Architect Rankings
The Best Ben Crenshaw Golf Courses in America
Ben Crenshaw's idea of golf fits in one sentence: the land already knows where the holes go. With Bill Coore, his partner in nearly all of this work, Crenshaw built the modern case for minimalism, moving as little dirt as the site allowed and letting width, firm turf, and green contours do what rough and water do elsewhere. The dataset behind this ranking holds 27 Crenshaw courses across 19 states, from the 1991 Plantation Course at Kapalua to Wicker Point in 2023, resort and private and public mixed together, plus restoration credits at Pinehurst No. 2 and Old Town Club and one genuine solo entry, his 1994 renovation of the Arlington Course at Hot Springs. Sand Hills and Bandon Trails and Friar's Head made the firm's name. What follows ranks the best of the courses we can document in full, best first. The top of the list is a real argument. The bottom of it would headline most architects' careers.
1Friar's Head Golf Club
Baiting Hollow, New York, 2003, private, par 71 at 7,070 yards. Golfweek ranked Friar's Head No. 2 on its 2026 list of the best modern courses in the United States, and Golf Digest had it 14th on the 100 Greatest after it debuted at 34th in 2011, the rare course that rises as the novelty fades. The routing moves between sand dunes 200 feet above Long Island Sound and reshaped former potato fields, two landscapes stitched into one round. The 15th, a 460-yard par 4 from an elevated tee guarded by a vast bunker, is the hole panelists describe to each other. Founded by Ken Bakst, the 1997 U.S. Mid-Amateur champion, Friar's Head is the fullest expression of what Coore and Crenshaw do: nothing looks built, and everything is intentional.
2Colorado Golf Club
Parker, Colorado, 2007, private, par 72 at 7,604 yards at over 6,100 feet of elevation, routed through ponderosa hills and ravines on a 1,700-acre property. GOLF Magazine named it the top new private course in America in 2007, and the championships followed: the 2010 Senior PGA, won by Tom Lehman, the 2013 Solheim Cup, and the 2019 U.S. Mid-Amateur. Golfweek ranks it the No. 2 private course in Colorado. Altitude golf usually means thin air and thick rough; Colorado GC is wide, strategic, and plays bigger than its yardage because the ball flies and the angles still matter.
3Streamsong Red
Bowling Green, Florida, 2012, resort, par 72 over sandy, links-like ground that central Florida is not supposed to have. Streamsong Red was built on a reclaimed Mosaic phosphate mining site, dramatic dunes left by the mining, and it opened alongside Tom Doak's Blue as a paired resort launch that redrew the state's golf map. It is regularly ranked among the best public courses in America, walking-focused with caddies available. Of all the firm's work, the Red may be the best evidence for the land-first creed: they were handed an industrial scar and found a links in it.
4O'odham Course at Talking Stick
Scottsdale, Arizona, 1997, resort, par 70 at 7,133 yards on Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community land. Built two years after Sand Hills by much of the same construction crew, the O'odham (formerly the North Course) is wide and open for the wind, with crowned greens that are extensions of the fairway and closely mown surrounds built for the ground game. The split-fairway par-4 12th is the signature. Desert golf in the 1990s meant target golf over rock and cactus; Coore and Crenshaw built a course you could bounce the ball on, in Scottsdale, in 1997. It still embarrasses most of what followed.
5Saguaro Course at We-Ko-Pa
Fort McDowell, Arizona, 2006, public, Golfweek's No. 1 Arizona public course on its 2026 state list. The Saguaro was built as a links-style layout intended for walking, short green-to-tee walks, on Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation land with no homes, roads, or businesses interrupting the desert. We-Ko-Pa means Four Peaks, for the range visible to the east. Par 72 at about 6,966 yards. Between the O'odham and the Saguaro, the firm effectively owns the argument for what public desert golf should be, and the second of them is the one anybody can book.
6Trinity Forest Golf Club
Dallas, Texas, 2017, private, par 72 at 7,450 yards on a former landfill south of downtown, ranked No. 26 in the Dallas Morning News 2025 Texas Top 100. A links-style layout with a double green the club calls the largest in North America, on a site that could not take trees or lakes and did not need them. Our full treatment is in the Dallas town ranking. Trinity Forest is the firm's constraint course: everything the site forbade became the design.
7Cuscowilla on Lake Oconee
Eatonton, Georgia, 1996, private, and one of the firm's earliest statements, opened the year after Sand Hills. Red clay bunkers, natural minimalism, Lake Oconee ground, and a record of SEC and collegiate championships and USGA events. Consistently ranked among Georgia's best. Cuscowilla is where the Southeast learned what this firm was; costs sit in the high estimate tier, as they do at most private clubs of this standing, and the club does not publish them.
8Wicker Point Golf Club
Alexander City, Alabama, 2023, private, the only Coore and Crenshaw design in Alabama and the newest course on this list. Five greens touch the Lake Martin shoreline and the back nine is largely lakefront, on Zeon Zoysia fairways and TifEagle Bermuda greens. It debuted at No. 2 in Alabama on Golf Digest's Best in State ranking and No. 1 in the state by GOLF Magazine in 2025, and it was Golf Digest's runner-up for Best New Private Course in 2023. A firm in its fourth decade together does not usually produce a course this alive this late. Wicker Point says the eye has not gone.
The concession, honestly made: the Coore and Crenshaw manner can become a mannerism. Width plus firmness plus a naturalist shrug is now the most imitated style in American golf, some of the imitators are the firm itself on an ordinary week, and a course like Chechessee Creek in the South Carolina Lowcountry (par 70, 6,641 yards, entirely re-grassed in 2015) or Warren at Notre Dame, which hosted the 2019 U.S. Senior Open, can feel like the house style executed well rather than discovered fresh. Even the Hot Springs Arlington renovation, Crenshaw's solo credit, is a restoration of William Diddel's 1930 work rather than an original, and it anchors our Hot Springs ranking for history as much as design. The defense is the top of this list. Friar's Head and Colorado GC and Streamsong Red are not a style repeated. They are three different answers that happen to share an accent, which is what a real architect's body of work is supposed to look like.