# The Kiawah Island Golf Guide

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/kiawah-island-sc-golf-guide/

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Town Guides / South Carolina


Kiawah golf course. Photo: N75746, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The wind gets a vote on Kiawah Island, and most days it uses it. You can feel it on the drive over from Charleston, in the marsh grass bending one way along the road, in the flags already snapping before you have seen a fairway. By the time you reach the Ocean Course, the place that hosted the 1991 Ryder Cup, the War by the Shore, and two PGA Championships, the point is plain. Wind decides your score here, not you. Plan around that fact instead of pretending a calm forecast will save you.

Kiawah is a barrier island in the Lowcountry built, for a visiting golfer, around one resort rotation and one very private side door. Get the order right and the week builds. Get it wrong and you spend your best morning learning lessons the island was always going to teach you, on the wrong course.

## Put the Ocean Course in the middle, not on day one

Anchor the trip on the Ocean Course, but do not play it first. That is the argument we would make against almost every itinerary sold here. The Ocean Course is the reason for the trip, a seaside test where the breeze turns a stock shot into a guess and a good round into a negotiation. Playing it cold, straight off the road, wastes the one round you will talk about for years. You need a day to learn how the ball behaves in this air, how much club the wind is really asking for, and how little hero golf pays.

Start instead at Turtle Point. Jack Nicklaus designed it, it opened in 1981, he led a major renovation in 2016, and three holes play along the Atlantic. It is an early Nicklaus resort design, which means it asks clear questions and gives you the ocean in doses rather than all at once. As an opener it does two jobs: it introduces the wind without humiliating you, and it reminds you that Kiawah golf is not one note. The holes away from the water feel like a different course from the ones on it, and that contrast is useful education for what is coming.

Play Osprey Point second, or slot it as the afternoon round you actually enjoy. Tom Fazio designed it, it opened in 1988, and it moves through maritime forest, marsh and lagoons. It is generally rated the most playable resort course here after Oak Point, and at roughly half the Ocean Course fee it is also the sanest money on the island. Fazio's routing is scenic in a quieter Lowcountry way, all live oaks and still water until the breeze finds you again. On a trip built around one brutal centerpiece, the playable round is what keeps the group intact.

Then take the Ocean Course, rested, with a morning tee time if you can get one and no flight home hanging over the back nine. Give it the day. Walk if you are able, take the wind as the design feature it is, and do not keep a running complaint about the score. Nobody's score survives contact with a hard Kiawah wind intact, and the 1991 Ryder Cup was famous precisely because the place fought back.

## The private course changes the trip if you can get it

Cassique is the complication. It belongs to the private Kiawah Island Club, members only, and estimates put its costs in the highest tier. If you have a genuine route in, through a member rather than a hopeful phone call, it rearranges the week, because Cassique is a different idea of Kiawah golf entirely.

Tom Watson designed it, it opened in 2000, and it was his first design in the United States. He styled it as a links, with manufactured dunes, and the holes run along the Kiawah River and the marsh rather than the open Atlantic. Watson consulted on playability for members, a contrast the club itself draws with its championship River Course. So Cassique is not a softer Ocean Course. It is inland, riverine, links in accent, built for people who play it often. Play it after the Ocean Course if both happen. The comparison is the pleasure: same island, same wind, two architects answering it in opposite ways.

If Cassique is not open to you, do not chase it. The resort rotation is the trip, and it is a complete one. The public and private sides of Kiawah barely touch, and pretending a resort stay buys you leverage on the club side wastes goodwill and time.

Access, stated plainly: the Ocean Course, Turtle Point and Osprey Point are resort golf, bookable through a stay and priced accordingly, with the Ocean Course at the top by a wide margin. Cassique is private. Build the itinerary you actually have, not the one you hope a starter will grant you.

Go when the wind is a feature rather than a punishment and the Lowcountry heat has backed off. Spring and fall are the sensible windows, the light is better, and a sweater round on the Ocean Course beats a swampy one in every respect except the tan. Summer works if you start early and accept that the afternoon belongs to the beach.

The one mistake visitors make is booking the famous name twice and skipping the rest. A second Ocean Course round sounds like devotion. In practice it crowds out Turtle Point's ocean holes and an easy Osprey Point morning, and it turns a varied island into a single hard exam taken twice. Play the headliner once, properly. Then let the island show you its other registers: forest, marsh, lagoon, river.

Late in the day the marsh goes flat and gold and the wind, usually, gives up first. That is the hour to be standing on a tee at Kiawah, ball in hand, with nowhere else the trip needs you to be.

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