Check out Golfweek’s top 100 U.S. public-access golf courses in 2023.
Welcome to the Golfweek’s Best 2023 list of the Top 100 Best Courses You Can Play in the U.S. Each year, we publish many lists, with this selection of public-access layouts among the premium offerings.
The hundreds of members of our course-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. The top handful of courses in the world have an average rating of above 9, while many excellent layouts fall into the high-6 to 8 range.
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.
Each course is listed with its 2022 ranking in parenthesis in the title line, its average rating next to the name, the location, the year it opened and the designers.
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 or classic courses in the U.S.
The Lido at Sand Valley opens to limited resort play this month.
NEKOOSA, Wis. – One of the most anticipated courses openings of recent years didn’t start with a golf architect’s vision or a developer’s financial plan. This project started with a video game created by a Chicago-based financial consultant and eager golf historian who dabbles at length in no-longer-existing golf courses as a hobby.
Peter Flory (@nle_golf on Twitter, with the handle standing for no-longer-existing courses) has never built a golf course, but he’s played plenty – his list of courses played is enough to send even a golf travel writer into fits of envy.
More importantly, he dreams of playing historically significant courses that have been lost over the decades, plowed under for redevelopment or, occasionally, simply abandoned. Flory is also one of the best hickory golfers in the country, collecting and often utilizing a vast store of antique clubs so that he can appreciate how classic courses played in the era in which they were built.
One course topped his list of interest: The Lido, designed by Golden Age architects C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor on Long Island in New York and opened in 1917. The course, reputed to be the toughest and among the best in the world at the time, was plowed under by the U.S. Navy in World War II. Including an 18th hole inspired by Alister MacKenzie’s entry in a course-design contest, the Lido featured many of the classic template holes such as the Redan, Biarritz and Punchbowl that are still in use today.
Peter Flory, the golf history buff whose digital reproductions of the famed Lido led to the course being rebuilt at @Sand_Valley, makes his first own-ball birdie (on the tough 11th) at his dream course brought to life. @golfweekpic.twitter.com/Jc2K7sl2W6
Flory researched the Lido at length, discovering photos and historical narratives that provided insight not only to how it was built, but how it played. His goal was to re-create the course in a video game for his kids and friends to play.
He never imagined it would become a real course again. But this year, thanks to Flory’s efforts, a new Lido opens at Sand Valley in Wisconsin. Built by Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design firm, the new Lido is a painstaking recreation of the original on Long Island. A few tees and greens have been shifted a few degrees to accommodate safety in an modern era where golf balls travel much farther, but the new Lido was designed to be as close to the original as possible.
How close? When asked if it’s down to the inch, Flory has said, “Maybe even better.” Using digital tools undreamed of at the time of the original course’s inception, Flory and Doak efforted to re-create every hump, hollow, bunker lip and green slope from the original course.
It was all made possible because of the interest of fans of classic golf architecture, including Sand Valley developers Michael Keiser Jr. and Chris Keiser, the pair of brothers who greenlighted the project in Nekoosa, Wisconsin. They already operated two highly ranked courses at the resort – the eponymous Sand Valley and Mammoth Dunes – but they were looking for a cool idea for another parcel of land just across the street.
The result of the video game, the research and the financial investment opens to limited resort play June 28. The Lido is mostly a private club, but there will be tee times available to resort guests at select dates and times. Check with the resort for details.
Flory – who now serves as a panelist and ambassador for the Golfweek’s Best course-rating program – shares more insight in the Q&A below.
Whistling Straits and Sand Valley top the list for courses in Wisconsin, which ranks among the best states in the country for public golf.
Despite a short golf season amid its northern climate, Wisconsin offers one of the best lineups of golf courses in the U.S. Players who haven’t sampled the game in Wisconsin might be surprised to learn the state ranks amid the top five of all states for its elite public-access courses.
Golfweek’s Best offers many lists of course rankings, with that of top public-access courses in each state 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.
(m): Modern course, built in or after 1960 (c): Classic course, built before 1960
Note: If there is a number in the parenthesis with the m or c, that indicates where that course ranks among Golfweek’s Best top 200 modern or classic courses.
Strategy, difficulty and beauty on full display in these photos of Sand Valley’s new Lido course.
NEKOOSA, Wis. – You can’t let your mind wander on a single shot at the new Lido course at Sand Valley in Wisconsin. Not on a putt. Not on a chip or pitch. Not on a single approach, and certainly not on a tee shot. Every swing demands your attention, and there might be no greater compliment for a golf course.
Built as a recreation of the famed Lido on Long Island in New York that was purchased and then demolished by the U.S. Navy during World War II, the new Lido is a stunning test of every aspect of a golfer’s game, especially the mind. It’s no exaggeration to call it the most strategic course – at the very least among a handful of contenders – in the United States.
The original Lido was designed by Golden Age architects C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor, with several individual holes designed by contestants in an architecture contest that included Alister MacKenzie. It was built along the shore on soil dredged from the sea floor, then shaped by teams with horse-drawn equipment. The new reproduction and its many template holes were meticulously laid into place by Tom Doak with a giant assist by Peter Flory, a Chicago-based banker (and Golfweek’s Best course-rater ambassador) who used old photography to generate a digital replica of the New York original. Doak used those digital models to recreate the old layout as closely as possible.
Judging by two rounds this author played with Flory in early September, it’s easy to guess the hickory-equipped golfers of the 1920s had their hands full on the original.
Bunkers seemingly are everywhere. The Lido offers plenty of width, with fairways sometimes playing more than 100 yards wide as they overlap, but the traps appear to be unavoidable, especially the first time a player goes round. Woe to any golfer who gets out of line.
The 11th fairway (center) of the Lido at Sand Valley is flanked on either side by No. 17 (left, in the opposite direction) and No. 2 (right, playing in same direction as 11 with the green in the upper right). With several options for avoiding all the bunkers, the 11th effectively plays more than 100 yards wide. (Golfweek)
Players must stand on each tee and plot their way to the flag. It’s an exhilarating exercise that every course designer should strive to produce, but nowhere is such strategizing more important than at the Lido. A well-struck shot on the wrong line, even one that finds short grass, might as well have found a bunker closer to the proper line. It’s an awkward moment when you realize you picked the wrong angle off the tee – you can see the flag ahead on the green, but you can’t even begin to imagine how to get close in regulation when playing into the new and bouncy putting surfaces.
But if players take the time to study the various pathways offered for the tee ball and choose wisely, then the greens open up. That flag that appears tucked from one side of the fairway probably is reasonably approachable from the opposite side. You have to play the holes backward in your mind before you ever swing.
It’s all complicated by the bunker design. Many of these fairway traps would be better described as trapdoors, with their tops even to the surrounding grades. Most modern course designers flare their bunkers into hillsides or manufactured inclines, giving the players visual clues as to where they should play and what they must avoid. Many of the fairway bunkers at the Lido, by contrast, are flat on the ground and often hidden beyond rolling terrain. It’s hard to stand there and know exactly where all the trouble waits because you can’t see half of it. If your caddie tells you to avoid an area, even if it appears safe from the tee, take that advice to heart. Flory pointed out that the best well-known example of similar bunkering is the Old Course at St. Andrews, where nasty traps often lurk just out of view.
Even those traps you can see aren’t necessarily easy to avoid, and many of the greenside bunkers in particular have fearsomely steep faces – nearly vertical and more than 8 feet high in some cases. Just the intimidating sight of such bunker faces will send some players wayward.
The trouble doesn’t end with the tee shots and bunkers. The waste areas and steep grassed banks surrounding many of these greens present incredibly difficult chips, pitches and blasts to elevated putting surfaces that feature beautiful tiers and ridges. From short and center of many greens, the flags are reasonably approachable to players with solid short games, but most attempts from pin-high or long grow exponentially more difficult. The more you challenge the course in an attempt at a low score, the more the course challenges you back.
So yes, the Lido is difficult. It’s also beautiful, fascinating and incredibly fun. It’s in no way impossible to play, so long as golfers think. As soon as a round ends, most players will want another shot at it to try different routes. A golfer could play it a dozen times and never replicate all the same routes.
Key examples are the fourth, a par-5 that offers a safer route to the left or a risky drive rightward to a small patch of fairway flanked by sandy waste areas. Players who pull off the riskier tee ball are rewarded with a reasonable chance to reach the green in two shots, but those who miss into the sand are faced with a tough second shot over water just to reach the safety of the main fairway.
The tee shot at the par-5 fourth of the Lido provides for a longer, safer route to fairway on the left or a tougher, longer carry to a small patch of fairway to the right that significantly shortens the hole. (Golfweek)
The par-4 11th is another great example of width providing options. Flanked by the 17th fairway to the left and the second fairway to the right, players have a choice of vectors over, around and short of a minefield of bunkers and scrub. In our first round together, Flory went well right off the tee while I fired one off to the left just to be obstinate. We both hit solid tee shots, and our golf balls finished 118 yards apart as measured by laser rangefinder. Flory’s line paid off with a birdie 3, his first on the Lido, while I made a 7.
There are plenty of such examples, especially as the wind and its directions changes. On the wide-open, treeless expanse upon which this Lido was built, the breezes tend to be stronger than at the resort’s other two existing courses, Mammoth Dunes by David McLay Kidd and the eponymous Sand Valley by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw.
We wanted to share some of the photos of our two days at the Lido. Keep scrolling for those, but first the answers to several frequent questions in the days after our trip:
The Lido is still growing in, and the course will not officially open until the summer of 2023.
The resort is allowing small groups of members to play nine-hole preview rounds now while the grass is still taking hold, but many of the bunkers do not yet have sand (as you will see in the photos below). It is still very much a work in progress.
The Lido will accept very limited resort play. It will be a private course operated by the resort, but don’t expect to just show up as a guest and play on a weekend. Details on how to obtain a round on the Lido are still forthcoming. Plan to stay at the resort for any chance, and book earlier as excitement about the Lido builds among golf architecture fans.
Golfweek will present plenty of more coverage on the Lido before it opens, including Flory’s take on how it all came together. We just want to provide a sneak peak on how it all looks and plays.
Mike Keiser instilled in his boys a deep curiosity, which has translated into some of the best golf course developments in the world.
Mike Keiser, the eminently pro-walking founder of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon and staunch supporter of the game on foot, had a surprisingly simple way to get his two sons interested in golf more than three decades ago.
“Hey, you wanna go ride in a golf cart?” Keiser said he would ask young sons Michael and Chris when he wanted to introduce them to the game.
It wasn’t about hitting shots, not about architecture, nor entirely about developing an ethos that would lead to a family golfing legacy. It was all about young kids having fun, no matter what it took. If that meant a ride in a golf cart at age 3, then those cart batteries better have been fully charged.
Those initial forays into the game for the father alongside his sons – near their Chicago home and at the family’s summer house in Michigan and at courses around the world – have led to one of the great family success stories in golf. After Mike developed Bandon Dunes in the late 1990s and stretched his reach into destinations such as Canada and soon St. Lucia, Michael and Chris followed suit. The sons have opened their own highly ranked resort at Sand Valley in Wisconsin and plan to extend into new territories as well.
Mike Keiser plays at his sons’ Mammoth Dunes at Sand Valley in Wisconsin on opening day in 2017. (Courtesy of Sand Valley/Jeffrey R. Bertch)
But this isn’t a business story. Not a golf development story, per se – barrels of ink have been expended in telling those stories of how the Keisers built and contributed to a new market for links-style resort golf in the U.S. and beyond. This is a story of how a father got his sons into the game and piqued their curiosity about what might be possible in golf, course and resort development, and beyond.
Golfweek has since 1983 – with a recent two-year break because of COVID-19 – selected a Father of the Year in all of golf, and the list includes players, fathers of players, business leaders and regular dads who possess an irregular knack for fostering a passion for golf among their kids. This year that Father’s Day honor goes to Mike Keiser in reflection not of his business success but instead for his approach to helping sons Michael and Chris find their own paths into golf by sharing his knowledge and curiosity, his contacts, his love of fun courses and only occasionally his money.
And it all began with good times in golf carts, smacking balls along the shoreline of Lake Michigan and playing cross-country golf through the woods on land that later would become Mike’s first golf development, the highly rated, nine-hole and private Dunes Club in Michigan.
“For me, it was always a game, and it was a made-up game,” said Michael, now 40. “We didn’t really start by playing golf. We had golf clubs and golf balls, but they were always games on the beach in front of our house in Michigan.”
Mike would sometimes hit balls into Lake Michigan, then pay Michael to don a snorkel and retrieve them, Michael said. It was all part of a great adventure.
“My dad is a Tom Sawyer figure; I’ve always thought of him as Tom Sawyer,” Michael said in reference to Mark Twain’s character who can talk his friends into taking on his tasks with a smile and charisma. “He convinced me that retrieving his golf balls out of the lake was the funnest thing in the world. A lot of my introduction, I guess you could say, was empowering his practice, but I couldn’t have had more fun doing it.”
There’s that word again. Fun. Want to get your kids into golf? Keep that in mind.
“I have fond memories of Snickers bars and Reese’s and Cokes and putting around,” Chris, 34, said of his early days around the Dunes Club. “There’s just this kind of fun association with the place. When I got into actually trying to play, he would encourage me to tee it up in the fairway and keep it fun, not really keeping score.”
The new Sheep Ranch course at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon (Courtesy of Bandon Dunes)
That goal of fun golf has been a frequent theme as the family has expanded its reach in the game. Mike was looking to transport the enjoyable and accessible game played on links courses in the United Kingdom and Ireland to the U.S., and after much searching for a perfect site, he chose the remote coastline of Oregon to introduce a different kind of golf to an American market. It wasn’t about resistance to scoring, never about overly green grass, and not strictly about birdies versus bogeys. He believed there was an underserved U.S. market of golfers looking for fun above all else, and he set out to develop that market.
The results have been legendary, as Bandon Dunes now operates five full-size courses that rank among the best in the world, as well as a gorgeous par-3 course named The Preserve that helped reinvigorate the appetite for short courses at U.S. resorts. And his dream continues at Bandon Dunes, as he plans to add yet more holes.
Mike’s involvement in the development of Cabot and its two incredible links-style courses in Nova Scotia – in partnership with Ben Cowan-Dewar – further cemented his status as a premium developer of a new kind of resort and golf-first ethos that has been frequently imitated in recent decades.
Family trips often involved the sport as the boys grew. They are two among four siblings born to Mike and wife Lindy, with sisters Leigh and Dana following their own pursuits that didn’t involve golf. Mike and Lindy now have eight grandchildren, two per each of their own children.
“Having and raising children is the most important thing you ever do,” said Mike, a native of East Aurora near Buffalo, New York, who served in the U.S. Navy before cofounding a greeting card company, Recycled Paper Greetings, that would grow to be one of the largest in the U.S.
Both boys played other sports, and their interests in golf would sometimes ebb and flow, they each said. But Mike had a way of sparking their interest time and again. He once took a young-teen Chris and his cousin, Scott, on a tour of Scotland that included rounds at Royal Dornoch – a Mike Keiser favorite – and Brora Golf Course, which is famed among experienced golf travelers for having sheep and cattle grazing the fairways and fences around the greens to keep the livestock out.
All that great golf and history and architecture and all those kinds of things were fantastic for the grown-ups, Mike said, but the kids found another unexpected reason to laugh.
“Chris and Scott found a ball in a cow pie, and they said ‘Watch this,’ and they blasted out of cow pies,” Mike said with a laugh. “So I took them to play golf at Brora, and what was the highlight? Golf balls in cow pies.
“So moms and dads out there, if you’re playing golf with your younger kids, don’t expect them to like golf for the same reason you do. They’ll appreciate the views and et cetera et cetera, but it will take something like their ball landing in a cow pie to really get their attention. There’s more than one path to getting your kids to joining you in golf.”
The same could be said for the sons’ growing involvement in resort development. Michael finished college and worked in golf operations at Barnbougle, which his dad helped finance in Tasmania, before branching into residential development. Chris became a teacher for two years after college, then worked in digital golf sales. Neither went straight to work for their dad, instead finding their own way back to resort development over the years. Chris eventually landed a job working on digital initiatives for Bandon Dunes, and he and Michael paired up to open Sand Valley in 2016 in remote central Wisconsin, with their resort adding a second 18, Mammoth Dunes, in 2017.
Though Mike was involved as much more than interested spectator, it was up to the brothers to make Sand Valley work. Michael said that his dad bought the forested land and brought in founding members who provided seed capital, but the boys were responsible for most of the financing and on-the-ground decisions. It was their project, boom or bust. Dad, to a great extent, got out of the way.
“The best thing was that it was their idea, each step of the way,” said Mike, who didn’t want to be a controlling force as his sons built their own names in the industry. “It’s not good if you say, ‘Son, I’ll pay you twice as much as you’d make on the outside if you work for me.’ I don’t like that model. I prefer the model that Chris and Michael did that was sort of aligned, to get a sense of the industry and then shift to Bandon Dunes and Sand Valley. … Some dads push kids to work with the dad. Let them choose. Let their path be their path.”
Sand Valley in Wisconsin (Courtesy of Sand Valley/Brandon Carter)
Mike said his sons make a nice team, a mesh of Michael’s interest in sales and marketing and Chris’ skills in operations big and small. Both sons mentioned processes and methodology learned from their dad as keys to success, including one trait of their father when asked what they thought might surprise outsiders most.
“He’s extremely curious, everywhere he goes,” Chris said. “He’s deeply curious. That’s also reflected when we travel. He’s always asking people about the area. What’s it like to live here? What are the schools like? I think that can be disarming to people who maybe know who he is, know him in the world of golf and maybe expect him to be this intimidating character – he’s really not that way. … He has a common touch; it’s just part of who he is.”
Michael echoed those sentiments.
“One of the methods we learned before we even knew we were learning it, was just the curiosity of learning every day,” Michael said. “Growing up, if we were in a taxi cab, my dad would get to know the driver and ask him a hundred questions. Waiting in line at a restaurant, ask more questions. I think he trained us to be curious, to be unafraid to ask questions. …
“You don’t have to know everything, but there is probably somebody out there who knows the answers. Find that person, and ask them questions.”
As the family continues to expand its operations – in Florida, in the Caribbean, possibly in Scotland and beyond – there isn’t necessarily a lot of time for reflection. There’s too many great golf holes in interesting location to build. But the boys will keep one lesson in mind, as frequently expressed by their dad.
“He taught us that to whom much is given, even more is expected,” Michael said. “And nobody has been given more opportunities in the golf industry than my brother and me. Maybe Young Tom Morris, right? It’s not lost on us that we’ve been handed these opportunities. …
“We learned from so many adventures. We grew from those and we learned our own boundaries. My dad thought kids should learn from their mistakes. Go out there and take risks. Whatever the opposite of a helicopter parent is, that’s what he was. If he had just shared his wisdom, we wouldn’t have learned it for ourselves. We had to go learn it for ourselves. … He doesn’t offer a lot of advice per se, but he introduced us to incredible opportunities.”
