The top public-access offerings in this stacked golf state go on for miles, especially in the Phoenix-Scottsdale region.
Arizona is a gifted golf state, with desert courses of all kinds to suit any budget or taste. Especially in the region of Phoenix and Scottsdale, there are miles and miles of fairways to welcome residents, visitors and seasonal snowbirds alike.
Tops among the public-access offerings is We-Ko-Pa’s Saguaro Course, designed by famed architects Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw and which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. One of two courses at the facility operated by a casino next door, the Saguaro Course ranks No. 1 in Arizona on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list for each state.
Golfweek’s Best offers many lists of course rankings, with the list of top public-access courses among the most popular. All the courses on this list allow public access in some fashion, be it standard daily green fees, through a resort or by staying at an affiliated hotel. If there’s a will, there’s a tee time.
The Robert Trent Jones Trail takes up most of the spots for best public-access golf courses in Alabama, but the No. 1 spot is elsewhere.
The Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail grabs much of the spotlight for best courses in Alabama, and rightfully so. The Trail operates 26 courses at 11 sites across the state, and eight of the top 10 public-access courses in the Yellowhammer State are on the Trail.
FarmLinks at Pursell Farms in Sylacauga grabs the top spot on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list for Alabama, and alongside Kiva Dunes is one of only two non-Trail courses on the list.
Constructed as a living laboratory of sorts by Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry in 2002, with various types of grasses in use around the property, FarmLinks features one of the prettiest holes in the state. The 210-yard, par-3 fifth plunges 172 feet off the side of a small mountain to a picturesque green, providing views for miles. Most of the other holes feature wide fairways with sometimes hilly terrain before descending into gently rolling landscapes.
Golfweek’s Best offers many lists of course rankings, with the list of top public-access courses among the most popular. All the courses on this list allow public access in some fashion, be it standard daily green fees, through a resort or by staying at an affiliated hotel. If there’s a will, there’s a tee time.
Where to play golf of any kind in Florida? Check out these Golfweek’s Best course rankings.
The No. 1 public-access course in Florida isn’t really a surprise, seeing how it has been broadcast worldwide into living rooms during each year’s Players Championship for decades. The Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass ranks as one of legendary designer Pete Dye’s top five masterpieces, perplexing PGA Tour pros since it opened in 1980, and it ties for No. 15 on Golfweek’s Best list of all modern courses in the U.S.
And it isn’t the only course on the Ponte Vedra property to rank among Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play in Florida. Next door to the Players Stadium Course is Dye’s Valley, which clocks in at No. 18 among the Sunshine State’s best public layouts. Dye’s Valley doesn’t have the scale or fame of its neighbor, but it does have plenty of the features, challenges and visual tricks that made its designer and namesake famous.
Dye’s Valley at TPC Sawgrass in Florida (Courtesy of TPC Sawgrass)
Looking for even more highly ranked public-access courses all at one property? In Florida, that would be Streamsong, home to Nos. 2, 3 and 4 on Golfweek’s Best list of public-access layouts. The popular resort in Bowling Green, about an hour’s drive east of Tampa or 90 minutes southwest of Orlando, features courses by Tom Doak, Gil Hanse and the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw.
Coore and Crenshaw’s Red Course tops the rankings for Streamsong’s courses, coming in at No. 2 among the state’s public-access layouts and tying for No. 37 among all modern courses in the U.S. Hanse’s Black Courses isn’t far behind, ranking No. 3 in the state and tying for 50th among modern courses. Doak’s Blue Course is right there, too, ranking No. 4 in the state and No. 53 among modern courses.
Streamsong’s Red Course (Courtesy of Streamsong/Laurence Lambrecht)
How do you choose which layout at Streamsong to play? Take our advice: Play all three, then get back to us on your favorite. Every player to visit has plenty of opinions on which course they prefer and why, and none of them are really wrong. Combined, the three layouts make Streamsong one of only a handful of resorts in the U.S. to offer so many highly ranked courses, and the resort also has started construction of a new short course, the Chain, by Coore and Crenshaw that promises even more golf.
No. 5 in the state is no stranger to PGA Tour fans either, as Bay Hill Club and Lodge in Orlando is home each year to the Arnold Palmer Invitational. A statue of Palmer still stands guard near the first and 10th tees, reminding players of the decades in which the King lived at the resort while leaving his fingerprints on every aspect of the operation.
Florida is also home to a staggering array of private courses, many of which serve as winter retreats for well-heeled clientele and residents who chase the warmth south each year. Topping the list of private courses in the state is Seminole, a Donald Ross design in Juno Beach that is No. 12 on Golfweek’s Best list of classic courses in the U.S. and one of the most exclusive clubs in the U.S.
Can’t get a tee time at Seminole? Get in line – almost all of us are waiting on that call. In the meantime, check out the rest of the best public-access and private clubs in Florida below.
The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts – site of this week’s 122nd U.S. Open – opened in 1893 as a three-hole layout. Willie Campbell, a Scot and head professional at the club, extended the course to nine holes and then to 18 in 1899.
Several designers have worked on The Country Club over the decades, most recently Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner before the 2013 U.S. Amateur.
The layout used for the U.S. Open – which features small greens and thick rough among its considerable challenges – is actually a composite of two courses, the Main course and the club’s Primrose nine. Three holes of the Primrose (No. 9 Primrose playing as No. 9 of the Composite, a combo of Nos. 1 and 2 Primrose playing as No. 13 on the Composite, and No. 8 Primrose playing as No. 14 of the Composite) will be used for the national championship.
The Composite ranks No. 1 on Golfweek’s Best 2022 list of top private courses in the state, and it is No. 24 among all classic courses built in the U.S. before 1960. It will play to 7,264 yards with a par of 70 for the Open.
Thanks to yardage books provided by StrackaLine – the maker of detailed yardage books for thousands of courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges the players face this week. Check out the maps of each hole below.
The best of the best. State-by-state rankings of the best U.S. private golf courses in 2022.
Welcome to Golfweek’s Best 2022 list of top private golf courses in the U.S., as judged by our international panel of raters.
The hundreds of members of that ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on 10 criteria on a points basis of 1 through 10. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings are averaged to produce these rankings.
All the courses on this list are private and don’t accept daily-fee or resort play.
KEY: (m) modern, built in 1960 or after; (c) classic, built before 1960. For courses with a number preceding the (m) or (c), that is where the course ranks on Golfweek’s Best lists for top 200 modern and classic courses in the U.S. Also included with many courses are links to recent stories about that layout.
The course closed four years ago after losing $135,000 a year for six years.
WINNEBAGO, Ill. — The former Westlake Village Golf Course is set to reopen this summer under a new name with new owners.
Brothers Steve and Scott Leathers purchased the 18-hole course on March 30 with plans of returning it to its former glory and renaming it the Lynx Golf Course at Westlake Village. The course is in a small town that sits between Rockford and Freeport, Illinois, about 90 miles west of downtown Chicago.
“The target is for golf to open on August 1,” Steve Leathers said.
“The greens have to be redone. That’s really the only thing that holds you back from golfing. The greens are being refurbished and reseeded.”
The course closed four years ago after losing $135,000 a year for six years, Midwest Irrigation and Swan Hills Golf, LLC., owner Peter Beaves told the Register Star in 2018. Since then, the 131-acre site has been converted to an agricultural property for the production of hay.
The brothers purchased Westlake Village for $550,000 and plan to invest a “significant” amount of money over the next five years. In return, they are asking for a 10-year tiered tax abatement from Winnebago County.
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In year one, the tax abatement rate would be 100% but by year 10, the rate would decrease to 25%.
There are 172 lots that abut the golf course, based on 2021 aerial photos, 34 of them are vacant lots.
The number of vacant lots will soon decrease by one as Leathers said as he is in the process of purchasing one. He is hopeful that once the golf course reopens it will continue to drive more residential development.
The clubhouse, featuring a new 25-by-67-foot deck out back, should reopen as early as June 1, Leathers said.
“So there will be outdoor seating for people to enjoy the weather,” he said. “The target is to have some music and bands out here down the road.”
Leathers said he plans to hire eight full-time and seven part-time employees.
Leathers also plans to work with the Pecatonica and Winnebago school districts to make Lynx their practice and home competition course, similar to the former golf course before it shut down.
The request for a tax abatement request was approved 6-0 by the county’s Economic Development Committee and is expected to go before the Winnebago County Board for a vote Thursday night.
Chris Green: 815-987-1241, cgreen@rrstar.com; @chrisfgreen
How a stunning piece of East Texas property became one of the country’s best golf venues has more to do with camaraderie than course design.
TRINITY, Texas — Corby Robertson knew a thing or two about routing golf courses. Yes, the sport Robertson was most closely associated with was football — he was highly recruited by University of Texas coaching legend Darrell Royal then twice named All-American while captaining the Longhorns to the 1969 Cotton Bowl — but golf had always been in the Houston native’s blood.
When Robertson and his sister, Beth, made a land swap that effectively moved Austin Country Club to its current location, he worked with famed architect Pete Dye on the development of the course that now hosts the WGC-Dell Match Play, even taking a trip to see the Oklahoma masterpiece Oak Tree to better understand Dye’s genius.
But how Robertson turned a stunning piece of East Texas property into one of the country’s best (and most secluded) golf venues has more to do with camaraderie than course design.
Robertson — who didn’t declare for the NFL draft after an impressive college career because “those guys all made about $25,000 and I thought I could do much better” — had built Camp Olympia with UT roommate Chris Gilbert on a stunning site less than an hour from Huntsville. The idea behind the camp was to get teens to bond and to grow three essential pieces that Robertson holds dear — body, mind and spirit.
And originally, the course hosted what Robertson called “olf, which is golf without the greens.” As part of the camp’s weekly routine, eager campers would hit shots off a tee to a wide-open “green” that was simply a pushed-up piece of turf with a washtub in the middle. The kids loved it. Robertson jokes that the game could have been revolutionary.
“It would have been a more popular game,” he told Golfweek in September. “You make more holes-in-one and you don’t ever miss three-foot putts.”
But over time, Robertson and others realized this would be a prime piece of property for a golf course. By then, he’d become an energy magnate, first in oil, then in coal, and had the financial means to create the course. In the 1990s, when beetles started eating away some of the camp’s trees, he decided to make a go of it, starting with a series of three legit holes, then adding irrigation systems and creating the course that now tops Golfweek’s Best private courses in Texas list: Whispering Pines.
Putting together a piece this morning on @thespiritgolf, a great am event coming back soon to Whispering Pines in Texas. Here's the 15th hole. PRO TIP: To avoid the gators circling in the water, hit the green. pic.twitter.com/HqQvw7BiQ4
“We liked it. But if we were really going to do this we said, ‘What is golf missing?’ At the time, golf was missing the Olympics,” Robertson said.
So he decided to mix two of his passions — Camp Olympia and a new golf course. Soon after, in 2001, the Spirit International Amateur Golf Tournament was born, a biennial event with teams featuring two men and two women from each of 20 countries that span six continents.
After they built it — Robertson’s team worked with the Jack Nicklaus design team on the course — the world’s top ams started showing up in droves. When this year’s teams arrive for the 10th playing of the event (the 2017 event was canceled due to Hurricane Harvey), they’ll add to an impressive roster of amateur golfers who’ve made the journey to Whispering Pines. Among those who have won a title at the event are Lorena Ochoa, Brandt Snedeker, Jordan Spieth, Lexi Thompson, Scottie Scheffler, Austin Ernst and Will Zalatoris.
This year, a power-packed lineup that includes the Nos. 1 and 2 female amateurs in the world will lead the way for Team USA. Stanford teammates Rose Zhang and Rachel Heck will lead the American contingent while Texas A&M’s Sam Bennett and Michigan State’s James Piot round out the squad. Piot won the U.S. Amateur in August.
The tournament is known for having five concurrent competition categories: international team, men’s team and women’s team, and men’s and women’s individual stroke play competitions. It will be played Nov. 4-6 and broadcast on Golf Channel as well as the Spirit’s website.
A series of flags line a lake at Whispering Pines, ranked as Golfweek’s Best top private golf course in the state of Texas. (Contributed photo)
Players stay at Camp Olympia and partake in a number of club traditions, like line dancing and karaoke. While golf has returned to the Olympics with professionals, Robertson thinks his event has somehow maintained the amateur flavor the Olympics was originally intended to foster.
“I feel like maybe we inspired the Olympics to have golf. I hope we’ve been part of the inspiration. There are 200 other sports, why not golf?” he said. “But this wasn’t designed for pros. For stadium golf, we would have had to clear every tree on this property. There’s room to do that, but the beauty and the ambiance of this place, it would just be a shame.
“Listen, good amateurs are going to a great tournament every week. None of them have a camp attached. They live together in camp cabins and we turn these players into friends. Camp makes lifelong friends and it builds character. The mission of Camp Olympia is to have fun together but make people grow in body, mind and spirit. To do that with a bunch of very accomplished golfers? Well, that is just a plus.”
Which private golf clubs in the U.S. are best? A state-by-state ranking of the best, as judged by Golfweek’s group of experts.
Where’s the best private golf in each state? With this list of Golfweek’s Best Private Courses, we present the best such layouts, as judged by our nationwide network of raters.
The members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged together to produce a final rating for each course. Each course is then ranked against other courses in its state to produce the final rankings.
KEY: (m) modern, built in 1960 or after; (c) classic, built before 1960. (For courses with a number preceding the (m) or (c), that is where the course ranks on Golfweek’s Best lists for top 200 modern and classic courses in the U.S.) * Indicates new or returning to the rankings.
