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Host to the U.S. Women’s Open sectional qualifier from 2009-'14, this Robert Trent Jones Sr. design is a solid test of golf along the shores of Lake Trace. A renovation in 2015, which brought significant improvements to the bunkers and putting surfaces, helped restore classic Jones features to the course.

Robert Trent Jones Sr. returned to the sandhills along Lake Trace to add a sister course, the Creek, for Carolina Trace Country Club. The rolling terrain and towering pines flanking the narrow fairways at the Creek make tee shots paramount. The semi-public facility boasts fees right around $100, making it a quality, affordable option.

One of two courses at Tullymore Golf Resort, St. Ives is a challenging layout with many forced carries into the greens. The tree-lined Jerry Matthews design features many elevation changes and raised greens.

In the current age of new elite private clubs and faraway destinatiion resorts, the opening of a public municipal-affiliated golf course in an urban area is major news—especially when Tiger Woods shows up for the grand opening, like he did in March 2023. The Park is the latest in a growing trend of public/private partnerships that have fueled the redevelopment of numerous municipal courses around the country. The new course is set on the site of the former Dick Wilson-designed West Palm Beach Golf Course, one of the first notable designs of the post-World War II years when it opened in 1947 and long considered among the top municipal courses in the country. That course closed in 2018 due to deteriorating playability and diminished interest and sat fallow for several years. Several plans for different uses of the land were proposed before a group of local citizens, led in part by Seth Waugh, CEO of the PGA of America, raised $56 million in individual donations to re-imagine the property as a community gathering space with amenities that include, in addition to golf, youth activities and educational programs, shopping and dining. Woods was one of the donors. (Note: the PGA of America is not connected to the project.) The fundraisers and City of West Palm Beach hired Hanse and Wagner to create a new 18-hole course on the property’s existing site, located just off I-95 less than two miles south of the Palm Beach International Airport. Also included in the redevelopment is a state-of-the-art practice facility, a lighted nine-hole short course and a two-acre children’s-only golf zone. Hanse and Wagner retained nothing of the Wilson course and originally envisioned using its deep, sandy terrain to craft holes that would look and play like the Sand Belt courses of Melbourne, Australia. In routing the course, however, they removed pockets of trees, palmetto and other vegetation—crucial ingredients of Sand Belt courses—that would have enhanced that effect. “There are certain parts of the golf course where you get that Sand Belt feel—I hear the comparison a lot on 11, the par 3, and No. 6, the short par 4—but as Jim and I started to go through it we discussed how we were going to differentiate this golf course from some of the other things we’d done,” Hanse says. “We started to move away from the Sand Belt look and go more toward exposed sand areas because of the scale and width that we had.” The width, exposure and sightlines that were created once the land was cleared came to define the design’s concept, specifically fairways of enormous breadth, greens that are shaped or oriented to receive shots from specific points in the fairways, and highly contoured putting surfaces. “One of the cool things Tiger said when he was here, and he’s been by a few times, was this is a ‘one-ball course’—you’re not going to lose a ball out here,” Hanse says. Read Derek Duncan's full piece here.

There is great layout variety at Blue Mash, an Arthur Hills design located about 45 minutes north of Washington, D.C., with some wide-open holes and others that are tighter and tree lined. Approach play is important at Blue Mash, as many greens are quite small and have a decent amount of undulation. Runoff areas around the greens and tall-lipped bunkers will test your short game. The course features a 9,000 square-foot practice putting green, as well as a grass driving range and short game practice area.

American Dunes opened in 2021 and is a total reinvention of an existing course. In this case, Nicklaus took a wooded, decades-old design and nearly cleansed it of trees, opening up views across a lunar surface of heaving sandscapes that separate the holes. Extreme topographical variety has replaced a succession of narrow, repetitive golf holes with circular greens, and players now face enticing tee shots that must skirt sand barrens and putting surfaces shaped in all manner of size and pitch. Created by Lt. Col. Dan Rooney, whose family owns the property, much of the course’s proceeds are donated to Folds of Honor, a charitable foundation that supports injured veterans, their families, and awards scholarships to children of wounded or killed military men and women.

Twenty-some years ago Rees Jones might have completed America’s last true oceanside links at Ocean Forest. It’s certainly one of the premier linksland settings in the country, far more authentic in its links characteristics than his Haig Point or Atlantic G.C., despite some holes in woodlands. Ocean Forest’s fairways laterally traverse several rumples of dunes, some 18 feet high, through a pine-covered delta formed where the Hampton River flows into the Atlantic. The routing skirts saltwater marsh, the river’s edge and finishes with a one-two punch on the seashore. This may be the most walkable course among all those nationally ranked, despite the fact that the 18th hole finishes a half mile from the clubhouse. Here’s an obscure piece of trivia: The day Ocean Forest opened in 1995, O.J. Simpson was acquitted of all murder charges against him. Architect Beau Welling is now working with the club and is performing a remodel of the course in 2023. Standy by to see how these changes impact Ocean Forest's state and national ranking.