Best golf courses near Brunswick, GA

Ocean Forest occupies one of the premier oceanside settings on the East Coast. Originally designed by Rees Jones, the fairways laterally traverse the site’s interior pines, skirting marshes and breaking out in memorable moments to the shore of the broad Hampton River inlet before finishing along the Atlantic Ocean at 17 and 18. The course had been ranked among America’s 100 Greatest for 12 years, then a fixture among our top 200 courses nationally (and in the top six in Georgia). But by 2023, it was in need of updates and revisions, so the club opted to have Beau Welling initiate some major changes. The main order of business was to try to better connect the formerly perched-up green sites to the low, rambling terrain to be more accessible for members, enlarging them in the process. Welling also removed most of the Bermuda roughs and added open sandscapes along the holes to emulate the beach atmosphere, reconceived the par-3 17th on the water and elevated the 18th fairway so the ocean was visible above the dune line. The alterations combine to give the architecture a stronger seaside character that’s on par with the magical property.

This private club is operated by Sea Island Resort and located at the far north end of St. Simon's Island near the remains of Fort Frederica. Tom Fazio sometimes gets a rap for building "safe" courses that are heavy on visuals and light on substance. No one will think he played it safe at Frederica, which possesses some of the most extroverted greens you'll find anywhere. They're full of crests and pockets and channels and crowns. Some are perched on sand ridges that the architecture team created (the 5th, 6th and remarkable 16th), and others are tucked behind sweeping bunkers (like 2, 3, 8 and 17). Moving through clusters of transplanted live oaks, along lakes, over dunes and into the saltwater marshes at the north end of the site, the course feels a little like the Lowcountry meets Long Island.

The Sea Island resort continues to credit famed British golf architect H.S. Colt for its Seaside design, but in truth, it was never purely Colt's design. It was the work of Colt's partner, Charles Alison, who traveled to the U.S. and beyond in the 1920s and 30s while Colt remained in England. But the Seaside Course isn't even Alison's anymore—it is purely Tom Fazio, who incorporated Alison's original Seaside nine (today's 10-18) along with a nine (the Marshland Nine) designed in 1974 by Joe Lee, to create a totally new 18-hole course. But in keeping with the resort’s heritage, Fazio styled his new course in the design fashion of Alison, with big clamshell bunkers, smallish putting surfaces and exposed sand dunes off most of the windswept fairways. The Seaside Course has hosted numerous USGA championships and has been a mainstay on the PGA Tour schedule.

Sea Island’s golf courses have a long and rather convoluted history covering nearly 100 years of expansion, reconfiguration and renovations. Through it all, the historic Seaside has been the one that people schedule their visits around, full of holes that skirt Saint Simons Sound, the intracoastal marshes and sandy dunes refurbished by Tom Fazio in the late 1990s. The Plantation course, which started as a combination of one nine designed by Walter Travis in the 1920s and another from Dick Wilson in 1960, and synthesized together by Rees Jones in the 1990s, has typically played second fiddle.Not so much now. Keying on the original forms and concepts laid out by Travis, the Sea Island-based team of Mark and Davis Love III, along with lead architect Scot Sherman, stripped Plantation in 2019 and rebuilt it as a homage to early Golden Age design with deep coffin bunkers and squared-off plateau greens. The staggered bunkers eat into the broad fairways at intervals to set up zig-zag angles, and others have been introduced as dastardly centerline hazards, like the Principal's Nose feature on the short, drivable 10th that replaces a long, bending par-4 to make room for a massive putting course near the resort clubhouse.Other holes were broken up and recombined to better fit the property’s small footprint and create more sporting half-par holes. There’s even a touch of Pete Dye in the design in the use of bulkheading, small pot bunkers and S-shaped tee-to-green strategies. Guests will still instinctively gravitate toward Seaside and the long water views, but if they skip over Plantation they’ll miss a course jazzing it up on the opposite side of the architectural spectrum, and one of the more interesting designs in the southeast.