Best golf courses near Maple Grove, MN

A quality public track just west of the Twin Cities, Rush Creek has plenty of design variety, with elevation changes, deep bunkers and well-placed hazards creating a challenging yet enjoyable round. The scenic layout hosted an LPGA Tour event in the late 1990s and was the site of Ryan Moore’s second U.S. Amateur Public Links title in 2004.

When Bobby Jones won the 1930 U.S. Open at Interlachen (completing the second leg of what would become the game’s first Grand Slam), fellow competitor Gene Sarazen insisted the course was tougher than everything but Oakmont. In the decades that followed a series of architects including Robert Trent Jones, Geoffrey Cornish and Brian Silva worked to keep Interlachen’s edge, but nothing could staunch the march of time that made the course one-dimensional through the shrinkage of greens and the maturation of the hundreds of trees that had been planted, shading fairways and masking the property’s natural land movements. Enter Andrew Green in 2023, who was given the resources to strip back the layers and rebuild the course based on the blueprints Donald Ross developed in 1922 when he remodeled the course. Interlachen’s edginess is back, with ominous, strategically arranged bunkers guarding greens and fairway lines, and the expanded putting surfaces presenting a range of come-and-get-me hole locations that haven’t been seen in ages. The restored bunkering shines a spotlight on Interlachen’s wondrous undulation, punctuating focal points like the shared promontory of the second and seventh greens and the majestic rise toward the fortress putting surface of the par-5 12th.

While Tom Fazio is best known for creating massive landscapes for his designs, Spring Hill required little manipulation of earth. Fazio utilized the existing rolling topography to form what is one of his most natural designs. Holes are isolated from one another by thick forests of evergreens and, in one section of the property, acres of maple trees that provide a brilliant color display each fall. With several tight fairways, marshland along some edges, many uphill approach shots into elevated greens and subtle movements in the putting surfaces, Spring Hill is also one of Fazio’s most challenging designs.

University of Minnesota’s Les Bolstad Golf Course plays tougher than you might expect from a course that’s just 6,300 yards from the tips, as its narrow fairways and small greens require accuracy. The course, host of the 1958 U.S. Junior Amateur, offers weekday rates under $40.

Midland Hills always suspected their course was designed by Seth Raynor in the early 1920s, but they had no records of what that course looked like. They could intuit what some of Raynor's original holes were, but the overall architecture had dulled and shrunk over the years. That changed in 2018 when superintendent Mike Manthey discovered a 1921 irrigation map hidden above the ceiling in his office. The drawing showed Raynor's vision for the course, including individual holes and bunkers, a roadmap that designer Jim Urbina used to recreate and sharpen the old templates like the Biarritz, Road and Eden. The improvements have helped vault the course into the Best in State rankings for the first time.

The original 18 at Windsong Farm west of Minneapolis, designed by John Fought and Tom Lehman in 2003 and now called the South Course, is a big, demanding players’ course that stretches over 7,500 yards. The club brought Fought back to the site in 2023 to build a second course, the North, but with a different mandate: make it unique. Fought channeled Seth Raynor for architectural inspiration to create a crafty, fun 6,500-yard layout the jazzes up an ordinary plot of agricultural land. The design gives us recognizable versions of holes like the Eden, Biarritz, Bottle and Cape, but they’re mixed with imaginative strategic looks like the 306-yard ninth with a string of echelon bunkers short of the green and several holes that call for approaches over wetland canals that are just long enough to force players into uncomfortable decision-making mode.

For most of its history, Golden Valley has been in a state of flux. Tom Bendelow designed the club’s first course before A.W. Tillinghast was hired in the 1920s to construct a new course. A number of his bunkers were removed in the 1930s to reduce maintenance costs (Tillinghast, by this time, was traveling the country on behalf of the PGA of America, advising clubs on ways to cut costs during tight economic times), and others were tinkered with and modified in one way or another. A series of mid-century renovations took the design further from the one Tillinghast put in the ground, but recent work, first by Ron Forse and, in 2023, by Kevin Norby, has gradually restored much of the architect’s ideology. Greens have been expanded to add new hole locations, trees have been thinned and Tillie’s lost bunkers have returned with their shapes redefined. This is a classic parkland expression of golf on a graceful property that demands drives be placed in the fairway and approach shots left below the hole.

Something was in the air in Minneapolis and St. Paul in the 1920s. Call it an esprit de refaire (French for “repair”). Many of the prominent clubs in the market looked at their existing golf courses and thought, “we can do better.” The Twin Cities were an incubator for the first major movement of golf course reformation as courses laid out just years before by designers like Tom Bendelow, William Watson and Willie Park, Jr., were redesigned, most of them by Donald Ross. Interlachen (No. 1), White Bear Yacht Club (No. 4), The Club at Golden Valley (No. 15), Minneapolis G.C. and others. The Minikahda Club also falls into this category. Robert Foulis designed the original nine, and Watson was involved in some capacity, too. Then the club hired Donald Ross to completely revamp the course after Chick Evans dismantled the old design in the 1916 U.S. Open, shooting a then-record 286 using just seven clubs. Many more renovations ensued, but the club has perhaps settled on a lasting version after the work of Kyle Franz, who continued a program of thinning overgrowth, widening fairways and recreating bunker shapes and arrangements reminiscent of the club’s 1920s heyday.

In 1920, Donald Ross was invited to remodel this 1916 Willie Park Jr. design. For some unknown reason, Ross did not include Minneapolis GC in his resume. His work here wasn’t insignificant: Ross moved the clubhouse and reconfigured the routing, making it mostly his own, and the course was deemed strong enough to host the 1959 PGA Championship, won by Bob Rosburg. A recent renovation by Jeff Mingay altered the bunkering and recaptured many original green contours. It is well known in the Twin Cities as the “Player’s Club” because of the number of single-digit handicappers.

As if destined to be a golf course, TPC Twin Cities was built on the site of a former sod farm. The Arnold Palmer design 15 miles north of Minneapolis/St. Paul has hosted the PGA Tour’s 3M Open since 2019. A past member of our Best in Minnesota list, TPC Twin Cities plays among native prairie grasses and includes 27 bodies of water, notably at the par-5 18th, where a large lake guards the right side of the fairway and the front of the green.

Town & Country Club in St. Paul is one of the best courses in Minnesota. Discover our experts’ reviews and where Town & Country Club sits in our rankings.

John Fought and Minnesota native Tom Lehman were given 243 acres of rolling pastureland 25 miles west of Minneapolis to build Windsong Farm’s South Course. Opened in 2003, this golfers' club is designed to test the best players with a big ballpark of a course tipping out at 7,380 yards. Originally, the fescue-lined playing corridors were relatively tight. Fought returned and widened the fairways, which opened up different lines to drive and better angles into the greens. The collection areas around the greens allow for varying kinds of recovery shots back to the large, moderately sloping greens. While it is still a challenging golf course, it is very playable and a walker's paradise. The course’s second 18, the North, also designed by Fought, opened in the summer of 2024.

Braemar is a player-friendly public track just south of Minneapolis that offers wide, forgiving fairways. One of our panelists notes that the two nines play quite different, with the most compelling holes on the back side. In 1979, Braemar hosted the third edition of the since-discontinued U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links.

Wayzata Country Club is one of the best courses in Minnesota. Discover our experts’ reviews and where Wayzata Country Club sits in our rankings.

Meadowbrook is a Minneapolis municipal located just west of the city. Originally built in the 1920s and renovated in the mid-1990s, the course plays over rolling hills with tree-lined fairways and a winding Minnehaha Creek that comes into play on a couple of holes. The course, which is an Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary, hosted the 1947 U.S. Amateur Public Links.

Just north of downtown Minneapolis, Edinburgh USA is a Robert Trent Jones Jr. design that hosted an LPGA Tour event from 1990-1996. An aerial game is required at this muny, as numerous lakes and bunkers guarding the front of greens often take away the option of running the ball up. The course, which hosted the 1992 U.S. Amateur Public Links, features a massive double green shared by the ninth and 18th holes.