Course Comparisons / South Carolina
Old Barnwell Golf Club vs. Woodside Plantation Country Club: The Aiken Choice
Aiken has been a winter golf town for a very long time, which makes this comparison pointed. One side is the established private club inside a residential plantation community, 36 holes, members who live around the courses. The other side is a private national club that opened in 2023 and was ranked No. 71 in the United States on a Top 100 Golf Courses list almost immediately. Old money routine against new money ambition, in the same sandy South Carolina soil. Golfers invited to either should know what each invitation actually offers.
Old Barnwell was founded by Nick Schreiber as a private national club, designed by Brian Schneider and Blake Conant, and opened in 2023. The numbers around it are the first thing to understand. It sits on 575 acres of sandy soil and rolling hills, surrounded by longleaf and loblolly pines, in Aiken County sandhills country. Five hundred seventy-five acres for one 18 hole course is an enormous canvas in modern golf, where most projects fight for half that. Space lets a routing breathe, lets holes sit apart from each other, lets the sandy ground do the visual and strategic work instead of houses doing it.
The validation came fast. That No. 71 national ranking is one data point. The other is competitive: Old Barnwell will host an NCAA Women's Golf Regional on May 10 to 12, 2027, partnering with the University of South Carolina. The NCAA does not send a regional to a new course on vibes. It sends one where the golf, the conditioning, and the operation can hold a championship field, and it decided that about a course that had been open roughly three years at the time of the announcement.
Woodside Plantation Country Club is the other Aiken model entirely. A private club with two courses, now called Jones and Cupp, formerly Wisteria and Plantation, designed by Rees Jones and Bob Cupp, dating to 1987. The Cupp Course plays par 72 at 7,178 yards with a 74.5 course rating and a 139 slope. Those are strong numbers, and 36 holes changes the math of membership in ways a single great course cannot. Variety is a real architectural value when you play the same club 80 times a year. Two courses, two designers, two different days of golf without leaving the community you live in.
National club golf against community club golf
On pure golf, Old Barnwell wins, and we should not hedge it. The site is better, sandy and rolling and pine-framed at a scale Woodside's residential setting cannot match, the design team built a course the national lists noticed within a few years, and the trajectory, an NCAA regional already booked, points up. In our Aiken ranking and in the South Carolina state ranking, Old Barnwell is the Aiken name that travels. People in other states have heard of it. That almost never happens with a club this young in a town this size.
Woodside's best counterargument is honest and worth conceding in full. Old Barnwell is a national club. Its members come from everywhere, which means the club is a destination for its own membership, visited in stretches, while Woodside is a home. The golfer who lives in Woodside Plantation, plays the Cupp Course on a Tuesday, the Jones Course on a Thursday, and knows every member in the grill room has a golf life that a national membership, however spectacular the course, does not provide. Golf is a weekly habit before it is a bucket list. On the day score in our rubric, the lived experience, Woodside scores points Old Barnwell cannot, for the people who actually live in Aiken.
Access is private on both sides, so neither course helps the visiting public golfer directly, and costs on both sides belong in high estimate tiers that neither club publishes. The difference is the route in. Woodside membership follows living in or joining the community club. Old Barnwell membership follows a national club model, an invitation network that reaches well beyond Aiken County.
Verdict: Old Barnwell wins this comparison on the golf, clearly, and it is the invitation to chase if you get one call. Pick Woodside anyway if you are moving to Aiken, want 36 holes outside your door, and value a Tuesday round with neighbors over a few spectacular weekends a year. One course is built to be ranked. The other is built to be lived on. Aiken, lucky town, has both, separated by a short drive and opposite answers to what a golf club is for.