Town Rankings / Maryland

The Best Golf Courses in Annapolis

Annapolis is a sailing town that tolerates golfers. The harbor runs the calendar, the Naval Academy runs the skyline, and golf fits in around the edges, on ground the water keeps interrupting. That turns out to be a good arrangement. The best course here sits on the Severn River on Academy ground, designed by one of the golden age's finest architects and restored in recent years by one of the best restorers working now. The other two courses on the list serve the surrounding county, in Crownsville and Arnold, and Annapolis golfers treat that whole arc as one golf town. So do we.

This is a short bench and we will not inflate it. Three courses, one clear leader, then an honest fight for second between two public options with different virtues. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and access here has a wrinkle no other list in this series quite has: the No. 1 course is shared between midshipmen and members, which puts it in a category of its own.

1Naval Academy Golf Course

The Naval Academy course is a William Flynn design restored by Andrew Green, set on the Severn, and that sentence contains the whole case for No. 1. Flynn was one of the great architects of his era, a man whose courses reward thought and punish the lazy line, and Green has built his reputation on restoring golden age courses with a scholar's respect and a modern eye. When a restoration pairing like that happens on riverfront ground in Annapolis, the result is the best golf in the city by a wide margin.

What gives the round its character is who shares it. Midshipmen and members play this course together, which means your foursome might follow a group of plebes learning the game between classes, on a course that asks Flynn's questions at full strength. There is no other golf experience in Maryland quite like it: service academy golf, played seriously, on classic ground above the river where the Academy's boats work below.

The concessions are real. Access is not a public tee time you can book on a whim; the course serves the Academy community and its members first, and the visitor's path in runs through connection or invitation. Conditioning at a course carrying heavy Academy play also has to serve two masters. Neither point touches the architecture, and the architecture is the ranking. Flynn on the Severn, restored properly, wins Annapolis going away.

2Eisenhower Golf Course (Crownsville)

Eisenhower, the county course in Crownsville, takes second as the best straightforward public round in the Annapolis area. It is the workhorse option: a full, honest layout in the woods northwest of the city, the kind of course where Annapolis area leagues live, where a public golfer can get a real game on real ground without a membership or a sponsor. County courses earn their keep on volume and loyalty, and Eisenhower has both.

The golf will not make you forget Flynn, and it does not try to. What it offers is space, trees, a test that holds up week after week for the regulars who play it, and a price that keeps those regulars coming. Every golf town needs a course like this underneath its flagship, and a lot of towns do not have one this solid.

Where it wins against the third course here is consistency of the test. Where it loses, honestly, is character: Crownsville is a drive from the water, the setting is pleasant woods rather than Chesapeake shore, and nobody writes home about a round at Eisenhower. They just book another one, which is its own kind of review.

3Bay Hills Golf Club (Arnold)

Bay Hills, in Arnold just across the river side of Annapolis, is the third course and the neighborhood option: semi private in feel, convenient to the Broadneck Peninsula, the round you play when the goal is golf after work and dinner at a normal hour. It serves its community the way community courses do, with regulars, leagues, and a tee sheet full of people who know the greens by their first names.

As a pure test it sits a tier below Eisenhower, a little less demanding, a little less memorable hole to hole. That is the concession and the ranking in one line. But for golfers who live on that side of the Severn, Bay Hills is Annapolis golf in the practical sense, and practical golf played weekly beats famous golf played never.

Play Flynn's course if the Academy door opens, even once. Until it does, Crownsville on a fall morning, leaves turning over a quiet county fairway, is Annapolis golf without the postcard, and it holds up fine.