best in state
The best golf courses in Massachusetts
The two states that Donald Ross colored the most deeply with his architecture, and particularly with top-ranked courses, are North Carolina and Massachusetts. In the latter he is the architect for over one-third of the list, including three in the top 10: Essex County Club and Salem, both north of Boston, and Worcester.
The majority of ranked courses overall are located in the eastern half of the state around Boston, on the cape, and on Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner are the architects of record for three ranked courses, Boston Golf Club, TPC Boston and Vineyard Golf Club (they're the consulting architects at six others), Brian Silva has designed two (GreatHorse and Cape Cod National) and Rees Jones also has two (Sacconnesset and Nantucket).
Below you'll find our 2023-'24 ranking of the Best Golf Courses in Massachusetts.
We urge you to click through to each individual course page for bonus photography, drone footage and reviews from our course panelists. Plus, you can now leave your own ratings on the courses you’ve played … to make your case why your favorite should be ranked higher.
(Parentheses indicate the course's previous ranking.)
The Country Club’s 18-hole course that was the scene of the 1963 and 1988 U.S. Opens is not the 18-hole course ranked by Golf Digest. Those events were played on a composite course, utilizing a few holes from the club’s third Primrose nine. We rank the combination of the Main Course, clearly good enough to be one of the top courses in the world. Gil Hanse performed some course restoration prior to the 2013 U.S. Amateur at The Country Club. The USGA used a new configuration of 18 holes for the 2022 U.S. Open, won by Matthew Fitzpatrick, eliminating the par-4 fourth and adding the tiny par 3 11th, the first time the hole was used since the 1913 Open won by Francis Ouimet.
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Few realize Myopia Hunt Club, a funky, quirky lark where greens look like bathmats and bunkers look like bathtubs, hosted four U.S. Open championships by 1908 (two of them when the club had only nine holes). Although the Open hasn’t been back in over 110 years, Myopia has always retained a reputation of being a tough little rascal, with tiny greens, deep bunkers and several cross-hazards. Thanks to a Gil Hanse restoration, Myopia looks like it did in its U.S. Open heyday, but with much better turf conditions now.
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Old Sandwich Golf Club may be the craftiest Coore-Crenshaw design yet built. Amidst its pines, scrub oaks, gnarly bunkers, chocolate drop mounds, wavy fescue and briar bushes are hints of Baltusrol, National Golf Links, Pine Valley, Pinehurst No 2 and Chicago Golf Club in its cross-bunkering, hazard placement and sandy waste areas. The greens are some of the most rolling of any Coore & Crenshaw design, seeded with a half-dozen bent varieties to give them an old-fashioned mottled appearance. Nobody does old-fashioned better than Coore & Crenshaw.
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Essex County Club is considered the first great Donald Ross design and perhaps his most intriguing. He wasn’t the original architect, but he served as its professional from 1909 to 1913 (until his design business became so lucrative he no longer needed the pro job) and lived on site, so he was able to tweak many holes. Ultimately, he returned to do a substantial remodeling in 1917. Unusual holes are the order of the day, from the flat opening nine with fuzzy chocolate drops covered in tall fescue grasses to the blind shots, both uphill and downhill, on the back nine. The par-3 11th, with its green resembling the deck of a sinking ship, and the downhill par-4 18th, shaped like an S around small hills, are special. The club insists its third green, created in 1893 and preserved by Ross in his remodel, is the oldest green in continuous existence in America.
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Only recently, with the discovery of some original blueprints, has it been conclusively established that the ocean-side, links-like Kittansett, long thought to be the product of an amateur architect, Frederic Hood, was actually the work of well-known course architect William Flynn, who also designed Shinnecock and Cherry Hills. Credit that revelation to authors Wayne S. Morrison and Thomas E. Paul, who reveal that and much more in their massive 2,260-page biography of Flynn entitled The Nature Faker: William S. Flynn, Golf Architect. Credit Gil Hanse with restoring the bunkers without the aid of those Flynn plans. Instead, he used old aerial photographs.
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Boston Golf Club, in the south suburb of Hingham, is a modern-day Pine Valley, massaged by architect Gil Hanse and his team from dramatic coastal topography with gashes of unsullied sand. Fairways tumble across the landscape, posing some blind shots that are embraced, not criticized. One stretch surrounds an old strip mine, with mining spoils incorporated as chocolate-drop mounds. One vein of sand serves as a “Hell’s One-Third Acre” hazard. Like No. 64 Garden City Golf Club, Boston finishes with a terrific par 3.
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Herbert Fowler's most engaging 18-hole design out on Cape Cod. Routed on an isthmus in the Atlantic, with each nine looping out and back along the ocean’s edge, the course’s rugged topography was splendidly used to pose challenges in stance, lie and depth perception. It’s now golf’s equivalent of a spine-tingling, neck-twisting roller coaster ride along a waterfront. If you come upon a flat lie at Eastward Ho!, it’s likely a tee box.
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Some of America’s greatest golf courses were designed by first-time novices and non-architects: Merion, Oakmont, Pine Valley and Pebble Beach all fall into this category. Sankaty Head on the eastern edge of Nantucket Island does too. It was built by a local amateur player named Emerson Armstrong but judging by the circuitous routing and attractive bunkering (honed in recent years by Jim Urbina) that recalls some of Donald Ross’s best work, you’d be excused for assuming he’d done this dozens of times. The roomy holes unfurl across open fields of fescue, riding the site’s swales and ridges like an English links. True to the inspiration the greens are open in front to receive running shots played under the exacting Atlantic winds, and the collection of par 3s are about as tough and beautiful as it gets.
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Salem was a mainstay on the Golf Digest ranking of America’s 100 Greatest Courses since the list’s inception in 1966, until falling off in 2005. Hoping to jolt the venerable Donald Ross-designed course into relevance, the club hired Eric Iverson to engage in a major, $3.5 million restoration of Ross’s bunkers that also included adjusting and adding tees, redefining fairway lines, increasing hole flexibility on the putting surfaces and taking down several hundred trees that had been choking many of the holes.
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Gil Hanse's team completed renovation on the 12th and 13th holes at TPC Boston in 2017, completing a 10-plus-year project in which Hanse's team attempted to reestablish a New England-type style to the course. The course, which sits about 45 minutes from downtown Boston, was the longtime host of a FedEx Cup Playoff event on the PGA Tour.
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According to Ted Kennedy Jr., Hyannisport Club’s golf course was what convinced his grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy, to establish his family’s summer getaway in the seaside town on the southern tip of Cape Cod. Less than a mile away from the Kennedy Compound, the course was originally designed by Alex Findlay and later redesigned by Donald Ross in 1936. Hyannisport has been the home course of the Kennedys, including President John F. Kennedy, who was photographed playing the course during his presidency. Tipping out at under 6,300 yards, Hyannisport is quite short by modern standards, but the coastal breeze can play a significant factor. Many holes play along the marshlands on the Nantucket Sound, presenting both scenic and strategic value. The club maintains a small membership by invite only, but if you’re fortunate enough to get a tee time, enjoy the charming stroll around JFK’s summer escape.
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Taconic dates back to 1896 and is the home course of the Williams College men’s and women’s golf teams. Routinely ranked inside the top 15 on our Best in State rankings, Taconic, located in a quiet village in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, closer to Albany than Boston, is a challenging parkland layout with beautiful views of the surrounding mountains. It was designed and built in the 1920s by the architecture team of Wayne Stiles and John Van Kleek with undisturbed holes that fan out across a wooded property. The western Massachusetts gem has hosted three different USGA championships: the 1956 U.S. Junior Amateur, 1963 U.S. Women’s Amateur and 1996 U.S. Senior Amateur. Gil Hanse has been making restorative modifications here since 2008.
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The semi-private, 27-hole facility is truly a part of the fabric of the city. As part of the 15-year, $24 billion road infrastructure project, nearly 900,000 truckloads of excavated dirt were deposited here. That afforded architect John Sanford the ability to use the 13 million tons of material to cap the site and mold some dramatic topography with the soil. With land sitting as high as 298 feet above sea level, the Milton, Quincy and Granite nines offer terrific views of downtown with impeccable conditions. The practice facilities are top-notch, and the tavern at Granite Links was named as one of Golf Digest’s best 19th holes.
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