The best golf courses in Nebraska

Located on Santee Sioux Nation land, just a few miles from the South Dakota and Nebraska border, is Tatanka Golf Club at Red Feather Hill. The course originally opened in 2015 and was designed by the team of Paul Albanese and Chris Lutzke in close partnership with the Santee Sioux Nation. While working on the project, the designers were educated about the local Native American culture, specifically developing and understanding the need to reflect an intense bond with the natural environment. This is reflected in fairways and greens that appear to naturally tumble over the sandhill-esque landscape, once with intense vegetation and thickets of old trees, sometimes giving sight to Tatanka, the Dakota word for buffalo.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:
 

Quarry Oaks Golf Club lists its address as Ashland, Neb., but in truth it's closer to the little town of South Bend, named for the big turn of the Platte River as it makes its way east to the Missouri River. The Platte bends south because it butts up against limestone bluffs. The river has deposited a lot of sand here, which has been mined for generations, along with the limestone. Towns like Ashland were established around sand and gravel pits and cement and lime factories. This is the river whose banks I explored as a kid. I also explored it once as an adult, back in 1989, when my friend Dick Youngscap, who had established Firethorn Golf Club in Lincoln a few years earlier, invited me to join him to scout out a possible new course location.


Dick had been following the progress of the then-proposed Mahoney State Park, midway between Omaha and Lincoln, right off I-70. He knew the state was planning to build an interstate exit there, so he figured he'd bring in Pete Dye (who'd done Firethorn) and have him build a boffo public course easily accessible to tourists. The land we looked at was an old limestone quarry-turned-cattle farm owned by the Abel family, George, Betty and their son, Jim. Dick and I wandered around the high pastures along the south edge, then moved north into good-sized hills covered in oaks. We stopped abruptly on cliffs some 70 feet above the Platte River Valley, a marvelous view, then trudged down rugged bluffs, up a couple of narrow draws (the perfect width for golf holes) and back down again.


We came upon a chasm that had slumped down to the river (a possible dramatic par 3) and toward the end of the day, we found a secluded mine pit nearly encircled by vertical cliffs, with a small pond in the middle. I was especially captivated with this quarry, envisioning it as a finishing hole, with a clubhouse on the rim. Youngscap wasn't sure the quarry was big enough for anything but a par 3. On the ride back to Lincoln, Dick asked me what I thought. Interesting site, I told him, and great location, but if it were me, I'd buy some land out in the sand hills of central Nebraska and build an authentic links. "The sand hills?" Dick said. "Who the hell would go out to the sand hills to play golf?"


A few years later, Youngscap attended the wedding of a niece out in the sand hills and called me that night. "You weren't kidding," he said. "There are golf holes out here everywhere you look." He soon bought some land, hired Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, and the rest, goes the cliche, is history. Meanwhile, the Abel family liked the idea of a golf course on their land and in 1995 hired John LaFoy of South Carolina to design them a public course on the very piece of property that Dick and I had scouted.

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Lauded for its environmental sensitivity, ArborLinks was built in open plains, but this being the hometown of Arbor Day, some trees have been selectively planted for strategic and sustainable reasons. ArborLinks is ranked No. 13 on our Best Courses in Nebraska list.

Not as pure a Nebraska sandhills experience as sister Dunes Course, the Pines Course has just 11 holes playing in the tumbling prairie topography. It repeatedly touches the edge of a deep canyon formed by the Snake River. Those seven holes (6 & 7, 10 & 11 and 16 through 18) are lined with tall pines and cedars and bring to mind a collection of holes in the Colorado Rockies. For pure golfing variety, Prairie Club rivals even Bandon Dunes.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:
 

Dan Proctor and Dave Axland have been quasi-legends in the business of golf course construction for over 30 years now, individually and collectively. They've worked on many of Coore & Crenshaw’s prominent designs, including Sand Hills (Nebraska's premier layout, in the center of the state's vast sand hills) and Cabot Cliffs (Canada's premier layout these days). They even rated cameo appearances in Geoff Shackleford’s 1998 novel, The Good Doctor Returns. And they were also a talented course design team in their spare time, routing and building quality low-budget courses in the Coore & Crenshaw style.
 

Their most prominent collaboration is Wild Horse in central Nebraska, a public “little brother” to Sand Hills, in slightly softer but still authentic sand hills, closer to civilization. Like at Sand Hills, Wild Horse is lay-of-the-land architecture routed without benefit of topographic maps, with natural-looking bunkers, native grass roughs and pitch-and-run shots galore. Total earth moved: 5,000 cubic yards. Total construction costs: a little less than $1 million.
 

In my opinion, it's the best low-cost golf course in the nation. I admit I'm showing provincialism here. I was born and raised in Nebraska, and I'm partial to her natural treasures, of which Wild Horse is certainly one. There are many other fine public courses in the Midwest that are even less expensive to play than this one, but none, I will argue, will give you quite as genuine a prairie links experience as Wild Horse. 


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Located in Lincoln, Firethorn is the only course in Nebraska designed by the late Pete Dye. Built in the 1980s, it's the home course for the University of Nebraska's golf teams and offers a number of vintage Dye architectural touches, including deep pot bunkers, several par-3 greens angled against water hazards, and an Alps-like short par-4 with a green completely hidden behind a mound. Those who haven't played the course before usually have no idea where it is.

Dismal River, named for the eponymous body of water that flows through the rural Nebraska site, was created in the early 2000s as a slightly more upscale alternative to Sand Hills, at least amenity-wise. Located just a few miles from its inspiration, a course perennially ranked among the top ten on America's 100 Greatest Courses, Dismal River struggled to live up to its lofty goals and has changed ownership and operators several times. The White Course (a second course, the Red, was added in 2013) rolls across landforms similar to Sand Hills but are often more extreme and abrupt. When Jack Nicklaus was guiding his team through construction, he never went to examine what made the neighbor course so admired, and parts of the White lack the grace and naturalness of Sand Hills. The ground could have benefitted from a little more cutting and shaping, and in fact work was later done to soften and modify several holes. That's not to say there aren't stretches of great golf and powerfully emontional moments looking across the endless horisons of heaving grass dunes. The par-5 fourth plowing through a low valley adjacent to a broad sand blow out stands apart, as does the dogleg left seventh that climbs toward a natural greensite. Big hitters can try to drive the blind green over the top of a dune at the par-4 eighth, and the 11th, 14th and 15th all have turbulent greens partially hidden by bunkers and sand hill brows.

Opened in 1899, Omaha Country Club is one of the oldest clubs in the Midwest. The course has some incredibly undulating topography that captivates the golfer with a great mix of uphill and downhill holes. Despite being situated in a flat part of the country, Omaha’s elevation changes separate it from its peers. In addition, the green complexes are severely contoured, with some pin positions allowing for scoring opportunities and others adding to the resistance to scoring.

The Dunes Course, as the name implies, flows through a rumpled blanket landscape of the rugged, treeless, windswept sand hills of central Nebraska. Most fairways are generously broad, most greens are perched, tucked or otherwise half-hidden to reward only shots correctly placed at certain angles. The most fascinating hole comes early, the par-4 second with out-of-bounds indicated by a barbed-wire fence hard along the right from tee to green, but other holes like the par-4 eighth with a notch in a dune that gives players a peek-a-boo look at the green as they approach and the multi-option sixth and 13th are just as entertaining.

In adding a companion 18 to the Jack Nicklaus-designed White Course at Dismal River, Tom Doak created as organic and amorphous a design as anyone is liable to do in the U.S., simply following the flow of the land and locating greens with breathtaking backdrops. Doak walked the site several times before routing it, utilizing the existing folds of the land for his holes. His associate Brian Slawnik then mowed out the proposed fairways, which spread across the landscape into wide splotches, even flowing into adjacent fairways. Then Doak personally hand-shaped the greens. All but four of the putting surfaces took less than an hour apiece to transform from raw land to seedbed. There are no formal tee boxes, just broad, freeform pads with a couple of yardage posts. One gets the feeling that you could play the Red Course backwards to equal delight.

Architect David McLay Kidd has seen both ends of the golf site spectrum, from the incomparable ocean setting of the original Bandon Dunes course and the pine dunes of Sand Valley, all the way to lifeless land like the potato farm he inherited for St. Andrews' Castle Course in his native Scotland. He’s not likely to get a better one than GrayBull, the course he built for the Dormie Network in the sand hills of Nebraska. Located about 30 minutes northeast of North Platte, a few miles north of I-80, the 1,800-acre site provided the potential for dozens if not hundreds of golf holes, though the owners instructed Kidd to just build 18 of them and not to worry about leaving room for a second 18—or nine, or a short course—at a future date. Thus, the routing takes the long road around the site, moving in a big clockwise flow with gentle cascading movements and only a few switchbacks. There was a section of steeper dunes in the center of the property that were attractive, but they were essentially too severe, and Kidd couldn’t find a way to get in and out of them without having to make big cuts to the land, something you shouldn’t have to do in the sand hills. The fairways are larger than they appear but are obscured by angles around the dunes and elevated bunkers, and the greens are a continuing evolution of those at Gamble Sands and Mammoth Dunes, getting progressively more contoured at each course. The strengths of the design are the par 4s presented in a rich variety of lengths and orientations (the drivable fifth and 16th—in certain winds—are standouts, as is the 13th where the fairway kicks drives left into a hollow unless they challenge a large bunker on the right), adding up to a stellar addition to the sand hills, one of the world's vastest and most interesting of golf landscapes.

Building Lost Rail, just southwest of Omaha, was something of a homecoming for Scottsdale-based architect Scott Hoffman, who grew up in the city and went to school at Creighton. The key to the design, named after an abandoned trainline that ran through the northeast corner of the property, was decoding the routing for this relatively small parcel of land, around 150 acres, or just large enough for 18 holes, a practice facility, clubhouse, parking and maintenance. The matter was complicated by the deep, wooded ravines that cut through the site and further limited the areas where holes could be placed. It was an exercise perfectly suited to Hoffman’s skills, who specialized in laying out the holes on numerous Tom Fazio projects across the western U.S. throughout the early 2000s. The ravines serve as both strategic and penal hazards, flanking and bisecting holes and creating dramatic, intimidating scenery.

From Golf Digest Architecture Editor Derek Duncan:

Actor Nick Cage once ate a live cockroach for a film he was shooting. Later, when asked why—he could have eaten a pretend insect—he responded, “Anything less wouldn’t be real.” The conceit is that at times the only way to fulfill the potential of a given situation—a movie scene, a piece of art, a military offensive—is to push as far and aggressively as possible.
 

This principle applies to Landmand, a new design in northeastern Nebraska about 10 miles from Sioux City, Iowa. The course sits on a vast, elevated section of loess formations with eroded furrows and valleys. It winds across the bluffs and between valleys, and from the tops of the ridges horizon views of 20 miles or more are possible, filling the landscape with a feeling of unlimited proportion.
 

Given the setting, it’s impossible to discern the scale of the features in the near and middle distance, and the only way for architects Rob Collins and Tad King to make the golf look like it fit against the endless backdrops was to construct fairways 80 to 100 yards wide and greens that are, cumulatively and in some cases individually, the largest in the United States.

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The original owner of this property in north-central Nebraska first contacted Gil Hanse to design the course in the early 2000s. It took nearly 20 years—and different ownership—to complete the task, but the wait was worth it. Opened in 2021, the members-only CapRock Ranch is an invigorating addition to the golf wonderland that is the vast Nebraska Sandhills, where architects strive to do as little as possible. Much of the course explores the gentle, grass-covered dunesland, and the other—eight holes, to be exact—frolic along and over the pine-forest rim of the Snake River Canyon, dropping several hundred feet to the bottom. Scoring in both splash and sublimity, CapRock is uncommonly diverse and picturesque, a meeting of melodic minimalism and dopamine rush.

The golf course wasn’t so much designed as discovered. Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw trudged back and forth over a thousand acres of rolling sand hills in central Nebraska, flagging out naturally occurring fairways and greens. By moving just 4,000 cubic yards of earth and letting the winds shape the bunkers, the duo created what is undoubtedly the most natural golf course in America—a timeless course design. For decades, winter winds had always reshaped the bunkers, but course officials have recently discovered a method to prevent that. At the close of the season, they spray the surface of the sand in bunkers with a product that creates a crust to resist the howling winds.