# The Best Golf Courses in Aberdeen

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-aberdeen-sd/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / South Dakota


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Aberdeen is a prairie town, flat in every direction, with wind that has travelled a long way to reach your back nine. Golf here is not a destination product. It is what local players do on summer evenings when the light lasts forever, and any ranking of it should be honest about the scale before it starts handing out positions.

So, plainly: this is a two course bench. That is the whole list. Aberdeen has a country club course and a city course, and the ranking question is not which one hides some secret greatness. It is which one a visiting golfer should play first, and what each one is actually for. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in a town this size access counts for more than it does in a resort market, because the city course is the one most local golfers will ever play.

## 1Moccasin Creek Country Club

Moccasin Creek is Joel Goldstrand prairie golf, and Goldstrand understood this landscape better than almost anyone who has worked in the northern plains. Prairie golf lives or dies on wind and turf. There is no manufactured scenery to save a weak routing, no ocean and no mountains, so the course has to create its interest from angles, from how a hole sits against the prevailing breeze, and from greens that reward a player who can control a ball flight instead of just launching it.

That is the case for Moccasin Creek at No. 1, and it is a straightforward one. It is the strongest test in town, the course local players measure their games against, and the round a visitor with one day in Aberdeen should try to arrange first.

The concession is the word club. This is a country club course, which means access runs through membership and the guest logic that comes with it, not through a public tee sheet you can book from the highway. A ranking that counted access above all else would flip this list. We are not going to pretend the best golf in town is second best because it is harder to get on, but the friction is real and worth naming.

## 2Lee Park Golf Course

Lee Park is the city course, set in the park of the same name, and it does the job a city course is supposed to do. It keeps golf cheap and local, it gives Aberdeen's beginners and juniors a place to learn the game without a membership conversation, and it gives everyone else a walkable round inside town rather than a drive out of it.

Ranking it second is not an insult, and Lee Park's defenders should not read it as one. The honest concession runs in its favor: on a pure value basis, dollar for dollar and minute for minute, Lee Park may be the most-used and most-loved golf ground in Aberdeen, and a course that serves a whole town every week is doing something a private club never will. What it is not is the sterner or more interesting test. City courses are built for breadth of play, for leagues and lessons and nine holes after work, and the design compromises that make that possible are the same ones that keep it behind Moccasin Creek on golf alone.

Play both and the town makes sense in an afternoon and an evening: the club course for the golf, the park course for the town itself. Aberdeen is a stop, not a pilgrimage, and its golf is honest about that. More places should be.

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