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Tom Doak's best golf courses, ranked

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Tom Doak's St. Patrick's Links in Ireland has quickly climbed top-100 course rankings list since it opened in 2021.

By Stephen Hennessey
March 28, 2026
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There are few people in the world as knowledgeable about golf course architecture than Tom Doak. It’s fair to call Tom Doak one of the best current-day course architects, and considering his impact on the subject with his books and broader digital education, he’s certainly one of the most impactful designers of all time.

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One of the coolest things is that a lot of Doak’s work has been at public courses—just like Memorial Park Golf Course in Houston, where the PGA Tour has visited for the Texas Children’s Houston Open. Many of Doak's projects are at destinations, but the designer transformed Memorial Park (with Brooks Koepka as a consulting tour pro), a pivotal part of Houston's municipal golf lineup of courses, so that any golfer can enjoy meaningful architecture at a reasonable price. Doak has done a lot of collaborating in his career—so this list is mostly comprised of his work, leaving off projects like Sebonack, where he worked with Jack Nicklaus; Old Macdonald, where he and associate Jim Urbina built their second course at Bandon Dunes; and The Lido, where he helped recreate the famous C.B. Macdonald Long Island course.

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The below list is not a complete list but a collection of Doak’s work across the world. He has a number of projects that just opened and haven’t been evaluated by our course panelists, and others that are set to debut in the next few years, so this list will continue to evolve.

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Scroll on for the complete list of Tom Doak's best courses, and 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 on the courses you’ve played … so you can make your case for why a course should be higher or lower on our rankings.

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10. Stone Eagle Golf Club
Palm Desert, CA
4.4
30 Panelists
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.
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9. St Andrews Beach
Fingal, Victoria, Australia
St Andrews Beach remains one of the best values in golf—travelers can play this Tom Doak design for around $100 and experience what great architecture can be. Doak faced some environmental limitations in his routing, but the charming design on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, about two hours from Melbourne, does not disappoint and routinely appears on global top-100 lists.
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8. Rock Creek Cattle Company
Deer Lodge, MT
4.7
20 Panelists
In the Rocky Mountain foothills north of Deer Lodge, Mont., Tom Doak fashioned a splendid inland links from a working cattle ranch. His broad, looping routing starts in pasture, makes a slow but steady climb to the seventh tee, then plays through pines and over the ravines of Rock Creek, as gorgeous a fly-fishing stream as can be imagined. At the ninth, the course bursts back into the open, atop rolling hills offering hogback, punchbowl and sideslope fairways, then rolls downward and homeward, finishing back along the stream. Doak moved little earth because it was so rocky. Greens are huge to fit the scale, and bunkers are shaped to emulate those blown out by constant winds. Rock Creek Cattle Co. is high-country golf at its finest.
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7. St. Patrick's Links
Downings, Co. Donegal, Ireland
It’s always been known that the dunes to the south of the original Rosapenna resort on Ireland’s northwest coast in County Donegal were some of the country’s most profound linksland, though the two original courses that had occupied them since the 1990s with slender, simple fairways running mostly in parallel directions never fulfilled that promise. It wasn’t until Tom Doak began reworking the land in 2019—eliminating most of the holes, maintaining the corridors of others and finding new territories of dunes and sand ridges to explore within the site’s 300 acres along Sheephaven Bay—that the land’s true potential was realized. Opened in 2021, the routing of each nine moves out through buffered channels toward the shore, utilizing broad, bouncy fairways that camber into greens that are either set in hollows or elevated on wind-battered bluffs. In buoyancy, variety and seaside topography, St. Patrick’s rivals the best of what Irish golf has to offer.
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6. Te Arai Links (North Course)
Tomarata, Auckland, New Zealand
Tom Doak’s North Course at this new resort development on the northeast course of New Zealand is the highest-ranked debut in 2024. Unlike the South Course, which opened a year earlier, only a few holes play near the Pacific Ocean. The North doesn’t need them. Doak’s routing begins and ends on the ocean, but the spirit of the design resides in the majority of holes that play inland through sand barrens and a forest of conifers. As expected from Doak, the greens are full of robust movements and there are few level stances anywhere that’s not a tee.
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5. Barnbougle Dunes
Bridport, Tasmania, Australia
A 2004 collaboration of American designer Tom Doak and Australian tour-pro-turned-architect Michael Clayton, Barnbougle Dunes is a tremendous 18 in a fantastic stretch of sand dunes along Bass Strait, the sea that separates Tasmania from Melbourne. What's most fascinating is that the back nine is completely reversed from how Doak originally routed it. So was the site so good that, once construction started, Doak and Clayton were able to find nine new green sites at the opposite ends of holes originally envisioned? Or did they create those "natural" green sites?
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4. Cape Kidnappers Golf Course
Te Awanga, Hawke's Bay, New Zealand
Not a links, more like a stratospheric Pebble Beach, high atop a windswept plateau some 500 feet above the sea. The 2004 design truly demonstrates the lay-of-the-land philosophy of American architect Tom Doak, who ran holes out and back along a series of ridges perpendicular with the coastline, most framed by deep canyons. The fairways are wide, but Doak rewards bold tee shots that flirt with ravines and sets strategies using some of the deepest bunkers he has ever built. Cape Kidnappers was also the International winner of a 2012 Environmental Leaders in Golf Award, co-sponsored by Golf Digest.
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3. Ballyneal Golf Club
Holyoke, CO
4.7
36 Panelists
If Sand Hills Golf Club stands for the notion that there’s nothing more glorious than a round of golf beyond the range of cell phone reception, then Ballyneal (Tom Doak’s northeast Colorado answer to Nebraska’s Sand Hills) proves that isolated golf is even better when spartan in nature. With no carts and dry, tan fescue turf on fairways and greens, Ballyneal is even more austere than Sand Hills. It provides absolute firm and fast conditions, and with many greens perched on hilltops, the effect of wind on putts must be considered. The rolling landforms, topsy-turvy greens and half-par holes make playing here feel like a joyride. That sense of exuberance has catapulted Ballyneal from an original ranking of 95th in 2011 to its highest ranking to date at 34th.
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2. Pacific Dunes
Bandon, OR
4.9
61 Panelists
This was the second course constructed at Bandon Dunes Resort and the highest-ranked among the resort’s five 18s. To best utilize ocean frontage, Tom Doak came up with an unorthodox routing that includes four par 3s on the back nine. Holes seem to emerge from the landscape rather than being superimposed onto it with rolling greens and rumpled fairways framed by rugged sand dunes and marvelously grotesque bunkers. The secret is that Doak moved a lot of earth in some places to make it look like he moved very little, but the result is a course with sensual movements, like a tango that steps toward the coast and back again, dipping in and out of different playing arenas from the secluded sand blowouts to the exposed bluffs and all variations in between.
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1. Tara Iti Golf Club
Manghawai, Northland, New Zealand
Built by American designer Tom Doak from what had been a pine-covered Sahara along the northeastern coast of New Zealand's North Island, Tara Iti iis far more links-like than the country's other coastal courses, most of which are on rock. Doak and design associate Brian Slawnik spent more than two years gently resculpting the sandy soil into hummocks, punchbowls and sand dunes that look like they were formed by wind and vegetated by nature. There's lots of sand but no bunkers. Golfers may ground the club anywhere. With holes inspired by Cypress Point, Royal Dornoch and Royal St. George's, and views everywhere of the Hauraki Gulf, this might be New Zealand's answer to Pebble Beach's Carmel Bay. The greatest meeting of land and sea is clearly up for debate.
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