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The best golf courses in Indiana

By Derek Duncan and Stephen Hennessey
May 29, 2025
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Pete Dye was born in Ohio but lived in Indiana (and Florida) for most of his life. His early ventures into architecture occurred mostly in this state and his imprint remains everywhere. A player could chart the evolution of his design ideas simply by playing his courses, from Crooked Stick where his early Scottish links inspirations (small greens, pot bunkers, chipping hollows and native grasses) first came to light, to "peak" muscular Dye at Brickyard Crossing and Purdue's Kampen Course, and his late expressionist style at the Dye Course at French Lick.

But Dye doesn't dominate the state rankings—Jack Nicklaus, Tom Fazio, Coore and Crenshaw, and Tim Liddy also score hits in Indiana. In contrast with neighbors Ohio, Illinois and Michigan, the best golf in Indiana tends to be of the modern variety: only two courses in the ranking are designs that existed prior to the Great Depression, South Bend Country Club and the Donald Ross Course at French Lick.

Below you'll find our 2025-'26 ranking of the Best Golf Courses in Indiana.

Scroll on for the complete list of the best courses in Indiana. 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 … so you can make your case for (or against) any course that you've played.

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20. The Trophy Club
Lebanon, IN
3.9
10 Panelists
Previous rank: NR
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19. Purgatory Golf Club
Noblesville, IN
3.7
8 Panelists
Previous rank: NR
Purgatory Golf Club is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Indiana. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information
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18. Prairie View Golf Club
Carmel, IN
3.5
7 Panelists
Previous rank: NR
Prairie View Golf Club is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Indiana. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information
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17. The Sagamore Club
Noblesville, IN
3.7
8 Panelists
Previous rank: 11
The Sagamore Club is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Indiana. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information
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16. South Bend Country Club
South Bend, IN
3.8
8 Panelists
Previous rank: 12
South Bend Country Club is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Indiana. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information
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15. The Fort Golf Resort
Indianapolis, IN
3.6
10 Panelists
Previous rank: NR
The Fort Golf Resort is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Indiana. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information
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14. The Club At Chatham Hills
Westfield, IN
3.5
6 Panelists
Previous rank: 13
The Club At Chatham Hills is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Indiana. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information
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13. Woodland Country Club of Carmel
Carmel, IN
4.1
12 Panelists
Previous rank: NR
Woodland Country Club of Carmel is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Indiana. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information
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12. Birck Boilermaker Golf Complex: Ackerman-Allen
West Lafayette, IN
3.8
10 Panelists
Previous rank: 15
The Ackerman-Allen course at Purdue’s 36-hole Birck Boilermaker Golf Complex was originally designed by Bill Diddel and opened in 1934. The Purdue South Course, as it was known back then, hosted the 1955 U.S. Junior Amateur and the 1961 NCAA Men’s Golf Championship, the latter of which was won by Purdue, with Jack Nicklaus claiming the individual title. Pete Dye, who designed the sibling Kampen course, redesigned the Ackerman-Allen layout in 2015-’16.
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11. Rock Hollow Golf Club
Peru, IN
3.8
6 Panelists
Previous rank: 14
Rock Hollow Golf Club is ranked as one of the best golf courses in Indiana. Discover our experts' reviews and tee time information
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10. Holliday Farms Golf Club: Championship Course
Zionsville, IN
4.1
9 Panelists
Previous rank: 9
This private golf and residential development outside of Indianapolis is one of the last courses Pete Dye worked on—he passed in early 2020. The most scenic areas on the course pass through woodlands and along creeks, and others open into meadows with holes reminiscent of The Golf Club and Crooked Stick. Tim Liddy and P.B. Dye, who both have long histories with Dye (P.B. is his son) and were best positioned to carry out Dye’s ideas, helped finish building the course.
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9. Brickyard Crossing Golf Course
Indianapolis, IN
4
9 Panelists
Previous rank: 7
As an unapologetic Pete Dye fan, I know the most economical way to understand and appreciate Dye's genius is to simply play Brickyard Crossing, the course associated with the Indianapolis Speedway. There are four holes on the infield of the race track that provide a complete portfolio of his evolving design style. The par-3 seventh plays to a massive Seth Raynor-styled green perched some 10 feet high. The par-4 eighth is a boomerang par 4 along a lake that brings to mind the eighth at Crooked Stick, with a long rippled green a salute to Alister MacKenzie. The par-4 ninth is peppered with 10 pot bunkers in the right rough, eight more in the left. The short par-4 tenth, a dogleg wrapped around a long flat waste bunker down the left side, is a hole is full of Dye illusions. None of the four holes look or play anything like the other three, which makes it not only challenging but fun as you analyze and conquer. Plus, it's in the middle of the Indianapolis Speedway racetrack. --Ron Whitten
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8. French Lick Resort: Donald Ross Course
French Lick, IN
3.6
18 Panelists
Previous rank: 6
If the 2009 Pete Dye course at this historic resort in southern Indiana (ranked No. 118 on America's Second 100 Greatest Courses) is an acrobat swinging trapezes through circles of flame along the site's elevated bluffs, the 1917 Donald Ross course is more of a street-level tilt-a-whirl with holes that rise, fall and roll repeatedly over a gorgous meadow property. Each nine crests over ridges and ride into hollows, rising toward well-bunkered greens that flank slightly crowned putting surfaces. This is an Old World/New World contrast, with both the Dye and Ross courses achieving what they set out to do architecturally, but in rather different ways. Depending on their mood and appreciation for allowing land movements rather than bulldozers to dictate design and direction, golfers at French Lick often prefer the nuance and nature of the Ross course.
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7. Warren Golf Course at Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN
4.3
17 Panelists
Previous rank: 10
Given there is very little elevation change on Notre Dame’s Warren Golf Course, it was an impressive feat by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw to create a captivating design that compensates for the bland terrain with subtle doglegs moving in each direction, with strategically placed bunkers and trees creating high shot values. As is typical of Coore and Crenshaw designs, the course blends into the natural terrain and creates ample challenge not with bold, artificial features but thoughtful hazards and hole shapes. The course sits on 250 wooded acres just north of campus and is an Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary. Home to the university’s men’s and women’s golf teams, the course has hosted numerous NCAA regionals as well as the 2019 U.S. Senior Open. Steve Stricker won his first USGA championship, winning by six shots over David Toms.
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6. Birck Boilermaker Golf Complex: Kampen Course
West Lafayette, IN
4
12 Panelists
Previous rank: 6
It's fitting that one of the country's best college courses should be built by college students. Purdue students didn't design the Kampen Course at Purdue University, but they served as essential cost-saving labor for Pete Dye when he redesigned the course in the mid-1990s. When Dye and the kids (who had no previous construction experience) were done with it, the university's old North Course full of rudimentary holes running back and forth became a playground of the architect's postmodern trademarks including expansive waste bunkers studded with grassy moguls, deep pot and trench bunkers, elevated greens angled against hazards, par 3s across water and even a drivable par 4 with mirrored right and left fairways arcing around a large central wasteland. Built on a shoestring, this project had a special meaning for Dye as Purdue was where he first began studying agronomy prior to switching from a successful career selling insurance to golf course design.
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5. The Pfau Course At Indiana University
Bloomington, IN
4
14 Panelists
Previous rank: 5
College golf courses can be the most challenging of assignments for architects because of the need to accommodate the broad range of abilities that play the course day to day. On one hand, the design needs to be enjoyable for students, faculty and local play. On the other hand, it has to have the mettle to test the skills of the best amateurs in the country. At Indiana, Smyers, a nationally competitive amateur player himself, has thought deeply about the topic. He challenges talented players, including the Hoosiers’ golf teams, with length, subtly angled drives, compressed landing areas bordered by light rough and contouring slopes around the edges of greens. But the course is also broad where handicap players drive the ball, the greens are open in front and the bunkers are shallow. Native grass roughs and groves of hardwoods add an idyllic touch.
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4. Sycamore Hills Golf Club
Fort Wayne, IN
4.4
15 Panelists
Previous rank: 4
Jack Nicklaus has redesigned some aspects of every hole at Muirfield Village over the decades, in efforts to make sure that the course remains competitive as an annual host of the PGA Tour’s Memorial Tournament. But he’s done no major remodeling at Sycamore Hills Golf Club in Fort Wayne, just modest adjustments. Although the course sees its share of amateur competitions, Nicklaus has seen no need to toughen it for everyday member play. After all, it has always had plenty of challenge, like the long freeform bunker left of the fairway on the par-4 third, the 14 bunkers scattered about the par-5 fifth and the serpentine stream that crosses the fairway four times from tee to green at the par-5 15th. Sycamore Hills is Nicklaus at his most imaginative, with strategic golf on some holes, gambling golf on other holes and target golf on still others.
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3. French Lick Resort: Pete Dye Course
French Lick, IN
4.5
24 Panelists
Previous rank: 3
Pete Dye’s mountaintop design, Golf Digest’s 2009 Best New Public winner, established that at age 80 the designer still had fresh ideas, including rumpled chipping swales, country-lane cart paths and volcano bunkers. Measuring just over 8,100 yards from the tips, Pete Dye at French Lick is not the first course over 8,000 yards to land on our rankings. That would be, in 1967, the original 8,040-yard Runaway Brook in Massachusetts, later turned into the 8,325-yard Pines Course at The International Golf Club (and now completely remodeled by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, nowhere near 8,000 yards). The world’s longest is Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in China at 8,548 yards, not counting Australia's Nullarbor Links, a course that stretches 1,365 kilometers with each hole stretched out in a different town along a highway. The yardage may be a talking point, but what golfers will remember about Dye's French Lick course are the multi-mile views in all directions and the roominess of the fairways and greens that hang out over the edges of the sweeping land formations.
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2. Crooked Stick Golf Club
Carmel, IN
4.5
21 Panelists
Previous rank: 2
Crooked Stick is the course where Pete Dye became Pete Dye. Conceived following an extended tour of British courses, Pete founded Crooked Stick, located the land, raised the funds and designed the course, rejecting conventional golf holes in favor of radical ones, using bulkheads of vertical telephone poles to create abrupt change and long expanses of sand to emulate dunes. What’s more, he built it himself, pressing even his wife, Alice, and young sons, Perry and P.B., into construction work. They opened the back nine first, in 1965, with MacKenzie-style boomerang greens; the front nine came two years later, with lines and angles appropriated from Donald Ross. Crooked Stick was the first Dye course to host a major championship, the 1991 PGA Championship, just a month before the Ryder Cup visited his brand-new Ocean Course at Kiawah Island. Tom Doak finished renovation work in late 2024, but the goal was to enhance and sharpen the Dye features rather than change them, so the changes may not be noticeable.
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1. Victoria National Golf Club
Newburgh, IN
4.6
28 Panelists
Previous rank: 1
Built atop Peabody Coal Company’s long-abandoned Victoria strip mine in southern Indiana, Victoria National was a simple routing for Tom Fazio. He just followed the corridors (the perfect width for fairways) that existed between mining spoil mounds (long since overgrown with trees) and some 40 acres of fingery lagoons that had formed as steam shovels carving out coal deposits hit the water table. Chosen as Best New Private Course of 1999, Victoria National stunned most panelists. One gushed it was, “the most unusual, unpolished and unpretentious Fazio design ever.” Another called it, “probably the hardest Fazio course I’ve played. More penal than Pine Valley.” Fazio concurred with that assessment. “It’s U.S. Open-quality now,” he said soon after it opened. “If the wind blew, it’d be too hard.”
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