# The Arlington Golf Guide

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/arlington-va-golf-guide/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Guides / Virginia


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

Arlington golf starts with a date that sounds made up. Washington Golf and Country Club was incorporated in January 1894, considered the oldest golf club in Virginia and the ninth club to join the USGA. It was founded by members of Washington's Metropolitan Club, senators and ambassadors among them, on nine holes set on Hoover family land in Rosslyn along the Potomac. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson were members, earning the club its nickname, Playground of Presidents. This is Northern Virginia golf, played across the river from the capital by the people who run the capital, and it has been that way since before the USGA had ten members.

The county's golf concentrates in two private anchors, and a guide should be honest that there is no public centerpiece hiding behind them. Army Navy Country Club brings 27 holes by the Pentagon's flight paths, a big military membership club where the round comes with the sound and sight of the capital's air traffic. Washington Golf and Country Club brings the tradition, a Donald Ross course on 88 acres off Glebe Road in North Arlington, behind a Georgian clubhouse renovated between 2004 and 2006. In [our Arlington town ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-arlington-va/) those two carry the county between them, and the order below follows from what each does best.

## The order to play them

Play Washington Golf first if you get the chance, because chances are the whole problem in Arlington. An 1894 club with a Ross course on 88 acres does not sell tee times, and its membership history is written in presidents. The golf rewards the invitation. Ross on a tight North Arlington site means a traditional course where placement and green reading matter more than length, played on ground that has held golf since the game's first American decade. It is also, simply, the oldest club in Virginia still in place, and walking a course that Roosevelt and Taft belonged to gives a round a weight no new design can manufacture.

Play Army Navy second, and play all of its variety. Twenty seven holes changes the math of a club visit. You are not squeezing onto a single crowded 18. The Pentagon flight paths give the place its peculiar Arlington flavor, military golf under the approach routes of the capital, a membership built around service rather than around the Senate calendar. Where Washington Golf is the game's old Washington establishment, Army Navy is the uniformed city's club, and Arlington holds both identities in a few square miles.

The access reality is blunt. Both anchors are private, so a visiting golfer without a member connection is mostly reading about Arlington golf rather than playing it, and will find his actual tee times elsewhere in Northern Virginia, a point [the Virginia state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-virginia/) makes at the state level too. The mistake visitors make is assuming proximity to Washington means public access, that a county this dense and this federal must have a flagship muni. It does not, at least not at the level of these two clubs.

Go when the capital's calendar softens if you are visiting a member, late spring or fall, when Ross's 88 acres play firm and the river air off the Potomac cools the afternoons. Arlington's golf story is short, old, and closed to most of us. What is behind the gates, an 1894 Ross club and 27 military holes under the flight paths, is as concentrated a piece of American golf history as any suburb in the country can claim.

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