Best in State
The best golf courses in South Carolina
The majority of South Carolina's ranked courses are spread throughout the cities and resort destinations along the Atlantic Ocean seaboard. That makes sense as this region—the southern half in the original Lowcountry around Charleston, Kiawah Island and Hilton Head, and north into the communities around Myrtle Beach—has some of the most distinctive ecosystems in the U.S., characterized by the constant mingling of land and wetlands and marshes, occasional ocean exposures and haunting forests of moss-draped live oaks. Elsewhere, Greenville Country Club in the central part of the state places both its courses in this year's ranking, and the brilliant Palmetto and the exclusive Tom Fazio-designed Sage Valley lead the way near Aiken, across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. And Quixote Club, a new Kris Spense/Jack Nicklaus II design outside of Columbia debuts at no. 19.
The prediction here is that this list will be upended in the coming years. South Carolina is currently a hotbed of new development with at least six courses under construction or in planning. The Tree Farm and Old Barnwell, just outside of Aiken, will open to member play in late 2023 or early 2024. New courses are also on the board for the Columbus area, near Charleston, and at Kiawah Island and outside Hilton Head. Stay tuned.
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.
From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten: In the mid-1980s, I was researching a Golf Digest article on reversible golf courses, and one of the people I called was real estate developer Wallace Pate, who had laid out a reversible 10-hole course for his beach home development at DeBordieu Colony Club (pronounced "debby doo") in Georgetown, S.C., south of Myrtle Beach.
"You've called too late," Pate told me. He had sold the course the year before, and Pete Dye was at that moment in the midst of replacing it with a conventional 18-hole course to be called DeBordieu Golf Club.
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