But former Seattle Supersonics basketball star Jack Sikma convinced Fazio to help his group build a golf-only, non-residential 18 on land east of Seattle. Perhaps it helped that the land had been previously owned by aviation pioneer Bill Boeing, land he had called the Aldarra Farm. Fazio’s design, called The Member’s Club at Aldarra until recent years, quickly became known for its last four holes, dubbed “The Gauntlet.” They consist of a long, stout par 3 (with an old stone farm silo near the green), a par 4 along wetlands, a reachable par 4 with stacked sod bunkers before the green and a long closing par 4 with two forced carries over ravines.
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The Sea Pines Resort/Bill Hornstein
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The Sea Pines Resort/Bill Hornstein
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The Sea Pines Resort/Bill Hornstein
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The Sea Pines Resort/Bill Hornstein
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The Sea Pines Resort/Bill Hornstein
Previous rank: 160
In the late 1960s, Jack Nicklaus landed the design contract for Harbour Town, then turned it over to his new partner, Pete Dye, who was determined to distinguish his work from that of rival Robert Trent Jones. Soon after Harbour Town opened in late November 1969 (with a victory by Arnold Palmer in the Heritage Classic), the course debuted on America’s 100 Greatest as one of the Top 10. It was a total departure for golf at the time. No mounds, no elevated tees, no elevated greens—just low-profile and abrupt change. Tiny greens hung atop railroad ties directly over water hazards. Trees blocked direct shots. Harbour Town gave Pete Dye national attention and put Jack Nicklaus, who made more than 100 inspection trips collaborating with Dye, in the design business. Pete’s wife, Alice, also contributed, instructing workers on the size and shape of the unique 13th green, a sinister one edged by cypress planks. Following the 2025 RBC Heritage, Harbour Town underwent an extensive restoration overseen by Davis Love III and his design company, working to restore and preserve Dye's original strategic intent. The project is completed, and the course reopened in November 2025.
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Courtesy of Gary Kellner
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Courtesy of Gary Kellner
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Courtesy of Gary Kellner
Previous rank: 169
Once the darling of the USGA, which awarded this Robert Trent Jones design the 1965 U.S. Open, making it the second youngest course to host an Open in the 20th century (after Northwood in Dallas), Bellerive is now favored by the PGA of America, which successfully concluded the 2018 PGA Championship on it. The polished course that hosted the PGA is a far cry from the immature one of 1965. Hardwoods along holes now have 60 years' worth of growth, fairways are now Zoysia and architect Rees Jones has replaced his father’s bunkering with that of his own style, positioned farther off the tees to challenge big hitters. Rees also filled in a pond in front of the 17th green and added chipping areas next to several putting surfaces.
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
Previous rank: 165
Galloway National occupies a very fine stretch of South Jersey-pine barrens, a site that before construction had been compared to nearby Pine Valley. But Tom Fazio felt the land more favorably compared with that of Pinehurst, and his dream was to reshape this course the old-fashioned way, using horses and slip-scrapers much as had been done a century ago at Pinehurst. But the economics and timetable didn’t allow him such a fanciful luxury. Instead, bulldozers were used to shove the sand around into graceful fairways and low-slung, fall-away greens. Pines and roughs of pine needles frame most holes and the eastern flank of the course runs directly along a tidal marsh that leads to the Atlantic. Galloway National now has enough exposed sand, by the way, that golfers today are reminded of both Pinehurst and Pine Valley.
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Dom Furore
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Dom Furore
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Dom Furore
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Dom Furore
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Dom Furore
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Dom Furore
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Dom Furore
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Dom Furore
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Dom Furore
Previous rank: 115
Sheep Ranch began life as a different Sheep Ranch in the early 2000s, a rag-tag, cross-country, 13-hole course with no irrigation built by Tom Doak on a bluff just north of what would later become Old Macdonald. It was a little-used recreation that only insiders knew about. Mike Keiser tapped Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw to convert it into Bandon Dunes’ fifth regulation 18-hole course and Coore and Crenshaw’s second. Spread across an open, windswept plateau, using many of the same greensites, Coore managed to triangulate the holes in such a way that nine now touch the cliff edge along the Pacific Ocean. Extremely wide fairways, large putting surfaces and sandless bunkers allow the exposed course to be playable in extreme winds. Though it's slipped behind its Bandon brethren in the rankings, Sheep Ranch nevertheless accomplishes the most difficult of feats for resort courses—distinction among equals.
More from Golf Digest
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Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
Previous rank: 151
Although congenial rivals, Tom Doak and Bill Coore actually collaborated on Streamsong’s original 36-hole routing, walking the site and mentally weaving holes around stunning mounds, lagoons, sand spits, savannahs and swamp, all elements left after a strip-mining operation. Coore then gave Doak first choice on which 18 he wanted to build, so Doak’s Blue Course includes a few holes routed by Coore. (Coore and Crenshaw’s Red, ranked 133rd, contains some holes originally envisioned by Doak.) The Blue starts a bit more dramatically, with the back tee on the first hole atop a 75-foot sand dune. It has more water carries off the tee, and it’s also a bit more compact, since it sits in the center with the Red Course looping around its outside edges. The Blue definitely has the bolder set of greens, some with massive shelves and dips. The later addition of Streamsong (Black) by Gil Hanse, ranked 191st in the country, added to the spirited competition among designers, and the royal rumble will get a shot of new blood once David Kidd's fourth course opens sometime in 2026. The theme song at Streamsong seems to be: “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.”
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Jeffrey R. Bertch
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Courtesy of Jeffrey R. Bertch
Previous rank: 158
David Kidd began building a second 18 at Wisconsin’s Sand Valley Resort just before Coore and Crenshaw had completed their 18, which would be named Golf Digest’s Best New Course of 2017. Kidd was intent on topping their work, so he gave his meandering layout enormous fairways, big accessible greens and visually unique hillsides of exposed sand—“mammoth dunes”—that became the course moniker. “This could be the best course I and my team have yet created,” Kidd wrote in late 2017. “We can’t wait for the critics to decide if they agree.” They were disappointed with the results of Golf Digest’s 2018 Best New Course survey, which placed Mammoth Dunes second behind Streamsong (Black). But balloting for Golf Digest’s 100 Greatest continued for an additional month after the close of Best New, and additional evaluations pushed Mammoth Dunes ahead of Streamsong (Black), which is now ranked #191.
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
Previous rank: 177
Bayonne Golf Club and its neighbor Liberty National Golf Club were built at the same time, part of a massive transformation of the Jersey shoreline along the Hudson River and New York Harbor. Bayonne was built on an old sanitary landfill covered with seven million cubic yards of fill, much of it dredged from the harbor to make the channel deep enough for supertankers. The deposits were piled up to 10 stories high, which developer-designer Eric Bergstol then shaped into towering faux sand dunes. The course is an ode to Irish links, with no trees, cart paths or level lies. Fairways flow down narrow valleys, edged by steep slopes laden with tall, wavy fescues. Bunkers are deep and often fearsome. A few greens sit right above the harbor, and all putting surfaces have confounding humps, bumps and rolls. Tucked away down a bumpy, unpaved road past a strip mall in blue-collar Bayonne, N.J., is this private, walking-only enclave.
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Benjamin Herms
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Benjamin Herms
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Benjamin Herms
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Benjamin Herms
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Benjamin Herms
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Benjamin Herms
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Benjamin Herms
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Benjamin Herms
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Benjamin Herms
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Benjamin Herms
Previous rank: 170
Walter Travis was a man of many talents. As a player, he won three U.S. Amateur titles and one British Amateur, and his 80-percent match win percentage ranks among the sport’s all-time best. He was a writer, editor and publisher of The American Golfer in addition to designing over two dozen golf courses. His greatest skill might have been bunkering courses. His work revamping Garden City in the early 1900s—adding, moving and deepening the bunkers as well as rebuilding the greens—transformed that course into what it is today, but his most ambitious work is at Hollywood. The elaborate bunker shapes and arrangements are nothing short of dazzling, especially as they’ve been sharpened and polished by Brian Schneider of Renaissance Golf, along with co-designer Blake Conant. They lay out like arrangements of gemstones and the spots on a jungle cat, varying from the size of a mansion parlor to little more than a bread box. Anything like it attempted today would be considered garish, but Travis’ Beaux Arts bunkering at Hollywood is a study in artistry.
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Dave Sansom
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Dave Sansom
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Dave Sansom
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Dave Sansom
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Dave Sansom
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Dave Sansom
Previous rank: 148
No course on our rankings has highlighted the value of new turfgrasses better than the Highlands Course at Atlanta Athletic Club. It sets the standard for quality everyday conditions as well as for major championships at Southern venues. Its tees and fairways are Zorro Zoysia, which can withstand Atlanta’s coldest winter days. Greens are state-of-the-art TifEagle Bermuda, smooth and pure. Approaches and surrounds of greens are TifGrand Bermuda, which allows them to be mowed very tight for additional bounce. The rough is Tifway 419 Bermuda, a great old standby. The club also recently upgraded its irrigation system. Because each turf has different water demands, a precise individual-head system was installed, each head controlled by the superintendent with a smartphone app, applying moisture only where needed and thus saving water and money. No longer will an errant shot at Atlanta Athletic Club land behind an irrigation box. There are none anymore. The club recently announced the current Rees Jones-developed architecture will also be given a refresh when Andrew Green begins a major remodel in 2028.
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courtesy of Sea Island
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courtesy of Sea Island
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Previous rank: 162
Ocean Forest occupies one of the premier oceanside settings on the East Coast. Originally designed by Rees Jones, the fairways laterally traverse the site’s interior pines, skirting marshes and breaking out in memorable moments to the shore of the broad Hampton River inlet before finishing along the Atlantic Ocean at 17 and 18. The course had been ranked among America’s 100 Greatest for 12 years, then a fixture among our top 200 courses nationally (and in the top six in Georgia). But by 2023, it was in need of updates and revisions, so the club opted to have Beau Welling initiate some major changes. The main order of business was to try to better connect the formerly perched-up green sites to the low, rambling terrain to be more accessible for members, enlarging them in the process. Welling also removed most of the Bermuda roughs and added open sandscapes along the holes to emulate the beach atmosphere, reconceived the par-3 17th on the water and elevated the 18th fairway so the ocean was visible above the dune line. The alterations combine to give the architecture a stronger seaside character that’s on par with the magical property.
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Courtesy of the club
2 / 5
Courtesy of Black Rock
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Rob Perry/Courtesy of The Golf Club at Blackrock
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Courtesy of Black Rock
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Courtesy of Black Rock
Previous rank: 141
Jim Engh’s architecture is all about turning fantasies into realities, and Black Rock delivers on that goal like few others, with some bobsled-run fairways (where one can putt from landing area downhill to the green), rollicking putting surfaces framed by squiggly bunkers and a par-4 11th pinched by towering rock formations that bring to mind a pinball machine. Unusual and controversial (it won Best New Private in 2003 ahead of No. 15 Friar’s Head and No. 83 Dallas National), Black Rock is a thrilling round of golf.
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Courtesy of the club
Previous rank: 143
Whisper Rock’s Upper Course was intended, as the club’s second 18, to specifically test its low-handicap and PGA Tour pro membership. However, Tom Fazio couldn’t resist being a crowd-pleaser, so although he designed 18 holes with demanding angles to diagonal fairways from the back tees, his landing areas for average golfers are generous and most greens are cradled with ample chipping areas. All players enjoy the scenic beauty of this patch of Sonoran Desert, with the front nine holes framed by dry washes and a four-hole stretch on the back woven through astonishing towers of balanced granite boulders. “That’s a beautiful, beautiful stretch, going up into those boulders and back down towards Pinnacle Peak,” said Fazio at the grand opening. “But I’m proud of the entire course, as it’s got a whole bag of different looks.” Whisper Rock’s other 18, the older Lower Course, is ranked #176.
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J.D. Cuban
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J.D. Cuban
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J.D. Cuban
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J.D. Cuban
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J.D. Cuban
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J.D. Cuban
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J.D. Cuban
Previous rank: 139
Many who’ve played Bluejack National have commented on its resemblance to Augusta National, particularly the par-3 12th, which plays over water to a shallow diagonal green backed by a pair of bunkers. While some suspect this is Tiger’s homage to the 12th at Augusta National, where he has won five Masters, it could be based on the 12th at Muirfield Village, where Tiger has won eight times. Nonetheless, Bluejack is most likely an ode to Augusta. At the course opening, Tiger told reporters, “When I visited the site for the first time, I was blown away. It’s definitely not the kind of site that comes to mind when you think of Houston. The terrain features a number of elevation changes and lots of tall, mature trees, more like something you would find in Georgia.”
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Courtesy of the club/LC Lambrecht
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Courtesy of the club/LC Lambrecht
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Courtesy of the club/LC Lambrecht
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Courtesy of the club/LC Lambrecht
Previous rank: 179
If there’s such a thing as an undiscovered Tom Fazio design, it’s McArthur Golf Club's Front Yard, a players-only layout he did in conjunction with PGA Tour star Nick Price. It’s little-known because of its neighbors, Jupiter Hills, a few miles south, Hobe Sound Golf Club, one of Joe Lee’s finest, just a few miles closer and Greg Norman’s Medalist Golf Club right next door. (Michael Jordan's The Grove XXIII, the Apogee Club, the new Discovery Land Company's Atlantic Fields and Tom Doak's new Sandglass are all a short drive to the west). McArthur sits astride the same sand ridge upon which Jupiter Hills and Medalist were built, and while Fazio had to deal with wetlands and easements in his routing, he framed each hole with acres of exposed white sand in the form of dunes, slopes and hollows to provide the Front Yard with a singularly stunning look that’s unlike any of its rivals. With those wide expanses of sand, McArthur started a trend that continues today. The club's new Back Yard course, built by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw in interior wetlands just inland from the original course, opened in 2023.
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Walt Beazley
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Walt Beazley
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Walt Beazley
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Walt Beazley
Previous rank: 144
George Thomas conceived of the idea of a “course within a course” when designing Los Angeles Country Club in the early 1920s, creating various tees for different holes that changed the angles of play and even the par values on different days. That’s part of the concept of Blessings in northwest Arkansas, where Robert Trent Jones II built a multifaceted routing that can be played in a variety of lengths and combinations intended to challenge the game’s best collegiate players (Blessings regularly hosts NCAA tournaments and was the site of the 2019 National Championships), including one setup with a USGA course rating of 80.9 and a 155 slope. Several holes cross over each other in the manner of old links courses, though there’s nothing linksy about the rural, wooded and sloping property bisected by Clear Creek. When you build a course for an individual owner—in this case, John Tyson of Tyson Foods—you get to break the rules. In 2018, architect Kyle Phillips remodeled Blessings to make it more walkable, creating a new first hole and relocating several greens while shifting and rebuilding bunkers to increase strategic diversity.
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Bill Hornstein
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Previous rank: NEW
From architecture editor Derek Duncan:
Actor Nicolas Cage once ate a live cockroach for a film he was shooting. Later, when asked why—he could have eaten a pretend insect—he responded, “Anything less wouldn’t be real.”
The conceit is that at times the only way to fulfill the potential of a given situation—a movie scene, a piece of art, a military offensive—is to push as far and aggressively as possible. This principle applies to Landmand, a new design in northeastern Nebraska about 10 miles from Sioux City, Iowa. The course sits on a vast, elevated section of loess formations with eroded furrows and valleys. It winds across the bluffs and between valleys, and from the tops of the ridges horizon views of 20 miles or more are possible, filling the landscape with a feeling of unlimited proportion. Given the setting, it’s impossible to discern the scale of the features in the near and middle distance, and the only way for architects Rob Collins and Tad King to make the golf look like it fit against the endless backdrops was to construct fairways 80 to 100 yards wide and greens that are, cumulatively and in some cases individually, the largest in the United States. Anything less wouldn’t be right.
Explore our complete review here—including bonus photography and ratings from our expert panelists.
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Clay Blackmore/Courtesy of the club
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Clay Blackmore/Courtesy of the club
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Previous rank: 157
To compare the present Caves Valley against that which was originally built in the early 1990s is to recognize how much Tom Fazio has felt obligated to adjust his courses to today’s club and ball technology. Back in 1991, the opening hole was a dogleg-left with a trap at the turn. Today, it has four bunkers framing the landing area. The par-5 third had just two “buffer bunkers” along a lake to the right to stop high-handicap slices from landing in the drink. Those buffers are still there, but so too are three enormous bunkers down the left, stretching over 300 yards from the back tee. And so it is all the way around Caves Valley. There are now target bunkers mainly in play for big hitters and frontal bunkers at several greens to force pin-seekers to throw it in the air. Caves Valley is a players’ club, and one remains a player only by being constantly challenged during a round.
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LC Lambrecht
Previous rank: 156
Though the late club founder and northeastern financier Finn Caspersen was not an avid golfer, he was intrigued by the idea of building a club near his summer home in Rhode Island. But the property he had was challenging and quite severe in places, strewn with wetlands and studded with huge boulders. He ultimately determined that Hurdzan/Fry was the firm that had the environmental chops and creative juice to make the most of it. Though the holes were limited in where they could go, they achieve a desired “old New England” flavor that mixes well with the more historic courses in the neighborhood and possess a dynamic range of strategic lines, carry options and green sizes. The early 1900s bunkering, crafted by Coore & Crenshaw shaper Jeff Bradley, is icing on the cake.
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
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David J Youngdahl
Previous rank: 146
Nipper Campbell, one of the all-time great names in golf, was a prolific golf architect in Ohio, but is mainly remembered for his design of Moraine, where he also served briefly as head pro (he was also highly involved in the expansion of The Country Club in Brookline, site of the 2022 U.S. Open). As the name suggests, Moraine Country Club was created on glacial moraine topography, which over the years had become obscured by massive tree planting. Keith Foster, soft-spoken but carrying a big chainsaw, wiped out nearly all the trees to reveal all the domed hills that members had never noticed during play. Moraine sits right next door to NCR Country Club, which was built by Dick Wilson in the early 1950s. At the time, a Moraine assistant pro would sneak over and watch the construction progress. He finally told Wilson he’d like to get into that golf design business, so Dick hired him away. The assistant pro was Joe Lee.
More From Golf Digest
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Courtesy of Paul Hamill
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Courtesy of Paul Hamill
3 / 13
Courtesy of Paul Hamill
4 / 13
5 / 13
Kirk H. Owens
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Lonna Tucker
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VANCE FOX, Vance Fox
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Courtesy of Paul Hamill
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Courtesy of Paul Hamill
Previous rank: 134
Back in the 1960s, a forest south of Truckee, Calif., served as a location for the filming of the popular TV western “Bonanza.” Now, the area near Lake Tahoe is a gold mine for impressive golf experiences, with a half-dozen high-end public courses, including PGA Tour host site Old Greenwood, and a couple of private gems. And in terms of gold, the standard for golf-and-ski living in all of America is Martis Camp. We say that emphatically because nowhere else can residents and their visitors play a mountainous and challenging Tom Fazio layout—Scottie Scheffler won the U.S. Junior Am here—and when winter arrives, take a quick shuttle from home to a private ski lift for the slopes at Northstar. Fazio has called this site one of the finest natural pieces of property on which he’s ever created a golf course. It has pines, firs, hemlocks and rocky outcroppings on nearly every hole, particularly the 18th, where the clubhouse sits atop a 70-foot-high wall of granite behind the green. Fairways are broad, though hazarded by squiggly bunkers in certain spots, and some greens have trunks of tall Ponderosa pines uncomfortably close. So gorgeous is Martis Camp that one critic called it “a private-gated national park experience.” The many amenities feel both natural for the setting and fanciful at the same time. The 18-hole putting course, now popular among high-end resorts, is among the best of its kind, winding through the multi-million-dollar properties. There is an 18,000-square-foot Family Barn that hosts activities all year long—the Beach Boys have played there—along with bike and walking trails, a private beach and dining options on the shores of north Lake Tahoe. Three restaurants on site, including one for fine dining, can keep you on the property for days, and there's even a cool "Lost Library," a cozy cabin tucked in the woods, replete with relaxing porch swings, that offers a quiet escape. Bonanza? Martis Camp fits that bill.
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Courtesy of Dave Sansom
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Courtesy of Dave Sansom
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Courtesy of Dave Sansom
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Courtesy of Dave Sansom
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Dave Sansom
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Previous rank: 149
From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:
Most golf fans are familiar with Kapalua Golf Club’s Plantation Course, home of the PGA Tour's opening event each year. Located on the north shore of the Hawaiian island of Maui, the Plantation was built from open, windswept pineapple fields on the pronounced slope of a volcano and is irrigated by sprinklers pressured solely by gravity.
As the first design collaboration by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, it unveiled their joint admiration for old-style courses. The blind drive on the fourth, the cut-the-corner drives on the fifth and sixth are all based on tee shots found at National Golf Links. So, too, are its punchbowl green and strings of diagonal bunkers.
It's also a massive course, built on a huge scale, Coore says, to accommodate the wind and the slope and the fact that it gets mostly resort play.
So it's a big course. But what sets it apart in my mind are the little things. When I played the course years ago with Coore, it took only one hole for me to appreciate one of its subtleties. We were on the tee of the par-3 second, an OK hole but nothing riveting, nothing like the canyon-carry par-3 eighth or the ocean-backdropped par-3 11th. The second sits on a rare flat portion of the property. The green sits at a diagonal, angling left to right, and there's a string of bunkers staggering up the right side of the green. The first bunker appears to be directly in front of the green but is actually 40 yards short of it. When pointed out to me, I called it Gingerbread. Bill disagreed.
Explore our complete review here—including bonus photography and ratings from our expert panelists.
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Drew Rogers
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Drew Rogers
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Drew Rogers
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Drew Rogers
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Drew Rogers
Previous rank: 164
Old Elm, a male-only club on Chicago’s north side, has one of the country’s most unique design pedigrees. British architect Harry S. Colt laid out the course in 1913 on one of his few visits to the U.S., collaborating on-site with Donald Ross, who to that point had designed courses in the Northeast and at Pinehurst but was not nationally known. After Colt departed, Ross, consulting Colt’s drawings and design notes, oversaw the construction of the holes. Over the last decade, architect Drew Rogers has helped reclaim the property’s original spaciousness by removing hundreds of trees that had begun to clog the holes and expand fairways and greens. With the help of designer Dave Zinkand, they recreated the rough and rugged bunker edging that Colt was known for in his best U.K. designs. Their work has reestablished Old Elm as one of the top courses in the golf-rich Chicago area.
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Previous rank: 140
Manele, previously called The Challenge at Manele, unseated Kapalua’s Plantation course as the highest-ranked public course in Hawaii several years ago. Now the course, located on the southern coast of Lanai, has the votes to make it eligible for the 100 Greatest and Second 100 Greatest rankings as well, buoyed by an Aesthetics score that regularly ranks among the top 30 in the U.S. The Nicklaus design is worthy of high praise. It has three ocean-cove holes, including the par-3 12th and dogleg-right par-4 17th. You might argue Manele has been perpetually underranked, starting with its finish on Golf Digest’s ranking of Best New Resort Courses in 1994, well behind World Woods’ Pine Barrens course (now known as the Karoo at Cabot Citrus Farms), which is currently 50th on our 100 Greatest Public. It’s hard to argue it’s underranked now.
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Courtesy of Mayacama GC
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Courtesy of Mayacama GC
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Courtesy of Mayacama GC
Previous rank: 137
As Jack Nicklaus wound down his competitive career, his empathy for average golfers rose, and rather than continue to build back-breaking championship-length courses, he began to tailor some of his designs toward the average golfers who foot the bill. Thus, Mayacama is less than 6,800 yards and is routed to be a very comfortable walk, essential since the club has no golf carts. A bold design, it explores every facet of the oak-dotted hillsides above Santa Rosa. Watersheds and gulches figure prominently in the layout, which has some dramatically elevated tees and four stunning, gambling par-5s.
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
Previous rank: 163
Built on just 89 acres, barely enough for 18 holes, no room for even a small practice range, with lots of bunkers and tiny greens, the Donald Ross-designed Wannamoisett has long held the reputation of the Sugar Ray Leonard of golf courses, compact but carrying plenty of punch. The course has received a number of renovations over the decades, the latest by Andrew Green in 2021, which included green and fairway expansions, the rebuilding of the bunkers in a more authentic Ross style (based on the architect's field notes and sketches) and the continuation of an existing tree clearing program. A long-time host to one of amateur golf’s premier events, the Northeast Amateur Invitational, Wannamoisett is considered today the best par-69 layout in the land.
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
Previous rank: 126
History was made here in 1894 when the nine-hole Newport Country Club, one of five founding members of the USGA, became America’s first championship venue, hosting both the inaugural U.S. Amateur and, in the fall of 1895, the inaugural stroke-play U.S. Open Championship. In 1899, Davis added the club's second nine on the property's lower section, stretching it out to the Atlantic shoreline. A.W. Tillinghast remodeled the course in the 1920s, resulting in the most authentic links experience Tilly ever created, or perhaps, more accurately, co-created. Over the past 20 years, consulting architect Ron Forse has faithfully restored many Tillinghast greens and bunkers lost over time. Newport is the rare nationally-ranked course that’s never had a fairway irrigation system. The weather dictates how firm and fast it plays.
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Courtesy of the club
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Courtesy of the club
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Courtesy of the club
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Courtesy of Roger Snyder
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Courtesy of Dick Durrance
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Scott Schneider
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Courtesy of Nicky McIlvaine
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Courtesy of Bill McKnight
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Courtesy of Ed MacMahon
Previous rank: 120
Designed by Robert Trent Jones and his long-time associate Roger Rulewich just before they tackled the ambitious and enormous Robert Trent Jones Trail string of courses in Alabama, Robert Trent Jones Golf Club was intended to be the veteran architect’s definitive statement on championship golf. Routed on rolling terrain densely covered with pine and hardwoods, the design reflects the philosophy Trent pioneered—heroic architecture—with well over 100 glistening white sand bunkers and the last 11 holes playing along the shoreline of Lake Manassas, including the par-3 ninth with a peninsula green, the par-3 11th over a lake cove and the par-4 18th over an inlet and up a lakeside bluff. Robert Trent Jones Golf Club has hosted the Presidents Cup matches on four occasions, was a PGA Tour stop in 2015 and hosted the Solheim Cup in 2024.
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Brian Oar
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The Dye Course at White Oak's par-3 17th.
Brian Oar
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The par-5 12th.
Brian Oar
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White Oak's par-4 fifth.
Brian Oar
Previous rank: 142
The Dye Course at White Oak, our 2022 Best New Private Course winner, is one of the most exclusive golf courses to be built in recent memory. It’s located on the border of Florida and Georgia outside Jacksonville, in almost complete natural isolation. It has no members, no on-site clubhouse (or any other structures on or near the course), and hardly anyone has played it except for personal invitees of owner Mark Walter and several dozen Golf Digest panelists, who visited between October 2021 and September 2022.
Walter engaged the late Pete Dye to design the course in 2013, but by the time construction began in 2017, Dye’s health had deteriorated, and he was no longer able to be active in building it. The job of finishing White Oak fell to longtime confidant and veteran course builder Allan MacCurrach, who interpreted Dye’s wishes based on extensive discussions from previous years and his own wealth of experience working with Dye on over 20 projects.
Intensely private and almost entirely off the radar until now, this exclusive video tour captured by photographer Brian Oar offers the first public look at The Dye Course at White Oak.
Read our full review, including panelist comments, here.
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Courtesy of Jim Mandeville
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Courtesy of Jim Mandeville
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Courtesy of Jim Mandeville
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Courtesy of Jim Mandeville
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Courtesy of Jim Mandeville
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Courtesy of Jim Mandeville
Previous rank: 136
Jack Nicklaus has redesigned some aspects of every hole at Muirfield Village over the decades, in efforts to make sure that the course remains competitive as an annual host of the PGA Tour’s Memorial Tournament. But he’s done no major remodeling at Sycamore Hills Golf Club in Fort Wayne, just modest adjustments. Although the course sees its share of amateur competitions, Nicklaus has seen no need to toughen it for everyday member play. After all, it has always had plenty of challenge, like the long freeform bunker left of the fairway on the par-4 third, the 14 bunkers scattered about the par-5 fifth and the serpentine stream that crosses the fairway four times from tee to green at the par-5 15th. Sycamore Hills is Nicklaus at his most imaginative, with strategic golf on some holes, gambling golf on other holes and target golf on still others.
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Courtesy of Michael Clemmer
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Courtesy of Michael Clemmer
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Courtesy of Michael Clemmer
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Courtesy of Michael Clemmer
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Courtesy of Michael Clemmer
Previous rank: 130
Asked if a course could be built in a Birmingham forest, Jack Nicklaus scouted the site from lumber haul roads and said of the mountainous terrain, “Well, there are a lot of par 3s out there, that’s for sure.” But then he discovered a gentle valley in which to put par 4s and 5s, so he took the job. It became one of his great early designs. But as it neared 40 years of existence, Shoal Creek needed some reconditioning, so Nicklaus and his former senior designer Jim Lipe (now operating his own firm in Louisiana) literally ripped up every hole and rethought strategies and options. The result was not a restoration but an updating. Gone are huge fairway bunkers, replaced by smaller clusters of traps. Greens have been recontoured, with one, the 12th, actually flowing front to back, unheard of back in the late 1970s when the course was first built. Shoal Creek has twice hosted the PGA Championship and the remodeled layout hosted the 2018 U.S. Women’s Open, won by Ariya Jutanugarn in a four-hole playoff over Hoo-joo Kim.
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Russell Kirk
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Russell Kirk
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Russell Kirk
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Russell Kirk
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Russell Kirk
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Russell Kirk
Previous rank: 145
When Fox Chapel hosted the 1985 U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship (won by Michiko Hattori), some observers were disappointed that its Seth Raynor design seemed so ordinary. Greens had become circular, many bunkers were overgrown and those that still existed bore fancy modern shapes. Most alarming, the Fox’s 17th, originally a Biarritz hole, had the front portion of the green and trench mowed as fairway. In the early 1990s, architect Brian Silva was called in to restore Raynor’s features. He reclaimed green dimensions, including the Biarritz, and recaptured original bunkers, particularly the necklace wrapped around the front of the 11th (“Short”) green. Tom Marzolf, of Tom Fazio Design, has continued to refine and draw forth more Raynor-inspired shaping and bunkering; this latest work debuted in the fall of 2020 with profound enhancements to the Punchbowl second (a par 5), Redan sixth, the Lions Mouth green complex at nine, Bottle 16th and the Redan.
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
Previous rank: 152
Ridgewood was always one of A.W. Tillinghast’s favorites. He lived nearby, was a club member and a close friend with the club's longtime pro, George Jacobus, who served as president of the PGA of America for seven years. (It was Jacobus who brought the 1935 Ryder Cup to Ridgewood.) The 27 holes that Tillinghast created were some of his most demanding. Not surprisingly, the course has long been a tournament venue, particularly in recent years, following extensive tree removal and bunker renovation by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. Ridgewood’s tournament 18 consists of holes from all three nines, and that's the configuration our panelists score. The club’s drivable par-4 sixth on its Center nine, the famed “Five and Dime” hole, is one of the country's greats, built long before potentially one-shot par 4s became trendy.
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Stephen Szurlej
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Courtesy of PGA of America, Gary Kellner
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Stephen Szurlej
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Courtesy of Gary Kellner
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Courtesy of PGA of America, Gary Kellner
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Courtesy of PGA of America, Gary Kellner
Previous rank: 138
Hazeltine might be the most controversial championship course of the modern era, designed by Robert Trent Jones for former USGA president Totton Heffelfinger, who used his considerable clout to bring the 1966 U.S. Women’s Open and 1970 U.S. Open to the then-very immature layout. Criticisms were so extreme that Trent Jones spent the next two decades remodeling it, straightening doglegs, relocating holes and rebuilding greens. Between 1987 and 2010, his younger son, Rees Jones, assumed the reconstruction, with even greater success—and today the layout, like many in the old man's portfolio, is more Rees than Trent. Hazeltine hosted the 2009 PGA and 2016 Ryder Cup, the latter a bright spot for the American team, which perhaps is why the PGA of America has already awarded the 2028 Ryder Cup to this Minnesota site. Davis Love III, longtime Ryder Cup player and victorious U.S. captain in 2016, will step in for Rees and make modifications to the course in preparation with his brother Mark and their lead architect, Scot Sherman.
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Previous rank: 131
One gets the feeling Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw looked long and hard at this mountain property on the east side of Lake Tahoe before agreeing to take the job. On one hand, the site is gorgeous, an elevated evergreen forest with views of the surrounding Sierra Nevadas and distant valleys. On the other, it was far more rugged than they preferred and would prove challenging to link up 18 well-connected holes on such vast terrain. Ultimately, beauty won out and they were able to find enough calm ground—especially from holes 10 through 15—to make the journey around it seem meditative and not a lurching, adrenaline-filled rush. The boulder-strewn site recalls parts of Rock Creek Cattle Company in western Montana, currently 65th on America's 100 Greatest Courses, and the off-site views and the way fairways and greens blend into the native grasses and conifers bring to mind Gozzer Ranch, ranked No. 43. Pretty good company.
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Courtesy of Double Eagle Club
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Courtesy of Double Eagle Club
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Courtesy of Double Eagle Club
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Courtesy of Double Eagle Club
Previous rank: 107
Built by reshaping flat farm fields into gentle hills and valleys, Double Eagle benefits from plenty of elbow room. Some holes have double fairways that pose genuine alternate routes. Greens are benign enough in contours to allow them to be kept extremely fast. A delightfully thoughtful design, it closes with two great water-laden, risk-rewarding holes. The club name does not symbolize a golf term. Original owner John McConnell was a fortune hunter, and the Double Eagle was a rare doubloon discovered in a sunken treasure.
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Courtesy of Flint Hills National Club
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Courtesy of Flint Hills National Club
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Courtesy of Flint Hills National Club
Previous rank: 132
Located 15 miles east of Wichita on the western perimeter of its namesake Flint Hills prairie region, Tom Fazio incorporated gently rolling terrain, prairie grasses and a meandering body of water into the design. The course features generous zoysia fairways flanked by penal bluegrass rough with fast, highly contoured greens broken into multiple tiers and a naturalistic bunker style that matches the broad prairie environment. Stretching over 7,000 yards with five par-3s, the highly walkable routing shows off a variety of native wildlife. Owner Tom Devlin is a fervent supporter of amateur golf, and Flint Hills has hosted three USGA national championships and a variety of other amateur competitions.
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Courtesy of Jeffrey R. Bertch
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Courtesy of Jeffrey R. Bertch
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Courtesy of Jeffrey R. Bertch
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Courtesy of Jeffrey R. Bertch
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Previous rank: 116
Sand Valley is the fifth course that the firm of Coore and Crenshaw has designed for resort maven Mike Keiser, and the first not located close to an ocean. No matter. It’s still on a thousand acres of rolling sand hills in Central Wisconsin, and Coore and Crenshaw were given carte blanche to route their course. (Rumor has it Coore routed a hole outside the property line, and Keiser reluctantly bought that additional parcel.) Given the name, many conclude Sand Valley is a combination of Nebraska’s Sand Hills Golf Club and New Jersey’s Pine Valley. But Sand Valley has its own personality, with some dual fairways, gigantic sand spits, enormous greens and even a hidden putting surface. Sand Valley was Golf Digest’s Best New Course of 2017.
1 / 9
Matt Hahn
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LC Lambrecht
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LC Lambrecht
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LC Lambrecht
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LC Lambrecht
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LC Lambrecht
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LC Lambrecht
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LC Lambrecht
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LC Lambrecht
Previous rank: 127
Coore and Crenshaw’s Red Course is part of a resort triple-header that gives golfers a rare opportunity to compare and contrast the differences in styles and philosophies of arguably the three of the top design firms in America, including Streamsong Blue, a Tom Doak design, and Streamsong Black, from Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. [In 2025, Streamsong announced a fourth 18-hole course by David McLay Kidd, the missing designer in modern architecture's Big Four.] The Red, like the Blue, was built from sand spoils created by a massive phosphate strip mine, with some piles forming dunes reaching 75 feet into the air. But there was only room for 31 holes, so Coore and Crenshaw had to take a section of less desirable, stripped-down land and create five holes that looked like the rest of the site, Red's holes one through five. The course has a wonderful mix of bump-and-run links holes and target-like water holes. Some greens are perched like those at Pinehurst, others are massive with multi-levels like those at St. Andrews. The turf is firm and bouncy, and while the routing is sprawling, it’s easily walkable. The Red has consistently come out on top in this survey, but the Blue and Black are within just about a point.
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of the club
Previous rank: 125
Prodded by his partner, Bruce Charlton, and their then-design associate Jay Blasi, veteran architect Robert Trent Jones Jr. agreed to a radically different, vertical-links style when building Chambers Bay in an abandoned sand quarry near Tacoma. By the time Golf Digest named it as America’s Best New Public Course of 2008, the course had already been awarded the 2010 U.S. Amateur and 2015 U.S. Open. In the Amateur, Chambers Bay proved to be hard, both in the firmness of its dry fescue turf (Jones called his fairways “hardwood floors”) and its difficulties around and on the windswept greens. For the U.S. Open, the firmness and surrounds were more manageable, but the greens were notoriously bumpy. That’s now been remedied, as the fescue turf on the putting surfaces has been replaced with pure Poa Annua. What's irreplaceable are the views of Puget Sound from nearly every hole, multi-level fairways that entice bold driving to gain second-shot advantages and two holes running parallel to a railway that invokes feelings of early Scottish and Irish links courses.
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Jeff Marsh
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Jeff Marsh
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Jeff Marsh
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Jeff Marsh
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Jeff Marsh
Previous rank: NEW
The Old Barnwell property, 12 miles southeast of Aiken, shares much in common with the nearby Tree Farm, which was constructed at virtually the same time in 2022 and 2023. The latter is a better pure golf site, but the more enigmatic, if less aesthetically endowed, Old Barnwell property is profound in other architecturally advantageous ways. The course plays around and through a treeless basin at the center of the 500-acre site, shooting the occasional sortie of holes into thinned-out sections of pine along a perimeter rim. The landforms surrounding the amphitheater are nakedly muscular, and eight holes traverse and tumble off these fallaway ridgelines. First-time lead architects Brian Schneider and Blake Conant used those movements to prop up wide holes that skirt the edges and handled the less suggestive parts of the property by constructing an assortment of contemporary and antique architectural features: old bathtub bunkers recalling hazards at Garden City Golf Club and Myopia Hunt; linear shaggy-grass berms that evoke military entrenchments; open waste areas and geometric chasms of sand; and vertical grass embankments protecting bunkers and greens. On top of this are a set of putting surfaces that crash any conversation of the game’s most profoundly contoured, pushing the limits of playability without crossing into needless ornamentation.
More From Golf Digest
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Jeff Marsh
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Jeff Marsh
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Jeff Marsh
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Jeff Marsh
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Jeff Marsh
Previous rank: NEW
At The Tree Farm, PGA Tour player and founder Zac Blair has attracted a kindred young-in-spirit if not exclusively young-in-age membership from across the country that mirrors his relaxed-casual passion for walking, fast play, head-to-head matches and creative architecture, particularly from the approach shot through the green. A majority of them are good players who think nothing of hoofing 36 or more holes a day.Design credit goes to multiple people, including Tom Doak, who routed the course over a gorgeously secluded site full of ridges, valleys and galleries of pine accented with scrub, sand and shades of underbrush, parts Pinehurst area and vintage Augusta National; and Kye Goalby and Blair, who designed the holes and features. Most of Blair's and Goalby’s fairways merely brush the land with a minimum of earthwork, draped around the curves of bunkers and ravines that tempt players to try and nip the corners. Highlights include a wonderful Redan par 3, a memorable punchbowl green at the par-5 16th, a mighty uphill par 3 (the fourth) modeled on the fifth at Pine Valley and some other subtle nods to template holes, but overall the architecture at The Tree Farm is organic and inspired primarily by what was already there, giving the course a budding air of sophisticated maturity.Some of the subtlest sections of the course, like the loop through a soothing cove of pines at five, six and seven, may be The Tree Farm’s most evocative, a resplendent sotto voce to the explosive aria of the final four holes that includes the Redan, a reachable par 5 with a corner-cut drive and deep punchbowl green, a short archery target par 3 and a downhill drivable par 4 with a split-level green similar to the 16th at Augusta National.
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courtesy of French Lick Resort
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Brian Walers Photography
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Brian Walers Photography
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
Previous rank: 118
Pete Dye’s mountaintop design, Golf Digest’s 2009 Best New Public winner, established that at age 80 the designer still had fresh ideas, including rumpled chipping swales, country-lane cart paths and volcano bunkers. Measuring just over 8,100 yards from the tips, Pete Dye at French Lick is not the first course over 8,000 yards to land on our rankings. That would be, in 1967, the original 8,040-yard Runaway Brook in Massachusetts, later turned into the 8,325-yard Pines Course at The International Golf Club (and now completely remodeled by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, nowhere near 8,000 yards). The world’s longest is Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in China at 8,548 yards, not counting Australia's Nullarbor Links, a course that stretches 1,365 kilometers with each hole stretched out in a different town along a highway. The yardage may be a talking point, but what golfers will remember about Dye's French Lick course are the multi-mile views in all directions and the roominess of the fairways and greens that hang out over the edges of the sweeping land formations.
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Kohler, WI
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Destination Kohler
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Destination Kohler
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Courtesy of Kohler Co.
Previous rank: 117
Only Pete Dye could have convinced owner Herb Kohler to rip apart an award-winning course (Golf Digest’s Best New Public Course of 1988) and still come out a winner. Dye coupled the front nine of that original 18 (now holes 1-4 and 14-18) with nine newer holes built within a vast bend of the Sheboygan River to produce the River Course. It possesses some of Dye’s most exciting holes, from the triple-option reachable par-4 ninth to the boomerang-shaped par-5 11th to the monster par-4 18th, where Kohler surprised Dye by converting a long waste bunker into a temporary lagoon for tournament events. For major events, like the 2012 U.S. Women’s Open, Dye’s original 18 was used. But for survey purposes, Golf Digest evaluates the River 18, which is available for everyday general play.
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Russell Kirk
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Russell Kirk
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Russell Kirk
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Russell Kirk
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Russell Kirk
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Jeremiah Khokhar
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Russell Kirk
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Russell Kirk
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Russell Kirk
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Jeremiah Y.Khokhar
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Daniel Wagner
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Russell Kirk
Previous rank: 133
The Concession was originally established by Sarasota resident Tony Jacklin, who convinced Jack Nicklaus to handle the design while Jacklin would offer design suggestions. The club name honors the famous final-putt concession from Jack to Tony in the 1969 Ryder Cup, which resulted in a tie between the teams and a moral victory for the underdog Europeans. The Concession is a terrific design, a rare Nicklaus one that’s not a residential development. The course flows across a variety of landscapes—meadows, wetlands, oak hammocks and pine forests—with spectacular bunkering and exciting green contours. Jack had been working on this course at the same time he and Tom Doak were doing Sebonack, and Jack later admitted the small, heavily-contoured greens at The Concession were inspired by those at Sebonack. In 2021, The Concession hosted the World Golf Championships-Workday Championship, won by Collin Morikawa.
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Courtesy of PGA of America
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Courtesy of PGA of America
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The green at the narrow 15th is typically Quail Hollow’s hardest to reach in regulation.
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Courtesy of Gary Kellner/PGA of America
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Courtesy of Gary Kellner/PGA of America
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The uphill 12th with water left and right is listed as a par 5 but will take scores of 4s and even 3s to win.
Previous rank: 119
Few golf course projects had more national attention in recent years than Quail Hollow, mainly because its front nine was redesigned just a year before it hosted the 2017 PGA Championship. The par-4 first and par-3 second holes were completely torn up, replaced by a new long dogleg-right par-4 opening hole. Several acres of pines to the left of the fifth tee were removed to make room for a new par-3 fourth. (With its knobby green fronted by three traps, it proved to be the most frustrating hole for pros in the 2017 PGA.) More pines were removed to the left of the par-4 11th, replaced by bunkers, and even more trees chopped down on a hill left of the par-4 18th to make room for money-making hospitality boxes. There’s no question that this latest remodeling, rushed though it was, improved the course. Quail Hollow hosted the 2022 Presidents Cup (the order of the holes were rearranged to ensure the majority of matches would reach the vaunted Green Mile, 16-18) and the 2025 PGA Championship.
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Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of the club
3 / 7
Andy Johnson/The Fried Egg
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Evan Schiller
5 / 7
Jon Cavalier
6 / 7
Andy Johnson/The Fried Egg
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Jon Cavalier
Previous rank: 135
Completing a George C. Thomas hat trick of designs—the others being Los Angeles Country Club (North) and (Riviera)—is Bel-Air Country Club. It's a charming throwback design that winds through mansion-dotted canyons of Los Angeles, the topography so steep that golfers are guided from hole to hole via a tunnel, an elevator and the city’s most famous suspension bridge, which spans a gulch on the par-3 10th and serves as a dramatic backdrop for the 18th green. Bel-Air’s design had been altered over decades by, among others, Dick Wilson, George Fazio, Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Tom Fazio. But in 2018, Tom Doak erased every bit of their work, removing most of the phony water hazards and faithfully recapturing Thomas’s splashy signature bunkering. To complete a round amidst these Hollywood hills, you’ll definitely encounter a Hollywood star. Her name is Bel-Air.
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Courtesy of Tony Roberts
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Tom Alexander Photography
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Courtesy of Patrick Corley
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Courtesy of Drew Annan
Previous rank: 121
It has three par 5s over 600 yards and a par 4 measuring 478 yards, but the Canyon Course at Forest Highlands still plays shorter than its listed yardage. That’s due in part to its elevation at 7,000 feet and partly because it has six par 3s, a strong collection spaced every other hole from the fourth through 14th. Both nines are routed along mountain ridges, with holes edged by stately ponderosa pines. The ninth is especially scenic, as it drops down an escarpment into a narrow stream valley to a double green it shares with the 18th hole.
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Courtesy of Henebry
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Channing Benjamin
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Courtesy of Henebry
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Courtesy of Mark Davidson
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Courtesy of Randy O'Rourke
Previous rank: 113
When developer Michael Meldman first showed Tom Fazio the land for the proposed Madison Club, an arid, barren desert outside Palm Springs, he told Fazio, “Let’s do a modern-day Shadow Creek.” By “modern-day,” he meant one that would feature homesites along the holes. So Fazio did what he’d done in Las Vegas at Shadow Creek. He had crews dig into the desert and pile up dirt on the sides. But this time, the cuts became channels wide enough for fairways, with pads for home sites perched above holes on surrounding ridgelines. After trucking in and planting mature trees and sodding everything, Fazio was satisfied The Madison Club looked nothing like a typical Palm Springs residential layout. Said Fazio, “If you’re given a free hand in the Coachella Valley, what do you do? You do everything. You move the earth, plant the trees and carve out the streams. You create the entire space. There’s so much here.”
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
Previous rank: 109
As an old pro from Pine Valley who lost an Open at Merion, George Fazio blended features of both of those great courses into his design at Jupiter Hills, the high point of his second career as a golf course architect. Built from a distinct sand ridge that runs laterally along the Atlantic seacoast north of West Palm Beach, Jupiter Hills was inexpensive to construct. The terrain was so good, only 87,000 cubic yards of earth were moved. A decade after it opened, George Fazio retired near the property and couldn’t resist constantly tinkering with it. He ultimately removed many of its most unique, Pine Valley-like aspects. His nephew Tom Fazio, who had assisted on the original, has renovated the design several times, most recently in 2020 with new bunkering strategies. The open sandscapes of the original design remain but they're cleaned up, and the effect is one more of polish than rugged terror.
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Courtesy of the club
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of the club
Previous rank: 128
One gets the impression, playing St. Louis Country Club, that C.B. Macdonald was perplexed about how to route a course on such a tight piece of property. After all, his previous and concurrent design efforts at National Golf Links of America, Piping Rock and The Lido were comparatively spacious. But at St. Louis C.C., Macdonald must have felt squeezed, for he installed back-to-back par-3s at the second and third holes, placed his Redan par-3, the 16th, near the entrance road, then had players walk back to the 16th tee to play the 17th. Those quirks aside, St. Louis C.C. is a sublime, hilly museum of golf. It has so many enormous, unique landforms, it’s like playing golf through a dinosaur graveyard. The short par-4 18th is Macdonald’s version of the 17th at Prestwick, the Alps, and features a blind approach over a ridge into the green. If you miss a 30-incher on this punchbowl green, remember Sam Snead did, too, to lose the ’47 U.S. Open.
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Ryan Young
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US PGA TOUR
Previous rank: 124
Philadelphia Cricket was A.W. Tillinghast’s home club in his early years as a golfer, so when he laid out a new course for the club in the early 1920s, he devoted special attention to it. Over the century, it aged. Greens shrank, bunkers eroded, trees grew (including one right through the roof of a clubhouse veranda). In 2008, Keith Foster was retained to restore the course to its Tillinghast glory, but a poor economy postponed the work until the summer of 2013. The Cricket is now faithful to Tilly once again, with trees removed and original greens and bunkers reclaimed, including the famed “Great Hazard” that must be carried on the par-5 seventh. As per his request, Tillinghast’s ashes were scattered in the Wissahickon Creek that crosses the 18th green. The PGA Tour's Truist Championship was moved to Philly Cricket Club for 2025, with Quail Hollow Club hosting the PGA Championship.
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Courtesy of Eagle Point GC
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Courtesy of Eagle Point GC
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Courtesy of Eagle Point GC
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Photo by Eagle Point G.C.
Previous rank: 114
From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:
I played Eagle Point Golf Club, a Tom Fazio design, soon after it became ranked on Golf Digest's 100 Greatest but before it hosted the 2017 Wells Fargo Championship as a one-time substitute for Quail Hollow Club, which hosted the PGA Championship that summer. I walked it with caddies, Director of Golf Billy Anderson and one of the club's founders (and later president) Bobby Long (who was also green chairman at Seminole and a member of Augusta National.) Just before we teed off, golf architect Andrew Green came over and introduced himself. We'd never met. He was designing a short-game facility for the club. Though it may seem strange that Fazio's firm wasn’t retained to do that, it helps to know that Andrew’s brother, Sam, was Eagle Point’s course superintendent at the time.
Read the complete review, plus comments from our panelists, here.
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Courtesy of Stonehouse Golf
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Courtesy of Stonehouse Golf
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Previous rank: 123
Considered by some to be Dick Wilson’s consummate design, Laurel Valley Golf Club was founded by a group that included Arnold Palmer, who lived a few miles from the site. In fact, the group tried to persuade Arnie to quit the PGA Tour and become the club’s head professional and manager. Palmer reportedly mulled over the prospect for a time before rejecting it. Imagine how different the tour would have been had Arnie not become the dashing head of Arnie’s Army in the early 1960s. Instead, Palmer won seven majors, 52 titles overall and founded a golf design company that thrice remodeled the lovely Laurel Valley for major events.
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
Previous rank: 122
Stone Eagle is one of the most remarkable courses in the golf-heavy Palm Springs market. It sits atop a rocky plateau, 1,000 feet above the Coachella Valley but still thousands of feet below the peaks of the adjacent Santa Rosa Mountains. When Tom Doak first walked the site, he said, “I thought this must be what the surface of Mars looks like: rocky, rugged and red.” Given the luxury of routing an 18 without any homesites, Doak did his lay-of-the-land best to create a faux links high above the desert floor by tucking fairways into creases of the land and positioning shots to play over low ridges into bold greens that mimic the rugged topography. At Stone Eagle, Doak used hillsides of rocks and boulders the way Old Country architects used sand dunes. The only difference: sand is soft, rock is not.
1 / 10
Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
4 / 10
Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
7 / 10
Braedon Fox
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Braedon Fox
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Braedon Fox
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Braedon Fox
Previous rank: 111
Unlike nearby Wade Hampton Golf Club, the Tom Fazio design that was routed through natural valleys to forego the need for dynamite, Mountaintop was blasted from solid rock. Some holes were forged through slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains, like the par-4 sixth, edged by a 30-foot-high wall of granite on the right. Conservative estimates are that all that rock removal raised the cost of construction of this continuous-18 layout to $1 million per hole. The opening tee shot drops 100 feet, and six holes also play over a deep gorge formed by Hurricane Creek. Mountaintop proves there is no property too rugged for Tom Fazio.
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Allen Kennedy/Courtesy of The Preserve GC
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Allen Kennedy/Courtesy of The Preserve GC
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Joann Dost/Courtesy of The Preserve GC
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Joann Dost/Courtesy of The Preserve GC
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Courtesy of the club
Previous rank: 103
Located a few miles inland from the glorious fivesome of 100 Greatest courses on California’s Monterey Peninsula (Cypress Point, Pebble Beach, Spyglass Hill and the two courses at Monterey Peninsula Country Club), The Preserve Golf Club is dramatically different, the only golf course contained within a 20,000-acre parcel of gentle hills and mammoth oaks. Fazio moved almost no earth here, so perfect was the routing established by Poellot and Sandy Tatum. The greens are subtle, the bunkering low-key, the atmosphere one of absolute tranquility.
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LC Lambrecht
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LC Lambrecht
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LC Lambrecht
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LC Lambrecht
Previous rank: 104
Though it contained a classic collection of Raynor favorites, including a Road Hole, a Biarritz, a Redan and even a Prize Dogleg (based on an entry from a 1914 magazine design contest), Yeamans Hall suffered from benign neglect for 50 years, with bunkers overgrown and greens both shrunk by mowing habits and mushroomed by topdressing. But in the late 1980s, the course superintendent discovered Raynor’s original plans in the clubhouse attic. Architect Tom Doak and his then-associate Jim Urbina used the plans to faithfully restore Raynor features. Urbina continues to implement restoration touches, and Yeamans Hall today is one of the country's most polished and evocative examples of Raynor's architecture on a relatively flat piece of lowcountry land.
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Courtesy of the club
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David Cannon
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Previous rank: 108
Rich Harvest Farms began as a six-hole backyard course for computer billionaire Jerry Rich, was then expanded into a nine-fairway, 11-green layout that could be played multiple ways, and finally evolved into a conventional 18-hole layout strong enough to host the 2009 Solheim Cup and the 2017 NCAA Championship. With its polish and landscaping, some call Rich Harvest Farms the “Augusta of the Midwest,” but even Augusta National doesn’t have Rich Harvest’s flexibility, where every hole can play differently every day, some even from different angles and par.
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
Previous rank: 106
The East Course at Baltimore Country Club, also known as the Five Farms Course, was one of many outstanding A.W. Tillinghast designs nationally ranked for decades by Golf Digest. Still, even jewels need polishing now and then. The club brought in Keith Foster, perhaps the most modest of modern-day course architects. He chooses to work solely on restorations, no more than two at a time, and declines to self-promote. At Baltimore Country Club, Foster removed trees (which nearly everyone is doing these days), rebuilt greens to make them manageable with today’s green speeds, re-established Tillinghast’s bunkering, regrassed everything and brought back sparkle to the East Course. The par-3s here rank among the best Tillinghast built, as does the stretch run from the par-5 14th to the strong par-3 17th.
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
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Brian Oar
Previous rank: NEW
Architect Chet Williams has already set the standard for golf in Texas with Whispering Pines, the state’s top-ranked course in Trinity, north of Houston. The land he had to work with at The Covey, set within a 2,000-acre hunting club 75 miles west of Houston, was even better with hills, ridges and ravines cut by natural dry washes that have been reinforced as rushing-water streams. With no surrounding development, The Covey is a scenic journey through the Texas outback through groves of pines and hardwoods and cross-course views. Numerous specimen trees have been left standing in the fairways that must be maneuvered around, and Williams’ green complexes can be wicked, flanked and fronted with deep, staggered bunkers, with strong putting contours that create multiple internal levels and severe false fronts that eject any short approach 30 or 40 yards back down the fairway. The halfway house behind the ninth green on the property’s highest point is one of golf’s best, with an upper-level observatory deck and lounge that offers 20-mile views across the county.
1 / 6
Evan Schiller
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Evan Schiller
3 / 6
Evan Schiller
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Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
Previous rank: 129
When it was conceived in the early 1920s, The Creek was considered “The Million Dollar Club” because of the wealth of its exclusive membership. The line that writer Royal Cortissoz wrote upon its 1923 opening remains true today: “The distinctive character of this course lies in its range.” It opens with holes framed by trees, mainly lindens that line the entry drive, then moves onto a bluff that overlooks Long Island Sound. At the turn, holes play adjacent to the shore, offering fresh takes on two of C.B. Macdonald’s most exciting template holes. The 10th, a dogleg along the sea, is his version of the Leven (of Lundin Links in Scotland), while the 11th is not just a Biarritz green, but an island Biarritz green. Other Macdonald favorites are also at The Creek, including the Eden, Redan and Short.
1 / 8
LC Lambrecht
2 / 8
Andy Johnson/The Fried Egg
3 / 8
Andy Johnson/The Fried Egg
4 / 8
Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
5 / 8
Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Andy Johnson/The Fried Egg
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Andy Johnson/The Fried Egg
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Andy Johnson/The Fried Egg
Previous rank: 110
Expertly routed across glacial domes and over kettle holes, Kingsley Club opens with a split fairway, a high-right avenue separated from a low-left one by a cluster of sod-face bunkers. It’s an attention grabber that is repeated in various fashions throughout the round. For instance, the hilltop green on the short par-3 second seems tiny in comparison to the deep, shaggy bunkers surrounding it. The long par-3 fifth plays over a valley with a tongue of fairway ready to repel any shot that comes up short. The par-4 sixth seems to slant in one direction, then can't in the other direction once past a lateral ridge that runs down the fairway. Every hole has its own character. With roughs of tall fescue and occasional white pines and hardwoods, Kingsley is all natural and all absorbing, a thoughtful design by Mike DeVries, who grew up in the area playing Crystal Downs.
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Courtesy of Gary Kellner
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Previous rank: 99
To prepare Olympia Fields North for the 1961 PGA Championship (won by Jerry Barber in a playoff over Don January), the club didn’t hire a golf architect. Instead, superintendent Warren Bidwell relocated 32 greenside and 13 fairway bunkers and added new tees to lengthen the course by 320 yards. Forty years later, golf architect Mark Mungeam supervised extensive changes before the North hosted the 2003 U.S. Open and made more changes again before Olympia Fields North and then-newly remodeled South co-hosted the 2015 U.S. Amateur. In 2017, Olympia Fields North was the site of the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, and the course hosted the 2020 and 2023 BMW Championship. Andrew Green has since been hired to remodel the course.
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Peter Wong/Courtesy of Spring Hill GC
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Peter Wong/Courtesy of Spring Hill GC
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Peter Wong/Courtesy of Spring Hill GC
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Peter Wong/Courtesy of Spring Hill GC
Previous rank: 100
While Tom Fazio is best known for creating massive landscapes for his designs, Spring Hill required little manipulation of earth. Fazio utilized the existing rolling topography to form what is one of his most natural designs. Holes are isolated from one another by thick forests of evergreens and, in one section of the property, acres of maple trees that provide a brilliant color display each fall. With several tight fairways, marshland along some edges, many uphill approach shots into elevated greens and subtle movements in the putting surfaces, Spring Hill is also one of Fazio’s most challenging designs.
1 / 7
Evan Schiller
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Evan Schiller
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Evan Schiller
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Evan Schiller
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Evan Schiller
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Evan Schiller
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Evan Schiller
Previous rank: 150
Tom Bendelow actually laid out the original course at East Lake, back when it was known as Atlanta Athletic Club, and that was the layout upon which Stewart Maiden taught the game to the now-legendary Bobby Jones. Donald Ross basically built a new course on the same spot in 1915, which remained untouched until changes were made before the 1963 Ryder Cup. When Atlanta Athletic moved to the suburbs in the late 1960s, the intown East Lake location (many of the members stayed behind) fell on hard financial times until being rescued in the 1990s by businessman Tom Cousins, who made it a sterling fusion of corporate and inner-city involvement. Rees Jones redesigned most holes beginning in the mid-90s, making the course more reflective of his views of championship golf. After the PGA Tour reversed the nines for the 2016 Tour Championship (flipping the unpopular par-3 finish into the ninth hole), the club made the new routing permanent for regular play. East Lake underwent another major restoration following the 2023 Tour Championship, this time by Andrew Green, that focuses on bringing back the course's Donald Ross heritage. Green used a 1949 aerial to inform the replacement of bunkers and the shape of greens, which are much larger and possess a wider variety of hole locations and slopes than before. Almost every hole was dramatically revamped, creating a course that poses driving options and requires the careful calibration of each shot rather than a mere test of straight hitting. The result is a massive jump in our rankings.
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
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Courtesy of Jon Cavalier
Previous rank: 112
The par-4 10th at Colorado Golf Club, playing downhill off the tee to a green hanging on a slope, with the Colorado Rockies in the far distance, has not a single bunker. Yet it sets the tone for what might well be Coore and Crenshaw’s finest example of how to massage a great golf course from topography that many would have considered ordinary. These designers made this stretch of Front Range southeast of Denver extraordinary. They ran fairways across sagebrush hills that are dotted with pines. They positioned greens on buttes and the far sides of barrancas. Colorado Golf Club is a second-shot course where seemingly generous landing areas can result in awkward hanging lies for approach shots to greens that run left or right or even away from the direction of play. The massive par-5 first is one of the most exciting first holes in a time zone known for exciting opening holes. It's then followed by a short cross-ravine par-3 benched into a hillside like its inspiration, the second at Prairie Dunes. In 2019, the course hosted the USGA Mid-Amateur.
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evan schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
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Courtesy of Evan Schiller
Previous rank: 98
Built in a 250-acre meadow beneath the Grand Teton Mountains and its ski runs, Shooting Star is a core-golf layout with no housing. Its opening nine runs counterclockwise around the perimeter of the site, and its incoming nine circles clockwise through the interior. The flat land was re-sculpted into hills and valleys, then lightly planted with aspens and evergreens. Water hazards, in the form of 50 acres of lakes, ponds and a canal reshaped into a stream, affect play on 13 of the 18 holes. The club displays green sketches of all 18 in the clubhouse, each signed by Fazio, and the notations on them reflect some of Fazio’s design instructions, such as “Make sure bunker right of green feels real intimate with the stream,” “Create a flash in the left central back portion of the green to help slow down long iron shots,” and “No bunkers in front of green to entice better players to pull out driver from the tee.”
1 / 6
Laurence Lambrecht
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Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
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Courtesy of Laurence Lambrecht
Previous rank: 105
The Olde Farm is old school in concept and execution. The terrain of this site was so nearly perfect for golf that designer Bobby Weed staked it out in just two days, driving around the property in his rental car. The routing hugs the flowing contours of old farmland beneath the foothills of the Appalachians, with holes hopping Sinking Creek a few times and edging slopes of the adjacent hills. It’s a lay-of-the-land design featuring some semi-blind shots, but Weed always provides a target somewhere in the distance. Bentgrass fairways are kept dry and firm and most greens are open in front to encourage the old-style game of low, running approach shots.
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Photographed by Dom Furore at Arcadia Bluffs in Michigan.
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Dom Furore
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Nile Young Photography/Courtesy of Arcadia Bluffs GC
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Nile Young Photography/Courtesy of Arcadia Bluffs GC
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Photo courtesy of Arcadia Bluffs
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Nile Young Photography/Courtesy of Arcadia Bluffs GC
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Nile Young Photography/Courtesy of Arcadia Bluffs GC
Previous rank: 92
Can a course ranked this high be a sleeper? The Bluffs Course at Arcadia Bluffs has been overshadowed by Pacific Dunes ever since it finished second to it in the Best New Upscale Public Course race of 2001. And likewise, it’s been second-fiddle to Crystal Downs, a northern Michigan neighbor that every visitor wants to play, even though it’s private, and Arcadia is public. And even by Whistling Straits, the imitation links on the opposite side of Lake Michigan that Arcadia Bluffs resembles, although the sand dunes at Arcadia are natural, not manmade. More recently, the Bluffs faces competition from within, the newly opened sister layout, the South Course at Arcadia Bluffs, designed by Dana Fry in the style of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor.
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Laurence Lambrecht
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Laurence Lambrecht
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Laurence Lambrecht
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Laurence Lambrecht
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Laurence Lambrecht
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Laurence Lambrecht
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Derek Duncan
Previous rank: 102
This is Herbert Fowler's most engaging 18-hole design. Routed on an isthmus in the Atlantic on Cape Cod, with each nine looping out and back along the ocean’s edge, the course’s rugged topography was splendidly used to pose challenges in stance, lie and depth perception. It’s golf’s equivalent of a spine-tingling, neck-twisting roller coaster ride along a waterfront. If you come upon a flat lie at Eastward Ho!, it’s likely a tee box, a fact that can put some golfers off who lack a sense of humor and appreciation for links golf. Keith Foster’s renovation in the early 2000s made giant strides in uncovering the spectacular landscape through serious tree removal, and in 2024 Kyle Franz took Eastward Ho! over the finish line by opening up the remaining sightlines, expanding fairways so the ball runs as much laterally as propels forward, reclaimed over 28,000 square feet of green surface, and introduced open sandscapes that hide cart paths and alleviate the search for balls in the fescue roughs. The most striking change is the expansion of the front of the green at the par-3 fourth hole to create a staggering Biarritz putting surface, one of the most majestic in the world.
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