Town Guides / Louisiana
The Avondale Golf Guide
Avondale sits across the river from New Orleans in Jefferson Parish, flat Louisiana ground where the wind has nothing to stop it. Golfers know the name for one reason: TPC Louisiana, Pete Dye's Zurich Classic home, flat and windy and harder than it looks on TV in the wind. Television flattens everything. It flattens the bunkers, it flattens the water, and it completely hides the breeze that turns a stock 7 iron into a guess. Arrive expecting the course you watched in April and the first gust across an open fairway will correct you.
The smart way to build an Avondale golf trip is to treat it as a small New Orleans golf base rather than a one course stop. The anchor list runs to three names: TPC Louisiana in Avondale itself, English Turn Golf and Country Club across in New Orleans, and Lakewood Golf Club New Orleans. Play them in that order, for reasons that have as much to do with history as architecture.
Play the Tour course first
TPC Louisiana was designed by Pete Dye and built in 2004 specifically to host the PGA Tour's Zurich Classic, with help from tour pros Steve Elkington and Kelly Gibson. It has hosted the Zurich since 2007, after Hurricane Katrina delayed its hosting debut, and it plays 7,400 yards at par 72. Golf Digest ranked it No. 4 in Louisiana in 2025 and Golfweek put it No. 2 among public courses in the state in 2026. It is Louisiana's only PGA Tour event venue in the modern Zurich era, a member of the Audubon Golf Trail, and it sits low on its property among bunkers, water hazards and bald cypress trees.
Low is the operative word. Dye built a course at sea level in south Louisiana and defended it with angles, sand and water instead of elevation, because there is no elevation. The public access is the gift here. This is a genuine Tour venue a visitor can book, walk and suffer on in the same wind the field gets, and it anchors our Avondale ranking for exactly that reason. Play it first, while your swing and your patience are fresh, because it is the hardest examination of the trip and the one you came for.
Then play the course it replaced
English Turn is the second day, and the pairing is a history lesson. Jack Nicklaus designed it for the New Orleans PGA Tour event, it opened in 1988, and it hosted that event for sixteen editions from 1989 to 2004, then once more in 2006 when Katrina damage pushed the tournament back from TPC Louisiana. It plays par 72 at 7,078 yards, its 15th hole plays to an island green, and it serves as home course for the Tulane Green Wave and the New Orleans Privateers. Tim Simpson won the first edition in 1989.
Playing TPC Louisiana and English Turn back to back shows you two eras of Tour golf in one parish: Nicklaus's late 1980s championship statement, then Dye's 2004 answer to modern equipment and modern athletes. Access differs, though, and plan for it. English Turn is private, so the route in is a member connection or a college golf contact, while TPC Louisiana simply takes a reservation. If English Turn does not open up, Lakewood Golf Club New Orleans fills the third slot in the local rotation, and the honest advice is to ask locally about its current access and condition rather than trusting any listing, ours included.
The mistake, and the close
The one mistake visitors make in Avondale is scheduling by the television memory. They book TPC Louisiana as a casual resort round, bring the casual warm up, and spend four hours discovering that a flat course in a Louisiana wind, defended by Dye bunkering and water, does not care what it looked like on a screen. Play it early in the day, early in the trip, and with a real practice session first. The wider Louisiana state ranking puts this little parish cluster in context, and the context flatters it: few small towns anywhere hold a current Tour venue and its predecessor within one trip.
Go when the Zurich calendar lets you compare your round against the field's, or in the quieter weeks when the cypress and the low ground have the place to themselves. Either way the last image is the same: a flat horizon, water standing where the land gives up, and a Dye green asking one more honest shot out of you before the river air takes the evening.