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The best golf courses in Oklahoma

By Stephen Hennessey and Derek Duncan
May 29, 2025
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Oklahoma golf is synonymous with Perry Maxwell. The Oklahoma native was one of the great golf course architects of the 1920s and '30s and was arguably the most successful designer working through the Great Depression. He would do much work at Augusta National following the first few years of the Masters after Alister MacKenzie’s passing.

Maxwell designed more than 30 courses in the state, including a handful with his son, Press, and five of those make this year's ranking, beginning with his landmark design at Southern Hills in Tulsa, host of numerous major championships (the 2022 PGA Championship being the latest) and occupant of the top spot in Oklahoma since we've published state rankings.

Dornick Hills Golf and Country Club—Maxwell's first venture into architecture—moved up three spots in this year’s ranking and is a favorite of any Maxwell fan. Built on family land, Dornick Hills has been the subject of numerous revisions over the years—attempting to recapture the genius of Oklahoma’s home-made artist.

Below you'll find our 2025-'26 ranking of the Best Golf Courses in Oklahoma.

Scroll on for the complete list of the best courses in Oklahoma. 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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15. Gaillardia Country Club
Oklahoma City, OK
4.1
4 Panelists
Previous rank: 14
Gaillardia Country Club in Oklahoma City is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Oklahoma. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information
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14. Oaks Country Club
Tulsa, OK
4.3
3 Panelists
Previous rank: 15
One of just two courses in Oklahoma to bear the imprimatur of A.W. Tillinghast (he remodeled it around 1925), Oaks Country Club was renovated again by Bill Bergin in 2015 with an eye toward preserving the Tilly character. The holes are laid out over a spacious property south of the city, and unlike Tulsa C.C., Tillinghast's other Oklahoma design, Oaks feels old and rich with character, with small, sloping greens and simple bunkers that match the scale of the site.
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13. Hillcrest Country Club
Bartlesville, OK
4.3
6 Panelists
Previous rank: 11
According to writer and historian Chris Clouser, Perry Maxwell got the commission to design Hillcrest in northeastern Oklahoma in 1926 by underbidding A.W. Tillinghast and Walter Travis, the club's first choices. It can be considered the final course of his early period before he began working nationally and teaming with Alister MacKenzie. Like all Maxwell designs, the routing tackles the slopes of the property from every angle, presenting players with uphill, downhill and cross-slope stances. The course—considered a hidden gem by Maxwell enthusiasts—is full of other tells from the architect, including wild internal putting contours, constant doglegs, a calm lay-of-the-land presentation and frequent to-and-fro forays to the clubhouse. The club will be undergoing an extensive irrigation project in 2025 and plans to make other updates to a few holes.
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12. The Territory Golf & Country Club
Duncan, OK
4
4 Panelists
Previous rank: NR
The Territory Golf & Country Club is one of the best golf courses in Oklahoma. Discover our experts' reviews and more course information.
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11. Tulsa Country Club
Tulsa, OK
3.9
4 Panelists
Previous rank: 8
Tulsa Country Club was designed in the late 1910s by famed architect A.W. Tillinghast, one of just two courses in Oklahoma with this pedigree. Now located in a neighborhood not far northwest of downtown (it was countryside when first built), the design doesn't have much Tillinghast left in it after years of remodels, including one in the 1980s by the late Jay Morrish and another in 2010 by Rees Jones. Though more modern in appearance today than its vintage might indicate and in need of continued tree removal, Tulsa is a finely conditioned course full of mild doglegs and elevated greens set above inset bunkers.
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10. Dornick Hills Golf & Country Club
Ardmore, OK
3.4
14 Panelists
Previous rank: 13
Dornick Hills was the first course Perry Maxwell built, and it is the course where he tinkered and honed his architectural chops while switching careers to golf design (he was previously in banking). It was his home course, as he lived on property, and owned the land it's built on. The design retains a charming, experimental, rough-edged character that's been polished out of other courses like Southern Hills and Colonial, as fine as they are, through endless rounds of investment and improvement. Over the decades, Dornick Hills, in the southern part of the state near the Texas border, rarely had the resources to invest in upgrades, so it still feels (and plays) like it might have in the 1920s and '30s. Nevertheless, it remains a fine, extraordinarily distinctive collection of early Maxwell holes on a unique property that features one of golf's great holes, the par-5 16th, with a green on top of a 40-foot high sheer cliff wall. Tom Doak and his team at Renaissance Golf renovated the course in 2021, clearing brush and trying to imitate the putting contours that Maxwell originally built, though no existing plans remain for what those might have looked like. How close they got will never be known, but their work and the overall setting make Dornick Hills a must-see museum piece for fans of Maxwell and classical era architecture.
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9. Cedar Ridge Country Club
Broken Arrow, OK
3.8
4 Panelists
Previous rank: 7
Built in the late 1960s by Texas-based architect Joe Finger, Cedar Ridge was a member of America's 100 Greatest Courses from 1977 until 1985. It's a smartly routed course that efficiently works into and out of the property's corners, moving up and down gentle slopes. Over time, many of the bunkers had softened and taken on circular and oval shapes, not unlike those at nearby Southern Hills before that course's restoration in 2019. University of Oklahoma graduate Tripp Davis gave Cedar Ridge a similar treatment in 2016 and 2017, restyling the bunkers with more shapely edges, rebuilding tees and greens and removing dozens of unnecessarily planted trees. Now in its seventh decade, the design feels fresh, purposeful and engaging.
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8. The Golf Club of Oklahoma
Broken Arrow, OK
Previous rank: 10
The Golf Club of Oklahoma in Broken Arrow is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Oklahoma. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information.
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7. Oklahoma City Golf & Country Club
Oklahoma City, OK
4
12 Panelists
Previous rank: 9
Oklahoma City Golf & Country Club is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Oklahoma. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information.
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6. Oak Tree Country Club (East Course)
Edmond, OK
Previous rank: 5
Oak Tree Country Club's East Course in Edmond is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Oklahoma. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information.
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5. Jimmie Austin Golf Club At The University of Oklahoma
Norman, OK
4.3
9 Panelists
Previous rank: 6
Originally designed by Perry Maxwell and opened a year before his death in 1952, this home to the University of Oklahoma golf team has received several modern-day touch-ups. The latest was in 2017 by architect Tripp Davis, an OU grad and member of the 1989 National Championship golf team. Davis relocated tee boxes, shifted three fairways significantly, relocated five greens, lengthened the courses and redesigned all bunkers. He also added a four-hole Short Course.
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4. The Patriot Golf Club
Owasso, OK
Previous rank: 4
Coming on the heels of their acclaimed Chambers Bay in Washington State, The Patriot was a major changeup for architects Robert Trent Jones II and Bruce Charlton. Rather than molding a course from sand on a rectangular gravel mine next to Puget Sound, The Patriot was cut from a massive and heavily forested property northeast of Tulsa. The eclectic topography sliding up and down over ravines and wetlands offered an enticing opportunity to employ it in bold ways, and the design evolved into an aggressive engagement of land and turf. Creeks are used to bisect numerous fairways, landing zones expand and contract between 30 and 80 yards, bunkers and streambeds buffet greens and there are even alternate par-3 sixth holes, a tactic Jones also used at The Raven at Sandestin in Florida.
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3. Karsten Creek Golf Club
Stillwater, OK
Previous rank: 3
A former winner of Golf Digest's Best New Public Course title in 1994, Karsten Creek was developed by Oklahoma State University and thus often appears toward the top of rankings of the best collegiate courses in America, and for years was a fixture on America’s 100 Greatest Public Courses. The Tom Fazio design even broke into America’s Second 100 Greatest ranking in 2023-2024 at No. 186. In 2023, the university made the course membership-only and closed it for major renovation by Andrew Green. It might be more accurate to say that Green built an entirely new golf course on top of the old property, utilizing the footprint of about half the previous hole corridors and branching out into new direction through the surrounding hardwoods for the others. The only resemblance to the former course are the six finishing holes including 17 and 18 that run in opposite directions along the shoreline of a lake and the extreme shot demands that will continue to sharpen the skills of the collegiate athletes who practice here.
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2. Oak Tree National
Edmond, OK
4.6
16 Panelists
Previous rank: 2
Oak Tree National was originally the men’s-only Oak Tree Golf Club, with 18 holes patterned after previous Dye designs (the par-3 eighth, for example, was a close cousin to his 17th at Harbour Town, complete with a basket trap on the back left). It has long been considered one of Pete Dye’s sternest tests of golf, a hilly layout with numerous water hazards and deep bunkers protecting some very tiny greens, as well as gusting Oklahoma winds and gnarly Bermudagrass rough. It’s been a PGA Tour Champions fixture in recent years, hosting the 2006 Senior PGA Championship and the 2014 Senior U.S. Open. Recent touch-ups by Tripp Davis have kept Dye's architecture sharp.
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1. Southern Hills Country Club
Tulsa, OK
Previous rank: 1
A product of the Great Depression and constructed by hundreds of workers who stood at the gate each morning hoping for a 25-cents-per-hour job that day, Southern Hills is architect Perry Maxwell’s great achievement. Nearly every hole bends left or right, posing critical tee shots that must risk something. The putting surfaces have the classic “Maxwell Rolls,” and most are guarded by simple yet effective bunkers. During the summer of 2018, architect Gil Hanse and crew rebuilt much of the course, in the process re-establishing Maxwell’s distinctive, gnarly-edged bunkering and reconstructing the green shoulders that had been built up over the years. Hanse's changes were on display at the 2022 PGA Championship, and the club will host the event for a sixth time in 2032.
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