Course Profiles / Louisiana

Squire Creek Country Club: A Course Profile

Louisiana golf has a pecking order problem, and Squire Creek solved it by simply taking the top spot and keeping it. Golf Digest ranked it No. 1 in Louisiana in its Best in State list for 2021-22, and first again in each of the last four publications through the 2025 list. For a course that opened in 2002 in Choudrant, a small town between Monroe and Ruston, that is not a hot streak. That is a settlement.

Tom Fazio designed it, and this is Fazio working with room. The course sits inside an 1,100 acre development in northern Louisiana, and it plays 7,105 yards at par 72 from the championship tees. That yardage matters because it separates Squire Creek from the knock usually aimed at top ranked courses in smaller states, that they win by default against thin fields. A 7,105 yard Fazio that hosted a USGA championship is not winning by default. It is winning the argument.

The championship evidence

The course hosted the 2015 U.S. Women's Mid-Amateur, its first USGA championship, and before that the 2005 Western Athletic Conference championship. It is also the home course for the Louisiana Tech Bulldogs golf team, which tells you two useful things. First, good college players see it constantly and still have to play well to score, or the program would have moved. Second, the course gets maintained to a standard that survives daily scrutiny from people whose job depends on reading greens correctly.

Golf Digest noticed early. In 2004, two years after opening, the magazine named Squire Creek the fifth best new private course in the nation. Early praise is cheap in golf. Magazines hand it out and courses fade. What counts is the second decade, and the second decade here brought a USGA championship and a run of state No. 1 rankings that has not broken. Our Louisiana state ranking follows that evidence rather than fighting it.

What Fazio did with the land

Northern Louisiana is not dramatic country. It rolls, it is wooded, it is humid, and a lazy architect can build a perfectly forgettable course on it by pushing fairways between the trees and calling the trees strategy. Fazio's better work, and this qualifies, uses width to create angles rather than using width as an excuse. At 7,105 yards the course can stretch for strong players, but the interest for everyone else lives in where the fairways invite you to go and where the greens refuse to receive the shot from that side.

The concession, honestly stated: Fazio courses divide golfers. Some find the shaping heavy handed, the visual framing a little too composed, the whole thing a bit like a photograph of a golf course rather than a golf course that grew. There are days at Squire Creek when that critique has a toehold, particularly for purists raised on scruffier ground. But the counter is built into the record. A course can survive being called polished. It cannot fake four straight state No. 1 rankings and a USGA championship at the same time. The polish here sits on top of real examination.

Access is private. Choudrant is not a detour on most travel routes, and the club does not publish membership figures, so costs belong in the labeled estimate category only: a top ranked private club in its state prices like one, and anyone quoting you an exact initiation number from outside the membership office is guessing. The practical route in is a member invitation, and for college golf followers, a Louisiana Tech event on the calendar.

The verdict

Squire Creek is the rare modern private club that became the reference point for its entire state within twenty years of opening. Plenty of courses debut to applause. Almost none hold the top ranking through four straight publication cycles while hosting national championships and a college program at the same time. In Choudrant, between Monroe and Ruston, the argument about Louisiana golf starts here and works its way down the list.

One more detail belongs in the record. The Western Athletic Conference championship in 2005 came early in the course's life, before the USGA arrived, which means Squire Creek was collecting competitive credentials in layers: conference golf first, a national championship a decade later, state rankings throughout. Courses that peak early usually show it by year ten. This one's résumé reads in the opposite order, each honor arriving after the one before had time to expire, and none of them did.