Town Guides / North Carolina

The Southern Pines Golf Guide

Midland Road is the whole argument in one stretch of pavement. On one side sits Mid Pines, Donald Ross from 1921. On the other sits Pine Needles, Donald Ross from 1928. Both are in Southern Pines, both are open to resort guests, and both are better walks than most of what the bigger resort down the road in Pinehurst will sell you. Golfers drive this corridor chasing a famous name five minutes away and roll straight past the two courses that local players tend to defend most loudly.

Southern Pines is the quieter half of the Sandhills, and that is its advantage. The golf concentrates along this one corridor, the inns are small, the rounds feel unhurried, and the best value in the region sits in plain sight at a municipal course that happens to be a Ross.

Two inns, one road, no wrong first round

Start at whichever of Mid Pines or Pine Needles you can get, but play both, and play them on consecutive days if you can. The comparison is the education.

Mid Pines is the intimate one. Ross opened it in 1921, the routing is largely untouched, and Kyle Franz restored the bunkers and waste areas in 2013 to wide acclaim. It reads as a time capsule of 1920s Sandhills golf: longleaf pines, sandy waste, greens that reward the player who thinks in angles instead of yardages. The inn is a sister property to Pine Needles under the Bell family, and guests and the public can both play, though the smaller scale means tee times feel personal in a way big resort golf rarely does.

Pine Needles is the championship sibling. Ross opened it in 1928, John Fought restored Ross features in 2004 and Franz worked on it again in 2017, and its tournament record is the strongest in town: U.S. Women's Opens in 1996, won by Annika Sorenstam, 2001, won by Karrie Webb, 2007, won by Cristie Kerr, and again in 2022, won by Minjee Lee, plus the U.S. Senior Women's Open in 2019. Peggy Kirk Bell, an LPGA pioneer, owned and taught here for decades, and the teaching culture still clings to the place in a good way. It is the bigger, sterner test of the two, with classic Ross greens and wiregrass framing the fairways.

Our order, if forced: Mid Pines first for the walk and the routing, Pine Needles second once your short game has remembered what Ross greens do to a lazy chip. Reverse it and nothing breaks. Skip one for the other and the trip has a hole in it.

The muni that embarrasses resort pricing

Southern Pines Golf Club is the round your group will talk about at dinner, partly for the golf and partly for what it cost. It dates to 1923 in the Elks Club lineage, another Ross, and the Town of Southern Pines acquired it in 2020. Franz led a restoration that reopened in 2021, recovering Ross holes including ground from the lost Little Nine. It plays through longleaf pines in the same corridor as its famous neighbors, at municipal access and Sandhills value pricing. National reviews have called it one of the best muni values in American golf, and for once the praise is not hard to follow once you see the routing and the rate on the same page.

Play it third, after the two inns, or play it as the afternoon second round on a 36 hole day. It pairs with either inn without a long drive, and it recalibrates what your group thinks a green fee should buy.

Talamore, a Rees Jones design from 1991, is the change of pace. It is resort golf in a more modern register, famous in the 1990s for its llama caddies, which tells you something about the era and the marketing. Treat it as the fourth round, the one for a group that wants a different look after three days of Ross, not as a substitute for any of them. It has resort and public access, so it is also the easiest add when the inn tee sheets tighten up.

Access here is refreshingly simple compared with Pinehurst. The inns take guests and public play, the muni takes everyone, and Talamore takes resort and public bookings. No member introductions, no half open doors. The constraint is capacity, not permission, so book the Ross pair first and build outward.

Timing, and the drive-by mistake

Spring and fall are the Sandhills at their best, firm and mild, and they are also when everyone else has the same idea. Summer is hot and storm prone in the afternoons. Winter golf here is a genuine option, quieter and cheaper in feel if not always in rate, with the trade of dormant color and cool mornings.

The mistake visitors make is treating Southern Pines as a spillover town, a place to sleep while playing Pinehurst. That gets the geography and the golf backwards. These are three Ross courses within a short drive of each other, two of them across a road from each other, restored by the same hand in Franz, plus a modern resort course for contrast. A trip built here stands on its own, costs less, and walks better.

Stay for the late light on Midland Road, when both inns go quiet and the pines throw long shadows across two fairways that have faced each other for a century. That is Southern Pines, and it does not need the resort down the road to explain itself.