# The Myrtle Beach Golf Guide

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/myrtle-beach-sc-golf-guide/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Guides / South Carolina


A leading golf course in South Carolina. Photo: N75746, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Eighty-plus courses on one strip. That number is the first thing everyone tells you about Myrtle Beach, and it is the least useful. Nobody plays eighty courses. You play four or five, spread over a few days, up and down the Grand Strand from North Myrtle Beach to Pawleys Island, and the quality of the trip depends entirely on whether those four or five were chosen with any discipline. Chosen badly, Myrtle Beach is interchangeable golf at package prices. Chosen well, it holds up against places that charge three times as much.

The center of gravity has not moved in more than seventy years. The Dunes Golf and Beach Club is still the fight for No. 1 most years, and a serious trip starts by admitting that and building outward, north and south, from there.

## Build north to south, best first

Start with the Dunes. Robert Trent Jones Sr. designed it, it opened in 1948 with play following in 1949, and it is the course that made Myrtle Beach a golf destination in the first place. Rees Jones, his son, has done renovation work on it since. The signature is the par-5 13th, called Waterloo, which doglegs sharply around a lake and asks you, in order, how brave, how honest and how lucky you are. The club has hosted the Senior Tour Championship and PGA Tour Q-School finals, and it is consistently ranked the top course in Myrtle Beach and in the top five in South Carolina. Play it first while your swing and your standards are fresh. It is semi-private, a member club with limited outside and package play windows, so it is also the tee time to secure before anything else on the trip exists.

Second, go south to Caledonia Golf and Fish Club in Pawleys Island, and understand that this is the round half the group will name as their favorite on the drive home. Mike Strantz designed it, his first solo work, opened in 1994, on a former 18th-century rice plantation. The routing moves through a canopy of live oaks that are centuries old, and the par-4 18th plays over water to a green in front of the clubhouse porch, a Grand Strand signature for a reason. It is public, it is consistently ranked among America's top 100 public courses, and at peak fees around $150 to $200 it costs real money by Myrtle Beach standards and still feels underpriced next to destination resorts elsewhere. Strantz partisans will argue Caledonia should anchor the trip ahead of the Dunes. We would still play the Dunes first, on history and on the 13th, but it is the honest argument of the week and neither side loses it badly.

Third, the Barefoot Resort Dye Course, up in North Myrtle Beach. Pete Dye designed it, opened in 2000, and it is the only semi-private course at Barefoot; the other three there are resort courses. Expect Dye's usual grammar, waste bunkers and bulkheaded water hazards throughout, and a closing stretch locals compare to TPC Sawgrass's finish. It hosted Golf Channel's Big Break Myrtle Beach, which tells you how it photographs. Play it after Caledonia, not before. Two theatrical courses back to back blur together, and a day of Jones golf at the Dunes in between is the wrong separator, so order the week Dunes, Caledonia, Dye and the three voices stay distinct.

Fill the fourth slot with Grande Dunes Resort Club. Roger Rulewich designed it, opened in 2001, and Rulewich was Robert Trent Jones Sr.'s longtime associate, which makes it a neat bookend to a trip that started with the master himself. Seven holes play along the Intracoastal Waterway from a bluff-top setting, and the par-3 14th drops from a high tee along the water. It is resort and public access at premium pricing, ranked among the area's top public and resort courses, and it works best as the last round: elevated, open, forgiving enough that tired swings still find the day enjoyable.

Access is the easy part here, with one exception. Caledonia is public, Grande Dunes is resort and public, Barefoot Dye is resort and semi-private, and the Dunes is the gate to plan around. Book the Dunes window first, then let the rest fall into place.

Shoulder season is the smart money. Spring and fall give you the Strand without the worst of the summer heat and the family traffic, and the package machinery that runs this town is built to reward golfers who come when the beach crowd does not.

The one mistake is volume. Groups try to play 36 a day for four straight days because the courses are there and the prices invite it, and by day three nobody can remember which waterway was which. Myrtle Beach rewards a slower hand. Four rounds, one a day, in the order above, with an afternoon left empty on purpose. The strip will still be there next year, which is more than your back will promise if you ignore the advice.

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