Best golf courses near Grapevine, TX

Cowboys Golf Club is a unique property—boasting the first NFL-themed golf facility with Dallas Cowboys lore prominently featured, including Super Bowl trophies, rings and Cowboys memorabilia in the clubhouse. Stone markers with facts about the team's history can be found along the course, too. Architect Beau Welling has recently overseen a comprehensive transformation of Cowboys Golf Club, with all 18 green complexes renovated or enlarged to either add contours or new hole locations. The putting surfaces now are built with Tif3D Bermudagrass, the first course in the U.S. with such agronomy. Along with the plethora of new entertainment options, it's worth playing the Jeff Brauer original design that winds through Grapevine Lake Spillway, about 20 miles from AT&T Stadium.

Time, and previous renovations, tend to shrink and constrict golf courses. The mission of a major 2021 remodel by architect Keith Foster was to return Brook Hollow’s worn features to a better iteration of its first-generation A.W. Tillinghast design. Foster achieved magnificent results by accentuating the pedestal-like greens and bringing back their squared-off edges, installing steep-faced bunkers (as opposed to their previously flashed faces) and re-introducing several of Tillinghast's “great hazard” sand wastelands on holes like the par-5 15th. The result is a magnificent renaissance of one of Tilly's best courses and a first-time appearance in our Second 100 Greatest Courses ranking.

It occupies some of the best golfing terrain in the Dallas Metroplex—rugged hills dotted with cedars—yet Tom Fazio still indulged in considerable shifting of earth when creating Dallas National. The par-3 17th, for instance, is countersunk into an excavated box canyon of rock, while a deep ravine in front of the 18th green was filled in to lessen the difficulty of the approach for average players. Major championship golf will return to the Dallas area in 2027 when the PGA Championship will be held on the recently opened East Course at PGA Frisco, built by Gil Hanse & Jim Wagner, but Dallas National members feel they already have a course worthy of the task. The course is poised to be even more polished when it reopens in 2025 following a major touch-up by Team Fazio.

Architect Steve Smyers and his associate Patrick Andrews transformed the old Columbian Club in designing Maridoe Golf Club outside Dallas, which earned third-place in Golf Digest's 2018 ranking of the Best New Courses. Smyers' design can challenge the best players in the world—with the plates tipping out at 7,800 yards—with shaved-off areas around the undulating green complexes, but also tempting better players into taking aggressive lines off the tee. The course hosted charitable exhibition tournaments during COVID to raise money for the club's charity, and Maridoe will host a LIV event in 2025.

Vaquero is an upscale, Discovery Land Co. development north of Ft. Worth that opened in 2001 with a Tom Fazio-designed layout. Andrew Green remodeled the property in 2023, retouching every element by converting long sandy buffers into native areas, greatly reducing the overall acreage of sand, reversing the direction of two holes, redesigning the green complexes and removing the par-3 17th and replacing it with a new short 16th hole. The standout piece, however, is the revamped short par-4 13th full of centerline bunkers, creating a myriad of fascinating driving options.

The product of a partnership between Arlington Golf and the Texas Rangers, this MLB-themed course opened in February 2019. Designed by Arlington native John Colligan on the site of the old Chester Ditto municipal course, Texas Rangers Golf Club takes advantage of 55 feet of elevation changes on the property and boasts large undulating greens. On the first tee, check out the “On Deck” circle, where players can blast one last drive into the practice range before they hit their first shots.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten: Stevens Park Golf Course, a municipal operation in a revitalized area of Oak Cliff just southwest of downtown Dallas, isn’t exactly a preservation of the past, but a celebration of it. The original design was by a pair of club pros, Jack Burke, father of 1955 Masters champ Jack Burke Jr., and Syd Cooper, father of Lighthorse Harry Cooper, one of those “best players never to have won a major.” The course was built on land donated by Walter A. Stevens and his sister Annie Laurie in memory of their parents, Dr. and Mrs. John H. Stevens. In the early days, Stevens Park was a fun but funky affair, crisscrossed by so many hills, creeks, gullies, trees and city streets that one par 4 required a snap hook off the tee and three others demanded snap-slices. In 2010, Metroplex course architect John Colligan and his then-associate Trey Kemp reconfigured the course, straightening holes and eliminating blind spots. They kept several original corridors, reversed the direction of seven holes and created eight fully new holes, increasing the length from 5,700 yards to about 6,300, a par 70. They also vastly improved turf conditions with modern irrigation and Bermuda grasses. But they retained the fun factor at Stevens Park, mainly by emphasizing the geometric arrangement the old layout always had. Greens are still uniquely shaped, some rectangular, some diamonds, one perfectly round. Fairway mowing patterns zig and zag. There are six par 3s, some downhill, some uphill, and two of them back-to-back. It has four gambling par 5s, including the novel 16th that plays down a slope to an intersecting creek, then up and over a high cliff wall to a hilltop green. (The only hole even remotely resembling its configuration is the sixth at Pebble Beach.) Most holes at Stevens Park are tight and tree-lined, many tees sit atop hills so drives are downhill and the par-4 15th offers an incredible, up-close view of downtown Big D. Best of all, green fees with a cart never exceed $60.

This par-70 resort course hosted the PGA Tour’s AT&T Byron Nelson for 35 years. Aesthetics are very high with several uses of very natural-looking water hazards/creeks that blend in seamlessly to holes. The Four Seasons feel is evident all around, especially with consistently good conditioning. Large green complexes put a premium on approach shots, and if the wind is up, this can turn into a difficult test.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten: A story about the late country music superstar Waylon Jennings comes to mind—when he was asked once to watch a tribute artist’s performance. The young singer looked like Waylon, sang like Waylon, had Waylon's mannerisms and stage presence. After the show, the kid asked the legend what he thought. You’re good, Waylon told him, but you’ll always be one hit behind.So it is with The Tribute Golf Links, a Tripp Davis design on the eastern shore of Lake Lewisville, north of Dallas. It’s one of the best replica courses in the country, replicating 18 of Great Britain’s most iconic golf holes, as good a links experience as one could expect on Bermuda turf.Some holes are more homage than duplicates. The par-3 fifth is Royal Troon’s Postage Stamp, and while architect Davis nailed the topography, the green is far bigger than the original, a grudging concession, I suppose, to the demands of public golf.Conspicuously absent from The Tribute is North Berwick’s par-3 Redan hole. Davis’ original routing had it slotted as his 14th hole, but in construction it was replaced in favor of Muirfield’s heavily bunkered par-3 13th, which is now labeled “Tripp’s Favorite.”My point is, most of the holes are dead ringers, until you look closely. The 418-yard par-4 16th seems like a painstaking reproduction of the famed 16th at Trump Turnberry’s Ailsa Course, with a sneaky burn wrapping itself around its steeply pitched green. The problem is, The Tribute was built in 2000. In 2007, the Turnberry Ailsa hole was remodeled in preparation for the 2009 Open, lengthened and turned into a dogleg right, with new fairway bunkers and a new approach angle over the burn into the green. Should The Tribute have followed suit and remodeled its 16th to conform? Or is it OK that the hole remains as built to remind golfers just how good Ailsa’s 16th was before its remodeling?The Tribute's first, 17th and 18th are full-scale reproductions of the first, 17th and 18th at the Old Course at St. Andrews, complete with the Swilcan Burn and Valley of Sin on the last green. Though The Tribute’s par-4 17th is certainly the Road Hole at St. Andrews, including the blind tee shot over faux black sheds, a Road Bunker left and to the right a road and rock wall, it measures 471 yards, not the 495 yards that the real Road Hole has played in The Opens of 2010 and 2015. Of course, that was from a temporary tee installed just for those Opens, so maybe there’s no necessity for The Tribute to expand its Road Hole. Still, if a purist expects the total experience when playing The Tribute, will he or she be disappointed if it's not the accurate length?Therein lies the conundrum for any copycat course. They’re always one renovation behind.