The best golf courses in Georgia

No club has tinkered with its golf course as often or as effectively over the decades as has Augusta National Golf Club, mainly to keep it competitive for the annual Masters Tournament, an event it has conducted since 1934, with time off during WWII. All that tinkering has resulted in an amalgamation of design ideas, with a routing by Alister Mackenzie and Bobby Jones, some Perry Maxwell greens, some Trent Jones water hazards, some Jack Nicklaus mounds and swales and, most recently, extensive rebunkering and tree planting by Tom Fazio. The tinkering continues, including the lengthening of the par-4 fifth in the summer of 2018, the lengthening of the 11th and 15th holes in 2022, and the addition of 35 yards to the famed par-5 13th in 2023.

The design collaboration by amateur star Bobby Jones and golf architect Robert Trent Jones (no relation) was meant to recapture the magic that the Grand Slam winner had experienced when he teamed with Alister Mackenzie in the design of Augusta National. But Trent was an even more forceful personality than the flamboyant Mackenzie, so Peachtree reflects far more of Trent’s notions of golf than Bobby’s, particularly in designing for future equipment advances. When it opened, Peachtree measured in excess of 7,200 yards, extremely long for that era. It boasted the longest set of tees in America (to provide flexibility on holes) and the country’s most enormous greens (to spread out wear and tear). As it turns out, Trent was a visionary, and decades later other designers followed his lead to address advances in club and ball technology.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:

I’ve been told Gil Hanse had first examined the site of Ohoopee Match Club as far back as 2006 considered it ideal for golf: gently rolling terrain with no severe elevation changes, and beautiful sandy soil deposited by the nearby Ohoopee River, perfect for drainage and firm, fast conditions.

The ground around tiny Cobbtown, Ga., is also perfect for growing onions—it’s just northeast of Vidalia, world-famous for the Vidalia onion. Indeed, Ohoopee’s logo is a freshly picked onion, although if you look closely, its roots are three writhing snakes.

Any symbolism pertaining to match play is uncertain; perhaps it simply suggests the sort of putts one will face. What’s the composition of a course meant for match play? One might think it would contain lots of penal hazards, because a triple bogey on any particular hole would not be fatal in match play.

Perhaps the targets would be smaller than normal, to level the playing field between big hitters and short-but-accurate golfers. That’s not the composition of the 7,325-yard championship course at Ohoopee. Hanse did produce dramatic visuals in this sandy locale that hark back to portions of Pinehurst and Pine Valley, from long expanses of sandy rough dotted with native plants to deep, foreboding pits of sand, but they’re mostly on the far perimeter of holes. 

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No course on our rankings has highlighted the value of new turfgrasses better than the Highlands Course at Atlanta Athletic Club. It sets the standards for quality everyday conditions as well as for major championships at Southern venues. Its tees and fairways are newly-developed Zorro Zoysia, which can withstand Atlanta’s coldest winter days. Greens are state-of-the-art TifEagle Bermuda, smooth and pure. Approaches and surrounds of greens are TifGrand Bermuda, which allows them to be mowed very tight for additional bounce. The rough is Tifway 419 Bermuda, a great old standby. The club also recently upgraded its irrigation system. Because each turf has different water demands, a precise individual-head system was installed, each head controlled by the superintendent with a smart phone app, applying moisture only where needed and thus saving water and money. No longer will an errant shot at AAC land behind an irrigation box. There are none anymore.

Tom Bendelow actually laid out the original course at East Lake, back when it was known as Atlanta Athletic Club, and that was the layout upon which Stewart Maiden taught the game to the now-legendary Bobby Jones. Donald Ross basically built a new course on the same spot in 1915, which remained untouched until changes were made before the 1963 Ryder Cup. When Atlanta Athletic moved to the suburbs in the late 1960s, the intown East Lake location fell on hard financial times until being rescued in the 1990s by businessman Tom Cousins, who made it a sterling fusion of corporate and inner-city involvement. Rees Jones redesigned most holes beginning in the mid-90s, making the course more reflective of his views of championship golf. After the PGA Tour reversed the nines for the 2016 Tour Championship (flipping the unpopular par-3 finish into the ninth hole), the club made the new routing permanent for regular play. East Lake underwent another major restoration following the 2023 Tour Championship, this time by Andrew Green, highlighting the course's Donald Ross heritage. Green used a 1949 aerial to inform the replacement of bunkers and the shape of greens, which are much larger and possess a wider variety of hole location and slopes than before. Almost every hole was dramatically revamped, creating a course that poses options and requires the careful calibration of each shot rather than a mere test of straight hitting.

Twenty-some years ago Rees Jones might have completed America’s last true oceanside links at Ocean Forest. It’s certainly one of the premier linksland settings in the country, far more authentic in its links characteristics than his Haig Point or Atlantic G.C., despite some holes in woodlands. Ocean Forest’s fairways laterally traverse several rumples of dunes, some 18 feet high, through a pine-covered delta formed where the Hampton River flows into the Atlantic. The routing skirts saltwater marsh, the river’s edge and finishes with a one-two punch on the seashore. This may be the most walkable course among all those nationally ranked, despite the fact that the 18th hole finishes a half mile from the clubhouse. Here’s an obscure piece of trivia: The day Ocean Forest opened in 1995, O.J. Simpson was acquitted of all murder charges against him. Architect Beau Welling is now working with the club and is performing a remodel of the course in 2023. Standy by to see how these changes impact Ocean Forest's state and national ranking.

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 of the PGA Tour’s early season roster.

Years ago, one of the most spirited debate in golf was over who really designed Atlanta Country Club. Both Willard Byrd of Atlanta and Joseph S. Finger of Houston claimed the honor. Both lobbied Golf Digest hard for the architectural credit, but neither provided much supporting documentation. Both architects are deceased now, and from what we can piece together, Byrd landed the original contract in the early 1960s, but was still more land-planner than course architect in those days, and it seemed possible the club had brought in Finger to finish the job. The final word in that debate didn’t come until recently when architect Beau Welling, during a 2022 remodel of the course, found Byrd’s plans for the course and used them to restore a number of tee boxes that had shifted during previous renovations. Welling shifted and added bunkers, expanded and rebuilt greens and, importantly, redesigned the third and 11th holes, long considered the course’s weaknesses. Atlanta Country Club hosted the inaugural Tournament Players Championship in 1974 and the PGA Tour’s Atlanta stop from 1967 to 1996, and was among Golf Digest’s Second 100 Greatest courses until it fell out of the ranking in 2023. We’ll see if Welling’s remodel propels it back into the top 200.

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 lite 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.

Champions Retreat was originally going to be called "The Big Three" club. It was the idea of a South African developer who brought together Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer (the original Big Three of golf) during a Masters in the 1990s to discuss the prospect of each of them building a course at his proposed club. The idea worked. Each contributed nine holes at the more enduringly-named Champions Retreat west of Augusta on the Savannah River. The composite 18 for this ranking includes the Bluff Nine (Nicklaus), playing in the pines where it climbs a series of forested ridges that demand precise drives and several demanding uphill approches, and Palmer's Island Nine, more gracious in its width featuring artistically-shaped bunkers, a scenic five-hole foray onto a secluded island along the river and two par 3s that plays across watery inlets.

For decades, Lookout Mountain Club was viewed by architecture buffs and historians as one of the country’s great renovation opportunities. Seth Raynor laid out the course in 1925 on a high, tilting property near Lookout Mountain’s northeastern flank, just outside of Chattanooga. Raynor, who came into the profession over a decade earlier as a surveyor and construction specialist helping celebrated architect C.B. Macdonald build courses like National Golf Links of America, Piping Rock and the extinct Lido Club, had by this time become one of the most active and sought-after designers in the United States. At each of his commissions, including Lookout Mountain, he used variations of the “ideal holes” Macdonald first developed at NGLA (based on original holes from the U.K.), including the Redan, Eden, Road Hole, Alps, etc. These Raynor/Macdonald hole templates have always been present at Lookout Mountain, though few golfers would have recognized them. The course was never finished to Raynor’s plans or standards because he died in 1926 before construction began, and budget constraints and the difficulty of building on the mountain’s solid granite prevented his associate Charles Banks from executing the details. At the time, it was believed to be the second-most expensive golf course ever built, after Yale, another Raynor/Macdonald design. The subsequent years were no kinder. The club never had the resources to properly invest in preserving the Raynor architecture that did get built, and over the decades the greens shrunk, the bunkers dulled and tree-planting crowded the holes. Despite the memorable elevated setting, Lookout Mountain resembled a Raynor course only in glancing angles, a great “what if” considering that the architect's best-preserved work includes four courses—Fishers Island, Chicago Golf Club, Camargo and Shoreacres—in Golf Digest’s top 50. Fortunes changed in 2022 when the club at last garnered the resources to produce the course Raynor envisioned. Working hole by hole, architects Tyler Rae and Kyle Franz, with significant help from designer Benjamin Warren, used the club’s course map that Raynor had drawn to fully implement the template holes in ways that better match the enormous scale of a site possessing views that stretch dozens of miles in several directions. All greens were cored out and rebuilt and the bunkers were either returned to intended positions or reproduce in accordance with the course map. Since the map sketches lacked specific detail, especially concerning green contours, Rae and Franz used their extensive experience working on and researching other Raynor courses to draw inspiration for certain holes. Many, like the Redan 13th, Road 15th, the Double Plateau 17th or Maiden 18th would be fits at many Raynor properties while others like the Sahara third, Dustpan fifth and Lido 14th must be considered originals, expressively so. But it all adds up for a thrilling expression of Macdonald/Raynor architecture on one of the most unique, breathtaking sites Raynor ever worked. The result of Rae and Franz’s restorative efforts won Lookout Mountain Golf Digest’s Best Renovation award for 2023.

The late architect Bob Cupp, an elite golfer in his youth, was extremely talented at building tournament-worthy golf courses. Settindown Creek, the "country" course of the intown Ansley Golf Club located in the suburbs far north of Atlanta, is no exception (see the slope of 150). The club has hosted a number of prominent state and national events, including the 2005 U.S. Women's Amateur won by Morgan Pressel. It's a tough course that requires controlled approaches into greens surrounded by creeks, ponds, penal bunkers and deep rough. Two thirds of the holes play through the flood plain of the Little River, the other third over typically hilly, wooded north Georgia terrain. The original plan for the course had the holes numbered differently. The property straddled the county line, with most of the course on the Cherokee County side. At the time, however, Cherokee was a dry county, so the club moved the location of the clubhouse across the line into the smaller (and wetter) Fulton County section, necessitating a reording of the holes and turning, unfortunately, one of the course's weakest holes into the current 18th.

The historian Shelby Foote described the movements of the Union and Confederate armies, as Sherman pushed general Joe Johnston from Chattanooga into Atlanta, as a "red clay minuet" after the wet slippery soil they fought on and the stuttering thrust and parry of their forces. Some of the battle took place along Rocky Face Ridge in the area directly above and surrounding The Farm, and even today it's possible to dislodge a rusted musket ball or bullet from the earth. This otherwise tranquil 1980s-era Tom Fazio design plays partly along the flat farmland at the base of the ridge, partly in its foothill transition, and several holes including the par-4 tenth and par-3 11th shooting across a wooded canyon feel fully in the mountains. So not to favor one side or the other, both nines camber up and down the rise, with ten through 18 making a big loop around the outside of early holes.

Cuscowilla was one among the first group of jobs Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw took on after the opening of Sand Hills, the number eight course on America's 100 Greatest Courses ranking and a design that vaulted the duo to the top of the profession. The site's couldn't be more different. Cuscowilla is located on the shore of Lake Oconee, a large manmade reservoir that's home to the five courses of Reynolds Lake Oconee. To give an example of how Coore and Crenshaw think differently than other archtiects, they recommended the developer of Cuscowilla use the majority of the shoreline for homesites. Most architects would fight for water holes, but they prefered the more rolling uplands for golf rather than the flatter land on the water. Nevertheless, two holes do play along the lake, the Cape-like 10th with a downhill drive across an inlet, and the miniature par 3 11th to an elevated green, but the other parts of the design are stronger. The first six holes comprise one of the most rhythmic and engaging opening runs of any course in their remarkable portfolio and includes the uphill drivable, split-fariway par-4 fifth that is now something close to a template hole. Late in the round the loop of 15, 16 and 17 is almost as strong. Cuscowilla was also shaper extraordinaire Jeff Bradley's coming out party, and early showcase of his distinctive style of grassy, gnawed-edge bunkers, replete with Georgia's red clay sand.

Robert Trent Jones built 27 holes for the Atlanta Athletic Club when it moved from East Lake in Atlanta to the northern suburb of Duluth (now called Johns Creek) in the late 1960s. When Joe Finger added a fourth nine on a high section of the property in the early 70s, the holes were broken into two 18-hole courses, the Highlands Course, host of the 1976 U.S. Open and 2001 and 2011 PGA Championships, and the Riverside Course. Riverside was always viewed as the more friendly, non-championship course, though it hosted it's share of prestigious tournaments as well. Rees Jones performed major work on both courses through the years and the style of each came to resemble more his architeture than his father's, or Finger's. In 2022, Tripp Davis remodeled Riverside, rebuilding and reshaping each hole, each green site and the bunkers to tie them better into the landforms, creating new looks and several new holes in the process. Davis divided the par-5 third into a short par 3 and a dogleg left par 4 with the new green pushed back against the Chattahoochee River, then combined the old fourth and fifth into a riverside par 5 that bends gradually right. The twelfth green was pushed back 80 yards to turn it into a par 5, the par-3 17th green was rebuilt with modifeid punchbowl shaping and water hazards near the greens at 14 and 18 were removed. Riverside finished second for the 2023 Best Transformation award, and there are some (including us) who would divide a 10-round split between Highlands and Riverside 5-5, or even 6-4 in favor or the latter.

Early in his design career, Jack Nicklaus said he would design resort courses differently than championship ones. Great Waters is a vivid example of that intent. With a routing that features 10 holes on Lake Oconee, Jack and his associate Jim Lipe worked hard to vary the encounters with water. On one hole it's a carry off a tee, on another, it's beside a green, while on a couple, it's a cove in front of a green. Every encounter features a generous bailout option. Another concession to resort golfers: The greens are big but simple, with few complex contours.

This property, just a half-hour south of Savannah, was once the winter retreat of Henry Ford and his family, but golf didn't arrive until the 1980s when a new owner hired Pete Dye to build a course. Dropped blindly on any of the holes on the first nine and you might think you were at almost any of Dye's southeastern courses--is this Harbour Town? Oak Marsh? Long Cove Club or Barefoot Resort? The tells are all there, from the moss-draped oaks to the strip bunkers to the bulkheaded water features and moguls and hollows surrounding small greens. But there's no mistaking the second nine for anywhere else. These holes circle over an open isthmus of land projecting into the Ogeechee River. The treeless plain is full of Dye's architecture that looks particularly good in this exposed setting, particularly the wonderful drive and pitch 10th with a green set hard against the water, the par-4 14th with a bunkerless elevated green, and a nice rendition of his often used 5-3-4 finish tacking back toward the large antebellum clubhouse. The six-time host of the Georgia Open is also full of dozens of alligators that blissfully bask on the banks.

This course, formerly known as Canyon Ridge, opened in 2005 to regional acclaim in large part due to several holes that crept out to the edge of Lookout Mountain in northwest Georgia, peering down to a valley floor several hundred feet below. Other parts of the design were less successful. New owners rechristened the club McLemore and brought in Rees Jones and Georgia native Bill Bergin to remodel the course. Those soaring views were opened up even further, revisions were made to the bunkers and greens, and a new 18th hole was built on a previously inaccessible ledge of land farther out over the precipice of the mountain. Golf Digest deemed that hole, a breathtaking par 4 that rides the clifftop and seems to levitate above McLemore Cove, one of the best 18 holes built in the U.S. since 2000. Part of a gated community, McLemore offers attractive overnight packages, and a new 245-room hotel and resort will soon be added to the collection. —Derek Duncan

TPC Sugarloaf was the host of the Bell South Classic from 1997 through 2008, held on the Stables and Meadows nines of this 27 hole club. The Greg Norman design was impressive for the champions it produced, including Tiger Woods, David Duval, Retief Goosen, Zach Johnson (twice) and Phil Mickelson (three times). The course is notable for its slick-shouldered greens and stacked sod-wall bunkers, a feature not often seen in U.S. golf in the 90s. The club recently completed a multi-million dollar renovation that has brought the infrastructure up to 21st century standards.

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 Principals Nose feature on the short, drivable 10th that replaces a long bending par 4 in order 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.

Dunwoody is an example of the benefits of smart renovation. The club was established in the 1960s in the countryside north of Atlanta as the suburbs were quickly expanding that direction. It was a nice neighborhood country club with a perfectly fine course designed by Willard Byrd, who was one of the top regional architects working in the southeast in the 1960s and 70s. Over time, like all courses, the trees thickened and the golf features dulled, making the golf ordinary. Enter Atlanta-based architect Bill Bergin, who remodeled the course in 2013 by thinning excessive trees, expanding putting surfaces, creating more room in the fairways and giving the bunkering a more distinctive look with vertical grass faces and strong horizontal top lines. Though he couldn't cure the awkwardness of the unfortunate fifth hole, a 6-iron/8-iron par 4 that bends 90-degrees right, his work breathed new life into the wonderful, rolling piece of land with a kind of centralized core routing that later became increasingly rare in the Atlanta market. Once sleepy, Dunwoody Country Club is now a sleeper and well worth seeking out when in the region.

Ranked 8th for Golf Digest’s Best New Upscale Public Course of 2002, the Oconee course is known for its risk-reward shot options and views of the serene Lake Oconee on five holes. Forced carries over water inlets and opportunities to cut corners on tree-lined doglegs make this Rees Jones design a pleasure to play.

The National features 27 holes designed by Tom Fazio that traverse the rolling terrain, providing plenty of elevation changes. There are over 100 bunkers on the layout—most moderately sized—which frame the fairways that are often set well below the tees. Though water comes into play throughout, there’s often ample room to bail out away from the trouble. The course can tip out at over 7,000 yards (depending on which nines you play), providing a stern test. Yet, with the resort guest in mind, there are seven sets of tees available.