The best golf courses in Ohio
In our new listing of America’s 100 Greatest and Second 100 Greatest Courses, Ohio is tied with Illinois for the Midwest state with the most courses in our top 200 (eight). Five Ohio courses make our top 100, including Muirfield Village Golf Club, host of the annual Memorial Tournament on the PGA Tour, The Golf Club, Camargo Club, Inverness Club and Scioto Country Club.
Jack Nicklaus’ legacy is tied to most of these courses. Of course, he founded and built Muirfield Village and now hosts his PGA Tour signature event here. As a boy, he heard about Pete Dye building The Golf Club and visited several times, eventually forming a relationship with Dye that would lead to a design partnership. Inverness has hosted six majors in its history, with Nicklaus playing in five of them. And of course, Scioto Country Club is the childhood club of Nicklaus, where he learned the game from his longtime coach Jack Grout and perfected the fade playing away from Scioto’s right out of bounds.
Below you'll find our 2025-'26 ranking of the Best Golf Courses in Ohio.
Scroll on for the complete list of the best courses in Ohio. 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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From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:
Of the two residential courses Robert Trent Jones Jr. created around Columbus, Ohio in the early 1990s, Wedgewood Golf & Country Club in the northwest suburb of Powell has always been considered the better of the two. Nothing wrong with Jefferson Golf & Country Club, but it's the more obvious residential development course. Wedgewood is a lot more compact, a core course with homesites mostly around the perimeter and most holes separated from one another by portions of forest.
Bruce Charlton, then an associate, now a partner in the firm of Robert Trent Jones II, was the onsite architect on both jobs. He told me when I played both courses with him way back in 1992 that he and Jones were tickled to work in Columbus, home of architects Jack Nicklaus and Mike Hurdzan, among many others. "Columbus is literally a museum of great architecture," Bruce said, citing classics like Scioto, Muirfield Village and The Golf Club. Now they would be part of that museum.
Wedgewood has been ranked by Golf Digest among the Best Courses in Ohio, but it has never quite contended for a spot on the 100 Greatest. It's hard to say why; the course is certainly lovely, with bent fairways slivering through those acres of hardwood trees, and it's certainly tough, as those corridors between trees are narrow. Back in the 1990s, corridors were created to be just 40 yards wide, and over the ensuing years, growing tree canopies have made them play even tighter.
When I recently toured the course, I was reminded of how masterfully the creeks that flow across the property were used in the design. There's a creek gulley in front of the second green, with the creek piped underground at that point, but then it emerges on the dogleg-left third. That hole is considered the toughest on the course, with the creek twisting down the left side of the fairway, then cutting across short of the green to hug the right side of the putting surface.
On the par-5 sixth, another splendid golf hole, two separate streams converge about 160 yards short of the green. The resulting single stream then bisects the fairway and snakes down the right edge toward the tee, so both drives and second shots are complicated by that hazard.
Wedgewood has some of the smallest greens I've ever played on a Robert Trent Jones Jr. design, and the bunkering isn't the flowery flashed-sand style we're used to seeing on his designs. These are mostly shallow ovals that deliberately give the course an old-fashioned look, especially the three imbedded in the hillside below the green on the par-3 11th. Guarded by yet another creek ravine, it looks like it could fit in at Scioto. At least, the old Scioto before it got all geometric on us.
Diagonal oval cross-bunkers on the par-4 13th are so short off the tee that they're more gingerbread than trouble, but they do add an antiquated feel to the tee shot, from either of the two separate set of tee boxes on this hole. By the way, when I first played Wedgewood, I'm certain the 13th had only a single cross bunker; now there are three.
If there is a flaw in Wedgewood's design, it's that both nines run counterclockwise, meaning the same conditions prevail for the entire 18. If the wind is from the north, for instance (which is opposite the prevailing wind), golfers will play into it both on the par-3 eighth and par-5 ninth as well as on the par-3 17th and par-5 18th. That's a pretty mild criticism for a design that I really admire.
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Fowler's Mill is an early 1970s Pete Dye design east of Cleveland. It was originally built as an amenity for the employees of TRW Corporation (and called the TRW Course), an aerospace, automotive and electronics company. The three nines are set amid a peaceful, bucolic section of undisturbed nature with holes that crisscross the Chagrin River and skirt the edge of a lake. At its best the design evokes elements of Dye’s best early at places like Crooked Stick and The Golf Club, but the architecture is overall restrained and playable. The course opened to the public when it was sold in the 1980s and remains one of the best affordable public access courses in Ohio.
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Gary W. Kellner/Courtesy of the club
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In 2018, architect Mike Hurdzan and son Chris were given a huge, multi-year commission to remodel all 36 holes at Westfield Country Club, originally built in the 1970s by Geoffrey Cornish. They began with the South Course, a pleasant parkland design that flows to and fro through chains of ponds and small clusters of hardwoods. Compared to the North course that was transformed into a mostly treeless, meadow-style design, the work on the South was more to open up the views across the property and polish the architecture, though significant restructuring was done on the second nine by moving greens and breaking up holes. The North barely outpointed the South in the Ohio ranking.
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Gary W. Kellner/Courtesy of the club
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Gary W. Kellner/Courtesy of the club
Previous rank: NR
Westfield Country Club recently conducted back-to-back renovations on its South Course, followed by the North Course. Both were substantial transformations that included new holes and alternative routings, but while the South retained a more traditional parkland presentation, the North was radically changed from a cousin to the South into a prairie-style course infused with pot bunkers, fescue roughs and other Scottish-themed elements, though the playing surfaces are bluegrass. While less epic in scale and ambition, the new North Course recalls elements of the work Mike Hurdzan did at The Paintbrush (formerly Devil’s Paintbrush) in Ontario in the early 1990s with former partner Dana Fry. This time around, he had a different partner—his son Chris.
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Maketewah has developed a reputation as one of Cincinnati’s best player-clubs, boasting a membership of some of the best amateur golfers in Ohio. The course is also remarkable for the heavily jiggered topography. The clubhouse, ninth and 18th greens reside on an elevation at the center of the course, falling down into valleys that crisscross the property at different angles. Original architect Tom Bendelow’s 1910 routing is inspired by the way it traverses and plunges through the ravines toward high greens, and a 1929 Donald Ross renovation brought the bunkering and short game concepts into strategic focus. Even though Maketewah had been altered over the decades, it had never been considered one of Ross’s major works. That assessment must be reconsidered following Brian Silva’s 2022 remodel that reestablished the need for tactical play through the introduction of gorgeous Golden Age-style bunkers that cut into fairways and flank greens. The bunkering adds to the visual charm of standout holes like the long fifth, uphill par 4 16th and the trap-door fairway 17th. Silva also moved the location of the 10th green and restyled the 11th into a short par 4 with posing different lines of attack, including the option of going for the peekaboo green tucked behind bunkers and a kicker mound.
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The Golf Club At Stonelick Hills is one of the best golf courses in Ohio. Discover our experts' reviews and course information.
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Joey Gladner
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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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Springfield Country Club is one of the best courses in Ohio. Discover our experts’ reviews and where Spring Country Club sits in our rankings.
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The North course at Firestone Country Club in Akron is one of the best courses in Ohio. Discover our experts' reviews and where Firestone ranks in our rankings
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TPC River's Bend is one of the best golf courses in Ohio. Check out our experts' reviews and course information.
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The Championship Course at Columbus Country Club is one of the best courses in Ohio. Discover our experts' reviews and where Columbus Country Club ranks in our rankings
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Augusta National and Cypress Point architect Alister MacKenzie originally designed Ohio State’s Scarlet course in 1931, but he died in 1934 before construction began. After his death, Perry Maxwell oversaw the construction, though the course is still considered a MacKenzie layout. Jack Nicklaus returned to his collegiate course in 2005-2006 to restore the bunkers and lengthen the course to over 7,400 yards. The bunkers are some of the most penal in college golf, many massive in size and most with tall lips, often requiring high-lofted clubs to get back in play. The greens often play quite firm, making it difficult to hold approach shots close to some hole locations. The Ohio track regularly plays as one of the toughest courses on the Korn Ferry Tour when it hosts an annual event during the tour’s finals series. The course is semi-private and open to those who have an affiliation with Ohio State University.
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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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Previous rank: 15
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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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 were 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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Gary Kellner
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Mayfield Sand Ridge Golf Club in Chardon is one of the best courses in Ohio. Discover our experts' reviews and where Sand Ridge ranks in our rankings
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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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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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Andy Johnson/The Fried Egg
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Andy Johnson/The Fried Egg
Previous rank: 11
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 seventh, but the really good stuff is on the northwest 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 a phalanx of diagonal bunkers to a blind green. The par-5 16th crests over a high shoulder before trundling 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, re-grassing the course and extending the 18th green by approximately 80 yards.
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Courtesy of Brookside Country Club
Previous rank: 9
Brookside Country Club was designed by Donald Ross in 1922 and is among the top-ranked courses in Ohio. Except for some well-placed fairway bunkers, Brookside is forgiving off the tee but is quite challenging around the greens, which are bold and exceptionally undulating. Given the difficulty of the greens, it is helpful to play each hole backwards when strategizing off the tee, as staying on the proper side of tricky pins is essential to scoring.
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Evan Schiller/Courtesy of the club
Previous rank: 8
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. The club continues to understand the wisdom of fine-tuning rather than revamping classical architecture and now works with Keith Rhebb and Riley Johns, two talented associates of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, who have assumed the role of Canterbury caretakers by continuing to selectively address tree issues and other restorative detailing.
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David J Youngdahl
Previous rank: 7
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 of The Country Club in Brookline, site of the 2022 U.S. Open). As the name suggests, Moraine Country Club 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 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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Courtesy of Double Eagle Club
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Courtesy of Double Eagle Club
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Courtesy of Double Eagle Club
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Courtesy of Double Eagle Club
Previous rank: 6
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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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. That course was gone by the time the ’68 U.S. Amateur came to Scioto, 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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Patrick Smith
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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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The Henebrys
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John and Jeannine Henebry
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One of Seth Raynor’s last designs, Camargo Club 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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Courtesy of The Golf Club
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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 reintroduced 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 Pete Dye returned in 2014 to rebuild holes, modestly adjusting some of his original green contours to better match present-day green speeds. He also relocated the fifth green, adding a contorted putting surface more reminiscent of his later designs, an inconspicuous reminder of how much his design predilections evolved throughout his career.
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Courtesy of the club/Jim Mandeville
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Courtesy of Jim Mandeville
Previous rank: 1
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 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 par-3 16th, though that hole, too, has been tweaked since. 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.
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