# The Athens Golf Guide

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/athens-ga-golf-guide/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Guides / Georgia


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Athens is a college town that produces tour players the way other towns produce accountants, and its golf explains part of why. The University of Georgia Golf Course raised a generation of tour pros, a Robert Trent Jones Sr. design from 1968 that serves as the home of the UGA golf teams and a public test at university rates. Ten minutes of local knowledge away sits Athens Country Club, a 1926 Donald Ross, private, 27 holes, classic Ross greens in Bulldog country. A public championship course that trained tour pros and a golden age Ross behind a gate. Athens golfers grow up between those two poles, and a visitor should play them in that order of ambition.

Start at the University of Georgia Golf Course. It opened in 1968, it is university owned and public, and it has hosted NCAA regionals, the Liz Murphey Collegiate Classic for the women, and the Stadion Classic on the Nationwide Tour in the 2010s era. The record calls it a demanding championship layout by public standards, which is the correct frame. This is not a gentle campus muni. It is a Jones course built to test elite college players, offered to the public at college rates. Play it first, fresh, because it is the sterner examination and because every other round in Athens reads differently once you know what the university standard feels like from the back of a green.

## The Ross behind the gate

Athens Country Club is the prize if you can arrange it. Donald Ross, 1926, the original Ross 18 plus a North nine added later for 27 holes in total. It hosted SEC and Georgia amateur history and carries home club ties to University of Georgia golf, which means the private and university sides of this town's game were never separate worlds. The greens are the argument, classic Ross surfaces that have been sorting Athens golfers since before the university course existed. Costs sit in a mid to high estimate tier, fittingly for the town's established private club. If one invitation is available on an Athens trip, spend it here and spend the public days at the university course. Our [Athens ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-athens-ga/) orders them Ross first on architecture, UGA first on access, and both orderings are defensible, which is the sign of a real golf town.

Jennings Mill Country Club, an Arthur Hills design from 1987 in Bogart just outside Athens, is the third name. Private, par 72 at 7,004 yards with a 74.3 rating and a 141 slope, and a history of local tour qualifying. Those are modern championship numbers, sterner on paper than either older course, and it functions as the area's contemporary private option when the Ross is out of reach.

The access picture is worth stating plainly, because it shapes the trip. One championship course is public at university rates, which in Athens means a tour tested layout priced for the students and alumni who surround it. One is a private Ross, where the route in is a member. And one is a modern private club in Bogart with the sternest slope on the local card. A visitor without connections still gets the best public round in the region and a town full of evidence for what the private side holds. A visitor with one connection gets the full picture, Jones and Ross within the same small city limits, a pairing almost no college town in America can offer. That density, two architects of that stature shaping one town's golf across four decades, is the real Athens story underneath the football.

The mistake visitors make is scheduling Athens as a football weekend with golf squeezed around kickoff, nine holes here, a rushed round there. The town rewards the opposite plan. Golf first, at championship pace, UGA in the morning and the Ross if the golf gods and a member smile on you. Then the town, which has never needed help entertaining anyone after dark. In [the Georgia state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-georgia/), Athens punches far above its size. A generation of tour pros learned the game between a Jones and a Ross. Play both, and you will understand the production line.

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