# The Aberdeen Golf Guide

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/aberdeen-sd-golf-guide/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Guides / South Dakota


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Aberdeen, in northeast South Dakota, is not a golf trip town and this guide will not pretend otherwise. It is a prairie city with two courses that matter locally, and the honest way to write about golf here is the way Aberdeen golfers actually live it: one private club with a real architectural name attached, and one municipal course in a park, priced for the public, that has been open since 1933. Two courses, two doors into the game, and between them a small city covered. Plenty of bigger towns do worse.

## Where the golf concentrates

Moccasin Creek Country Club is the private anchor. The hook on Moccasin Creek is Joel Goldstrand prairie golf, and that pairing of architect and landscape is the story. Prairie golf is golf without shelter: open ground, wind as a playing partner rather than a weather event, and design that has to create interest with contour and angle because the land will not provide trees and elevation to hide behind. A Goldstrand course on the northern plains asks you to flight the ball, to take the ground game seriously, and to accept that a calm morning round and a windy afternoon round are two different examinations on the same fairways.

Lee Park Golf Course is the other half, and in daily Aberdeen life it is probably the bigger half. It is the city course in the park of the same name, at 1028 8th Ave NW, just north of downtown, opened in 1933. Eighteen holes, par 71, and do not let the municipal label soften your expectations: the SDGA rates the black tees at 75.4 with a slope of 136. A 75.4 rating on a par 71 muni means the back tees are a serious test, four shots harder than par on the card before the wind says a word. Published SDGA guest fees are 38 dollars for 18 holes on weekdays. Thirty eight dollars for a course rated 75.4 is the best value sentence in South Dakota golf, and it is not close.

## The order to play them

If you have a connection at Moccasin Creek, play it first, while you are fresh, because prairie golf in wind punishes a tired swing and rewards a player who can still commit to a knocked down shot on the 15th hole. Then play Lee Park, and play it from tees that match your game rather than your ego. The black tees at 75.4 are there for the strong player who wants the full measure. Everyone else will enjoy the course more, and score more honestly, a set forward.

If you have no private connection, your Aberdeen golf trip is Lee Park, and that is a perfectly good trip. Play it twice, once early and once in the late prairie light, and you will understand the town. The mistake visitors make, here and everywhere in the northern plains, is scheduling golf as if the wind were a footnote. In Aberdeen the wind is the architecture's co-designer. Check it before you book the tee time, bring a ball flight you can control, and do not judge either course by a single calm morning.

Our fuller Aberdeen ranking sits in [the best golf courses in Aberdeen](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-aberdeen-sd/), and the statewide context is in [the 5 best golf courses in South Dakota](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-south-dakota/). Aberdeen will not headline the state list. It does something more useful. It shows what golf looks like in a small American city that kept a muni open since 1933 and kept it hard, priced at 38 dollars, in a park north of downtown, waiting for anyone who drives in.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.