10 destinations have three or more highly ranked courses on Golfweek’s Best Top 200 Resort Courses list.
What do you really want in a golf trip? If your answer is golf, golf, then more golf in one spot, sometimes followed by a wee bit of extra golf, we have you covered.
Golfweek’s Best ranks courses around the world by various categories, ranging from modern courses to the best in each state. One of our most popular rankings is the top 200 resort courses in the U.S.
Any of the layouts on the list would make for a great getaway. More than three dozen resorts have two courses on the list, always begging for a comparison between layouts over a nice cold drink and dinner after a full day of golf.
But if you’re looking for more, keep reading. Because 10 resorts are home to three or more courses on Golfweek’s Best ranking of top resorts in the U.S. From coastal Oregon to inland Florida, these destinations have the holes — and the pedigrees — to keep golfers swinging for days.
Pinehurst No. 4 (Courtesy of Pinehurst Resort)
Six of these resorts have three courses ranked among the top 200. They are Big Cedar Lodge in Missouri, Firestone Country Club in Ohio, Pebble Beach Resorts in California, the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Alabama, Sea Pines in South Carolina and Streamsong in Florida.
Two of these are not traditional resorts. The first is Firestone, which for the most part is a private members club. But Firestone offers stay-and-play packages open to the public. That qualifies it as a resort based on Golfweek’s Best standards in which any course that offers tee times to the public, even if the club is mostly a private facility, is deemed to be public-access.
The other in question is the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, which offers golf at 11 sites around the state. Because all the facilities are managed under one umbrella and offer great opportunities to bounce from one site to another with relative ease, we opted to include the Trail on this list.
Next up are the resorts with four courses ranked among the top 200 — rarefied air. They are Destination Kohler in Wisconsin (Whistling Straits and Blackwolf Run are two clubs, each with two courses, that are part of one resort) and Reynolds Lake Oconee in Georgia, which is a sprawling resort and residential community.
Only two resorts in the U.S. have five courses among the top 200 in the U.S.: Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon and Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina. Both of them are bucket-list destinations that every golfer should see, hopefully more than once. They offer all the golf most players would ever want on one vacation — playing one round on each course would take days, and one round on each course is never enough.
The resorts with three or more ranked courses have gone about their development in multiple ways. Some were established more than a century ago and have added courses through the decades — these resorts often feature courses designed by multiple architects, offering an array of styles and architectural features. Others feature several courses by one designer, with the resorts sticking with the architects who proved to work best for them.
Either way, you can’t go wrong with a trip to any of these locations listed on the following pages. Included for each resort are its top-200 courses listed with their average rating on a scale of 1 to 10 as assigned by Golfweek’s Best rater program, their designers, the years they opened and their rankings on various Golfweek’s Best lists. We hope you enjoy perusing these elite resorts, both on these pages and in real life.
And it’s worth noting, there is one more resort destination that is very likely to join this list of 10 in the coming years. Pine Needles in North Carolina, not far from Pinehurst Resort, operates three courses, two of which are on the 2023 list of top 200 resorts: Pine Needles (No. 47) and Mid Pines (T-35). The company’s third course, the recently renovated Southern Pines, didn’t have the requisite number of votes to qualify for this year’s list but is almost a lock to appear on the list in upcoming years.
Architect Tom Fazio is returning to Reynolds Lake Oconee in Greensboro, Georgia, with plans to combine nine existing holes with nine new holes and introduce them as a new, 18-hole private golf course.
The existing nine holes that will be used for layout is The Bluff nine that currently is part of the 27-hole The National course. Fazio built all 27 of those holes, which also include the Ridge and Cove nines. The Ridge and Cove nines will continue as The National, which currently ranks No. 10 in Georgia on Golfweek’s Best list of public-access courses in each state. The National also ties for No. 187 on Golfweek’s Best ranking of resort courses in the U.S.
Reynolds Lake Oconee operates as both a resort and a members club. With the addition of the new and yet-to-be-named Fazio course, expected to open in late 2024, Reynolds Lake Oconee will have seven courses. Five of those – Great Waters, The Oconee, The Preserve, The Landing and The National – will be open to resort guests, including those who stay at The Ritz-Carlton Reynolds, Lake Oconee. Two of the property’s courses – Creek Club and the newly combined Fazio 18 – will be private. All the public-access courses at Reynolds Lake Oconee rank highly in Georgia on Golfweek’s Best state-by-state list, with Great Waters by Jack Nicklaus the highest among them.
Fazio built The Bluff nine in 1997 as part of the original National course, and The Cove nine was added in 2000 on the parcel that includes forests, streams, ponds and views of Lake Oconee. Fazio will use adjacent land distinguished by 100 feet of elevation changes, a creek, large boulders and an existing pond for the new nine holes that will be combined with Bluffs.
“My goal is always to create distinctive, one-of-a-kind golf courses,” Fazio said in a media release announcing the new nine. “There’s a lot of terrain variation – lots of ups and downs, ins and outs, twists and turns – which is great for golf. That’s what makes this such a fine natural setting.”
The media release said the new 18 will use the first five holes of the existing Bluff routing, followed by nine new holes including a new ninth green alongside Lake Oconee, then incorporate the final four holes of The Bluff.
“We are fortunate that Tom Fazio again applied his vision to Reynolds Lake Oconee to create nine new holes and integrate them with the world-class golf course he originally designed. It’s an honor for our community,” said Robert Merck, global head of real estate at MetLife Investment Management, investment manager of Reynolds Lake Oconee. “Our members and their guests are certain to be challenged and energized by his latest design.”
Looking to live where you play? We have you covered with the top 200 residential golf courses in the U.S. for 2023.
Welcome to Golfweek’s Best 2023 list of top residential golf courses in the United States.
The hundreds of 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 to produce a final, cumulative rating. Then each course is ranked against other courses in the region.
This list focuses on the golf courses themselves, not the communities as a whole or other amenities. Each golf course included is listed with its average rating from 1 to 10, its location, architect(s) and the year it opened.
The golf stretches for days, but which course tops at the Georgia resort tops the Golfweek’s Best rankings?
The best part of any golf trip is all the golf – of course – followed by more golf, with a high chance of still more golf tomorrow. More shots, more greens, more of everything. Wake up before the sun, launch the day off the first tee, keep swinging until the cart attendants round you up in the dark.
If the courses are of high quality, even better. Should they be ranked among the best in their state, greater still.
But few resorts offer seemingly endless great golf within their confines. One or two courses are the norm, then players are forced to book elsewhere for that more-golf-all-the-time fanaticism. Only a handful of properties include enough golf to keep players swinging on highly rated and fresh-to-them courses for days on end. It’s not overly difficult to jump around from resort to resort if golfers plan well in advance, but there’s much to be said for the ease of use in finding one golf vacation spot with great holes stretching for days.
Examples in the U.S. include Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon, home to five top-ranked 18-hole courses. Pinehurst and its smorgasbord of golf holes – anchored by the famed No. 2 – with five courses ranked inside the top 15 public-access layouts in North Carolina. Destination Kohler in Wisconsin and its four highly ranked courses that include Whistling Straits.
A massive Central Georgia property sprawling across some 12,000 acres on the shores of its namesake lake about 85 miles southeast of Atlanta, Reynolds Lake Oconee offers five courses open to guests of the on-property Ritz-Carlton hotel or cottages operated by the community, and club members have access to a sixth layout. That makes it 42,336 yards of golf in all, more than 24 miles.
And after leaving the luxurious lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, none of it feels like a resort. That’s by design, and it’s a good thing.
The Ritz-Carlton at Reynolds Lake Oconee (Courtesy of Reynolds Lake Oconee)
Despite having the AAA Four Diamond/ Forbes Four-Star hotel and 50-plus multi-bedroom cottages, Reynolds Lake Oconee is at its core a residential community with more than 4,000 members. In recent years, 88 percent of total rounds on the courses consists of member-related play, leaving just 12 percent of tee times for short-term guests of the hotel and cottages, with no regular outside daily-fee play. That means players can be rewarded with a private-club experience on the five courses open to guests.
Unlike many resorts, tee times are never rushed, going off in 12-minute intervals that help maintain pace of play instead of the industry’s frequent 9- to 10-minute intervals that can bog down a course. Reynolds’ practice ranges are uncrowded, the clubhouses never overrun, the courses typically in pristine condition. Throw in the Kingdom – an elite TaylorMade fitting and instruction center on property not far from the Ritz – and players have more golf options than would fit in a two-day trip.
It’s an old cliché from 1980s golf marketing to call daily-fee players a “member for the day,” but Reynolds actually delivers such a relaxed experience. The courses are operated for their members, and the hotel and resort guests are given a taste of that life.
“We’re always going to be more club than resort,” said Dave Short, senior vice president of marketing, sales and strategic planning for Reynolds Lake Oconee. “You know, high-density resort play, it’s just not what our members are here for. We’re not in that game. We just happen to have in the center of our club one of the best hotels in the country.”
Owned by MetLife Inc. since 2012, the resort community is home to some 4,000 members and features everything from forested houses that start around $700,000 all the way into the realm of lakefront mansions on multi-acre lots that cost more than $9 million, Short said. About 40 percent of real estate transactions involve buyers from the Atlanta area, and Short said the other 60 percent represent a vast geographic range as the resort has trended younger in recent years with active professionals embracing a work-from-home ethos.
It can be a huge change for big-city folks moving to what once was middle-of-nowhere rural Georgia, but Short said MetLife’s continuing capital improvements – new restaurants, leisure amenities, marinas and more – have made it a most-inviting lifestyle swap. “Our members will tell you,” Short said, “we’re 40 minutes from a Walmart but only five minutes from a Ritz-Carlton.”
And, seemingly, never even that far away from the next tee box.
The six total courses stretch across the property: Great Waters designed by Jack Nicklaus and recently renovated; The Oconee by Rees Jones and closest to the Ritz-Carlton; The National with 27 rolling holes by Tom Fazio; a members’ favorite at The Preserve by Bob Cupp; The Landing by Cupp, just up the road from the main property; plus the members-only and quirky Creek Club by Jim Engh.
Each of the five public-access layouts plays at times along the shore of the massive Lake Oconee, a massive reservoir constructed by Georgia Power in 1979 with 374 miles of shoreline. Great Waters features the most holes along the lake and receives much of the attention, ranking No. 2 among all public-access layouts in Georgia. But each of the layouts has received restorations and renovations since MetLife took over the property, and to focus only on the highest-ranked Great Waters – or The Oconee based on its easy proximity to the Ritz – would be a mistake.
The National Course at Reynolds Lake Oconee in Georgia (Courtesy of Reynolds Lake Oconee/Brian Oar)
“For a hotel guest, it’s easy to walk out the front door and go over to The Oconee, so that’s pretty popular, and Great Waters is very popular with guests because of its notoriety and profile as a Nicklaus Signature course,” said Short, a single-digit handicapper. “But once you get beyond those two, you can find a lot to like about The National, you can find a lot to like about The Creek if you know a member who can get you there, and I think The Landing is one that doesn’t get nearly enough recognition. It’s an extraordinary golf course.”
Short spent an afternoon chasing birdies and telling jokes at the Creek Club with this writer during my recent sampling of all six courses in three days – that’s a lot of golf, and I wouldn’t necessarily suggest such a trip because to focus only on golf is to miss too much else of what the resort offers. But golf is what I do, and following are my takes on the resort’s five public-access courses.
The LPGA announced a second Drive On Championship slated for October, as well as the cancellation of its final two Asian events this fall.
Coming off the momentum of a dramatic ANA Inspiration, the LPGA announced on Tuesday that a new tournament will be added to its schedule.
Golf fans will be treated to the LPGA Drive On Championship – Reynolds Lake Oconee, Oct. 22-25, in Greensboro, Georgia.
It’s the second Drive On Championship added to the 2020 schedule.
For those four days, a full field will compete on the Great Waters Course at Reynolds Lake Oconee for a $1.3 million purse. The event will be televised on Golf Channel and the LPGA’s international broadcast partners.
The tour also announced the cancellation of the BMW Ladies Championship and the Toto Japan Classic. Both events will return next year.
“We greatly appreciate the efforts by our partners at BMW and Toto to try to host their events this season and we look forward to returning to Korea and Japan in 2021,” said LPGA Commissioner Mike Whan in a statement. “Since we unfortunately cannot travel to Asia, we felt it was very important to add another competitive opportunity for our players. A big thank you to Reynolds Lake Oconee for hosting this official LPGA event, and giving an incredible venue to showcase the world’s best female golfers.”
The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant health regulations have made it impossible for the LPGA to embark on its planned Asian swing this fall. All four events this year have now been canceled.
The first LPGA Drive On Championship was at the Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio. Danielle Kang was victorious on Aug. 2 in that event, closing the show with a 2-under 70 for the first of two consecutive wins in Toledo.
The Great Waters Course at Reynolds Lake Oconee re-opened last October following 18 months of renovations by Jack Nicklaus.
GREENSBORO, Ga. – In those bygone eras before technology found its way into everybody’s pocket or backpack in the form of smartphones and laptops, promising executives could count on spending 30 or 40 years working their way up the ranks at a …
GREENSBORO, Ga. – In those bygone eras before technology found its way into everybody’s pocket or backpack in the form of smartphones and laptops, promising executives could count on spending 30 or 40 years working their way up the ranks at a corporate headquarters in or near a major metropolis.
Then came a golden watch and the golden years, with nothing but open tee times for all of retirement. For the particularly successful, there might be a second home on a golf course, maybe at a choice destination.
The only problem was those decades spent in cube farms and offices without a view. Sure, there were weekends and maybe a few golf vacations or afternoons spent at the boss’s exclusive country club. But clear expectations required that aspiring executives spend most of their waking lives attached to their office desks, surrounded by other likeminded professionals trying to climb a ladder that eventually might top out with a fairway view.
Enter technology, and things have changed. Many working stiffs have realized that instead of churning in an office all those years to eventually live where they want and enjoy some of the finer things in life, why wait?
No. 14 on the Great Waters Course at Reynolds Lake Oconee (Courtesy of Reynolds Lake Oconee/Evan Schiller)
With the advent of videoconferencing and VPNs, and the relaxing of expectations by many companies that staffers spend all their time in a corporate office, lucky 40- and 50-somethings can live just about anywhere. This trend has taken off in the past five years or so, said Dave Short, senior vice president of marketing, sales and strategic planning at the expansive Reynolds Lake Oconee community about an hour southeast of Atlanta.
“There’s a lot of people now that are buying a second home first, if you will,” Short said. “That’s a significant shift over the last few years. … They’re on whatever technology, and they work out of a home office, and they can walk nine holes in the afternoon or walk down the hill and dive into the lake at the end of the day. It’s just a different lifestyle.”
The trend has changed the market at Reynolds Lake Oconee, a sprawling lakeshore development of upper-level and top-tier homes that includes an on-property Ritz-Carlton hotel and covers about 14,000 acres – “We’re about 1,000 acres smaller than Manhattan Island,” Short said with a laugh.
Lake Oconee, built in 1979 to generate power, offers about 400 miles of shoreline, and about a quarter of those are part of Reynolds. The resort community features six golf courses, four of them ranked in Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play in Georgia. It is one of just three properties in the country, along with Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon and Destination Kohler in Wisconsin, to have four courses on that list.
“Ten years ago it would have been, let me pension off from General Motors and let me play golf six days a week for the rest of my life,” Short said. “And that’s just not who the only customer is today. It’s still a really important part of our existing membership, and certainly we have people who come here for that sole reason, but it’s really broadened out in the last several years. There are three families on my street (at Reynolds) in their early 50s that still work, but they work out of here.”
Short said Reynolds Lake Oconee has built out to about 3,000 rooftops and has another 26 miles of shoreline to offer as premium homesites. Atlanta provides the majority of prospective clients, and Short has seen a significant uptick in buyers from Florida and coastal Georgia in recent years as people tire of hurricanes and increasing congestion.
The Ritz-Carlton Reynolds (Courtesy of Reynolds Lake Oconee)
The relative affordability to build at Reynolds is a major draw, with what Short called an “ornate” home available for about $230 a square foot. Much more expensive and expansive multi-structure properties are available – call them what they are: lakefront mansions with additional buildings – but research shows that all in all the cost of a new luxury home is better priced at Reynolds than at many destinations offering comparable living experiences and golf.
But it’s the new class of mid-career homebuyers who have changed the community most, bringing in children instead of occasional visits from grandchildren.
“In the last 10 years, it’s sort of migrated away from being just a golf retirement community to one that now where there’s a lot of vibrancy, a lot of music, a lot of culinary rhythms that didn’t exist here 10 years ago,” Short said. “Part of what has fed into that is there is a whole class of people that are professionally liberated enough from having to live inside the beltway, whether you define that as Atlanta or D.C. or some of the larger cities. They have enough gravitas with their companies to say I want to live where I want to live.”
On top of its golf game
With the membership growing younger, one thing that never gets old at Reynolds Lake Oconee is the golf. MetLife, which purchased the property in 2012, sees to that with a continuous flow of capital improvements to the six courses as well as the hotel, the 10 restaurants and the four full-service marinas.
No. 11 on the Great Waters Course at Reynolds Lake Oconee (Courtesy of Reynolds Lake Oconee/Evan Schiller)
For golfers, the largest of the recent undertakings was a renovation of the community’s featured course, Great Waters, which ranks No. 2 in the state on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list. The Jack Nicklaus design originally opened in 1992, and after 18 months of work that ended in October, it’s a familiar experience down the same wide playing corridors, but with a few new twists.
“The golf course wasn’t broken to start with,” Nicklaus said during a reopening ceremony on the 18th tee next to the lake. “It was just the plumbing was broken, and we had to fix the plumbing. When you fix the plumbing, you get a chance to put a little lipstick on the outside of it.”
All the greens were rebuilt with TifEagle Bermuda grass, the entire course was re-grassed and a new irrigation system was installed. The fairways are now Zeon zoysia, and the rough is TifTuf Bermuda. All the bunkers were reworked.
The back tees were stretched to 7,436 yards, but perhaps more importantly, Nicklaus said, a new set of forward tees were built at about 4,500 yards to encourage older members and new players to take their shot.
With the setting, especially on the back nine’s eight water holes, there wasn’t any need to improve what was out there in view, just to open those views with fewer trees. Several greens and hills were reconfigured to take even better advantage of the views and water.
It’s rare for golf course architects to be given so much prime real estate on waterfront parcels, but Reynolds had a lot of lakeshore with which to work.
“This was a wonderful opportunity to do a pretty spectacular golf course on a pretty spectacular piece of property,” Nicklaus said of the original design. “The Reynolds people saw the vision and had the vision to understand that with 90 miles of waterfront, a little bit of that waterfront could go to golf to really create a golf course and situation that would be well worth the investment.”
Short said it’s all part of a theme of having room to enjoy the amenities, with housing set fairly far back from the playing corridors on ridges that offer long views.
“A golf course lot has a great golf course view, but they’re not encroaching,” Short said. “It doesn’t feel claustrophobic, with every single lot pushed up as close to the golf course as it can be. We do, by design, push the houses back.”
It goes hand-in-hand with those executives trying to escape the hustle and bustle of city living. Even with so many luxury lifestyle amenities on hand, this is still rural Georgia, and there’s plenty of room to grow. It’s small-town to the point that several locals and employees mentioned that a new Chick-fil-A had just opened nearby. But along with traffic and congestion, there’s one thing missing that Short enjoys pointing out.
“We’re 40 minutes from a Walmart and only five minutes away from a Ritz-Carlton,” he said with a laugh, not taking credit for a line he has heard from several residents. “That’s a pretty good selling point.”
The Oconee course at Reynolds Lake Oconee (Courtesy of Reynolds Lake Oconee/Brian G. Oar)
Golf at Reynolds Lake Oconee
Great Waters: The Jack Nicklaus design was built in 1992 and renovated in 2019. The course is No. 2 in Georgia on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list. It is 7,436 yards from the back with nine holes on the lakefront, including the final eight holes.
The Oconee: This 7,158-yard Rees Jones design opened in 2002 and features rambling elevation changes and a handful of holes on the lake. It ranks No. 4 in the state among Best Courses You Can Play.
The National Course at Reynolds Lake Oconee (Courtesy of Reynolds Lake Oconee/Brian G. Oar)
The National: Designed by Tom Fazio and opened in 1997, these 27 holes (Ridge, Bluff and Cove nines) feature significant elevation changes, with several holes on the lake. It ranks No. 8 in the state among Best Courses You Can Play.
The Landing: This original course at Reynolds was built by Bob Cupp and opened in 1986 among wooded areas and rolling hills. Stretching to 6,991 yards, it ranks No. 10 in the state among Best Courses You Can Play.
The Preserve: Built in 1988 by Cupp with Fuzzy Zoeller and Hubert Green as consultants, this 6,674-yard course features a six-hole loop named the Quick Six. Each of the six is less than 130 yards and can be played in about an hour.
Creek Club: This members-only track was designed by
Jim Engh and opened in 2007. With a mandate to build something “outside the box,” Engh built distinctive mounding and bunkers as well as three greens on the 18th hole of the 7,079-yard course.
