Best in State
The best golf courses in Ohio
Though Ohio is most recognized in the golf world as Jack Nicklaus’ home state, its many notable parkland courses have it in the running for the best golf state in the Midwest. In fact, Nicklaus took up the game at one The Buckeye State’s best courses, Scioto Country Club, where he was mentored by club pro Jack Grout, who would become his lifelong teacher. In our latest America’s 100 Greatest and Second 100 Greatest Courses ranking, Ohio has eight courses inside the top 200, tied with Illinois for the most of any state in the Midwest.
Below you'll find our 2023-'24 ranking of the Best Golf Courses in Ohio.
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.
This is the course that Jack built, and rebuilt, and rebuilt again and again. Since its opening in 1974, Jack Nicklaus has remodeled every hole at Muirfield Village, some more than once, using play at the PGA Tour’s annual Memorial Tournament for some guidance. The most recent renovation in 2020 was one of the most extensive and included the rebuilding of every hole, the shifting of greens and tees, strategic changes to the iconic par 5s and a new, more player-friendly par3 16th. That’s how a championship course remains competitive. But with every change, Nicklaus always made sure the general membership could still play and enjoy the course as well. The latest word is that Nicklaus is still not happy with the 16th hole and has plans for yet another version.
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The Golf Club, built in 1966, may be the most authentic of Pete Dye’s transition period of design, when he first chose to buck convention and start building lay-of-the-land layouts like those he’d seen during a 1963 tour of Scotland. In doing so, Dye re-introduced deception, misdirection and railroad ties into American golf architecture. Its construction attracted the attention of local boy Jack Nicklaus, who visited several times and made some astute suggestions. That led to a five-year Dye-Nicklaus design partnership. The Golf Club remained untouched for nearly 45 years, until 2014, when Pete Dye returned to rebuild holes, modestly adjusting some of his original green contours to better match them to present-day green speeds. He also relocated the fifth green, adding a contorted putting surface more reminiscent of his later designs, an inconspicuous reminder how much his design pedilictions evolved throughout his career.
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The Henebrys
One of Seth Raynor’s last designs, it wasn’t completed until nearly a year after his 1926 death. William Jackson, who later became the club’s pro and superintendent, handled the construction and was faithful to Raynor’s diagrams with two exceptions: he turned the 16th into a par 4 and the 17th into a par 5. Robert von Hagge added flashy but incongruous bunkering in the early 1960s. They lasted over 20 years, until Tom Doak undertook a restoration in the Raynor style of geometric-shaped bunkers and greens. Curiously, the Biarritz green at the par-3 eighth has never been mowed as the 60-yard-long putting surface found on other Biarritz holes built by Raynor or his mentor C.B. Macdonald. Club officials insisted early aerial photos confirm the front half of the green was always mown at fairway height, so they continue that tradition today. Don Placek of Renaissance Golf has recently completed further renovation enhancements, including adding six acres of restored fairway to better help define the scale of the property and extending the back left section of the Road green at 17 (as well as reintroducing a second "Road" bunker beyond the first) to reclaim its original prodigious 15,000 square feet.
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Patrick Smith
Inverness is considered a classic Donald Ross design. In truth, it’s one of his best remodeling jobs. Some Ross fans were outraged when the course was radically altered by George and Tom Fazio in preparation for the 1979 U.S. Open. The uncle-nephew duo eliminated four holes (including the famous dogleg par-4 seventh), combined two holes to make the par-5 eighth and created three modern holes on newly acquired land. In 2018, golf architect Andrew Green replaced the Fazio holes with new ones more in the Ross style, relocated greens on two other holes and added new back tees everywhere.
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Evan Schiller
The Donald Ross design at Scioto was the site of three prominent tournaments—the 1926 U.S. Open, won by Bobby Jones, the 1931 Ryder Cup and the 1950 PGA Championship (Chandler Harper). That course was gone by the time the ’68 U.S. Amateur came to Scioto (Bruce Fleischer), replaced in 1963 by a modern design from Dick Wilson who delegated one nine to associate Joe Lee and the other to associate Robert von Hagge. Several other renovations by Michael Hurdzan and Jack Nicklaus, who grew up playing the course, followed in the 2000s creating yet a third iteration of the course. Enough, the club said. They hired Andrew Green in 2021 to restore the course to the full Donald Ross version based on drawings, photos and an old aerial illustration from the '26 Open. Green lowered green complexes, emboldened contours, recreated Ross’ sharp-faced bunkering and returned the small green at the par-3 17th to the near side of a creek where it originally was.
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Courtesy of Double Eagle Club
Built by reshaping flat farm fields into gentle hills and valleys, Double Eagle benefits from plenty of elbow room. Some holes have double fairways that pose genuine alternate routes. Greens are benign enough in contours to allow them to be kept extremely fast. A delightfully thoughtful design, it closes with two great water-laden, risk-rewarding holes. The club name does not symbolize a golf term. Original owner John McConnell was a fortune hunter, and the Double Eagle was a rare doubloon discovered in a sunken treasure.
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Jon Cavalier
Nipper Campbell, one of the all-time great names in golf, was a prolific golf architect in Ohio, but is mainly remembered for his design of Moraine, where he also served briefly as head pro (he was also highly involved in the expansion The Country Club in Brookline, site of the 2022 U.S. Open). As the name suggests, it was created on glacial moraine topography, which over the years had become obscured by massive tree planting. Keith Foster, soft spoken but carrying a big chainsaw, wiped out nearly all the trees to reveal all the domed hills that members had previously never noticed during play. Moraine sits right next door to NCR Country Club, which was built by Dick Wilson in the early 1950s. At the time, a Moraine assistant pro would sneak over and watch the construction progress. He finally told Wilson he’d like to get into that golf design business, so Dick hired him away. The assistant pro was Joe Lee.
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In doing golf course restoration work, golf architects have to be like ghost writers, doing the best work they can while burying their egos and desire for personal attention. Nobody does that better than Bruce Hepner, who has consistently enhanced other people’s architecture without complaint. Canterbury Golf Club had long been considered one of the greats, the site of several major championships, including the 1973 PGA Championship won by Jack Nicklaus. But when Hepner first toured the Herbert Strong design, he found it over-treed and overdue for a bunker renovation. So he rebuilt all bunkers to give them a consistent style and strategic purpose, and also addressed tree removal and forward tee expansion. “It will be a dramatic change for someone who hasn’t been there in a while,” he said when he had finished.
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The Kirtland Country Club in Willoughby is one of the best courses in Ohio. Discover our experts' reviews and where Kirtland Country Club ranks in our rankings
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Located in the historically upscale Pepper Pike section of east Cleveland, The Country Club boasts a topography that is ideal for golf with smooth elevation changes peppered with moments of abruptly shifting land that William Flynn worked into the design when he built the course in the late 1920s. Standouts include the short, uphill par-4 third with bunkers stepped up the right side and the gorgeous, long downhill eighth, but the really good stuff is on the north side of the property. The green at the par-3 11th sits atop a skyline ridge that drops off steeply on the left. Second shots at the par-4 15th must fly uphill over a ridge and phalanx of diagonal bunkers to a blind green. The par-5 16th crests over a high shoulder before trundlng downhill to a heavily bunkered green, and the short par-4 17th bends sharply left around a kettle basin tempting long players to try to cut the corner. Already a star, "Country's" stock is poised to rise further now that Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner have completed their 2022 renovation of the course that included enlarging bunkers to match the scale and topography of the property, expanding green perimeters and fairways, lowering tees, grassing the course and extending the 18th green by approximately 80 yards.
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The South Course at NCR Country Club in Kettering is one of the best courses in Ohio. Discover our experts' reviews and where NCR Country Club ranks in our rankings
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Golf design is about transforming land. Sometimes it’s a native piece of soil, and in other cases the subject is an existing course. In the late 1950s, Robert Trent Jones was hired to take a somewhat benign and toothless layout built in the 1920s for employees of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company and toughen it up for the 1960 PGA Championship, much like what he did in turning Oakland Hills South into a “monster” prior to the 1951 U.S. Open. At Firestone he added dozens of bunkers, closed off green fronts, lengthened it to over 7,000 yards and installed several new water hazards. If complaints from the pros about its difficulty was an indication, the remodel was a profound success. Over the decades the tree-lined South Course, still a demanding tournament venue, has gained the respect of the best players who appreciate its unambiguous demands and ability to identify the best ball-strikers. Now it’s accessible to the public, who can reserve rooms and rounds through new stay and play packages.
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Coldstream is one of Dick Wilson’s best courses. But like most of the work of his predecessors—Donald Ross, William Flynn, A.W. Tillinghast, et al.—much of the authenticity and nuance had been eroded and erased through time. Keith Foster’s work here in 2020, removing trees to restore the grandeur of the holes, expanding fairways and, most importantly, deepening bunkers and adjusting their edging to better reflect Wilson’s intricate shaping, is exceptional.
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Course designer Arthur Hills called The Virtues (formerly known as Longaberger) "probably as beautiful as piece a property as I've had to work with." Told to route the course to preserve as many trees as possible, Hills made the brawny Virtues course wander gracefully from ridge top to valley, testing every shot with uphill, downhill and sidehill lies. It's Hills's most natural design, and it won Golf Digest's award for Best New Upscale Public Course of 2000.
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Joey Gladner
Architect Brian Silva put an entirely new twist on this 1927 design by rebuilding and expanding greens, shifting classical-era-inspired bunkers to more consequential locations, thinning trees and adding a newly conceived par 3. The transformation pushes this club into the first tier of a competitive Columbus golf market that includes 100 Greatest mainstays like Muirfield Village, The Golf Club, Scioto and Double Eagle.
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