# The Best Golf Courses in Ames

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-ames-ia/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Iowa


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ames is a university town on the flat central Iowa grid, and flat is the first lie the land tells here. Follow Squaw Creek down into its wooded valley on the edge of the Iowa State campus and the prairie drops away into one of the most demanding pieces of golf ground in the state. College towns get the golf their university builds for them, good and bad. Ames got lucky twice: a university course with a championship spine, a public links style option across town, and the private club every town like this keeps for itself.

Three courses, three different games. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in Ames the golf produces a runaway winner while access decides the rest.

## 1Veenker Memorial Golf Course

Veenker is Iowa State's course, a Perry Dye design laid tight along Squaw Creek, and it hosted an NCAA regional, which tells you what the college game thinks of it. This is examination golf. The creek keeps entering the conversation, the trees close in, and the course demands a level of ball control that public golfers in Iowa are rarely asked for. Dye family design on a university budget produced something with real teeth: holes where position matters more than power and where the penalty for a loose swing is immediate and usually wet.

The concession is that Veenker can beat up the people it is nominally for. A university course that hosts NCAA regionals is serving two masters, and the weekend amateur standing on a tight tee with the creek down one side may reasonably ask which master came first. Conditioning also rides the budget cycles of a public institution rather than a private pro shop. None of it displaces the course. Veenker is the best test in Ames by a margin wide enough that the rest of this list is really about second place, and every serious golfer in central Iowa knows the drive to play it.

## 2Coldwater Golf Links

Coldwater is the newer public option, built in a links style that suits the Iowa wind better than most American courses dare to try. Links is a word developers abuse, but the idea underneath it fits this state: open ground, firm bounces, wind as a design feature, trouble that is mostly about angles rather than water. On a blustery October day, which in Iowa is most of them, Coldwater plays the most honest golf in town after Veenker, and some days the more enjoyable.

It ranks second on ceiling. Coldwater does not examine a player the way Veenker does, does not have the championship record, does not make anyone's list of the hardest rounds in the state. What it has is playability with character, at a public price, which is the exact combination that keeps a course busy in a town this size. The concession in the other direction deserves stating too: a purist who thinks links golf requires an ocean will find the name ambitious. A purist who actually plays it in a 20 mile an hour prairie wind usually stops objecting by the fourth hole.

## 3Ames Golf and Country Club

The country club is the private end of Ames golf, the member course, and by all local accounts a pleasant, well kept round in the classic Iowa club mold: tree lined, social, maintained to the standard members pay for and public courses envy in August. If you have the invitation, it may well be the most comfortable day of golf in town.

It finishes third here on the evidence available to everyone else. A ranking has to argue from what can be examined, and a private course with no championship footprint and a local reputation cannot argue past a course that hosted an NCAA regional or a public test this distinctive. Members will tell you the conditioning alone settles it, and on their home course, with their locker and their lunch, they are not wrong about their own Saturdays. They are just answering a different question. This list ranks the golf a golfer can get to, and in Ames that order is Veenker, Coldwater, and then the club behind its gates.

In the fall, when the leaves turn in the Squaw Creek valley and the university is playing football across town, Veenker goes quiet and golden and hard as ever. Ames is a small golf town with one big test. It only ever needed the one.

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