Town Rankings / Texas

The Best Golf Courses in Arlington, Texas

Arlington is the city Texas built for other people's entertainment, stadiums and theme parks stacked along the highway, and for years its golf was an afterthought in the middle of the Metroplex, a thing locals drove to Fort Worth or Dallas to do properly. That changed in a specific way. The city rebuilt its public golf around ideas, one course themed to a baseball team, one built as an environmental showcase, and both turned out to be better than the gimmick risk in either pitch.

Three courses make the list, and that is the honest bench. Arlington sits between two of America's deepest golf cities, and half its serious players hold memberships or habits outside the city limits. What remains in town, though, is unusually interesting for a three course list: two municipal courses with real identities and one private club. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in Arlington the public pair carries the argument.

1Texas Rangers Golf Club

Texas Rangers Golf Club is the only MLB-themed golf course anywhere, built with the baseball team whose stadiums sit a short drive away, and the theme is the least important thing about it. Strip the branding off and what remains is a proper modern public test, wide enough for the daily golfer, shaped enough to interest the good one, and kept to a standard that municipal golf in Texas does not always reach. The baseball dressing, a clubhouse full of it, scorecards and markers with the Rangers identity worked through the round, is executed with a straight face, and it works because the golf underneath is not an afterthought.

The concession is that a themed course invites a skepticism this ranking shares. Golfers who hate a gimmick on principle will roll their eyes at the concept before they see the course, and a share of the green fee is plainly paying for the brand. Conceded, and ranked first anyway, because on the ground, hole after hole, it is the most complete public round in Arlington and the one visitors remember correctly: the golf first, the baseball second.

2Tierra Verde Golf Club

Tierra Verde is Texas's first Audubon Signature municipal course, a designation that describes how the place was built as much as how it plays, golf threaded through protected native ground on the south side of the city with the development kept off its back. The effect on the round is quiet. This is the least urban feeling golf in Arlington, holes separated by prairie and trees, the highway noise gone, the ball the loudest thing out there.

Purists for pure architecture may find it a touch gentle in places, and that is the honest concession: Tierra Verde's test does not press a strong player the way the Rangers course presses. What it offers instead is the best setting of any public course in this part of the Metroplex and a model of what a city can build when it treats a golf course as land stewardship rather than leftover acreage. Second here, and first on plenty of locals' lists for reasons this ranking respects.

3Shady Valley Country Club

Shady Valley is the private entry, the Arlington club for golfers who want the member version of the game without driving to Dallas or Fort Worth for it. It does the club job properly: a course its members know by heart, a social center for its neighborhoods, conditioning that answers to a membership rather than a city budget.

It ranks third because the two courses above it are doing something rarer. A solid private club in a Metroplex suburb is a known quantity, and known quantities finish behind a themed public course that actually plays and a municipal preserve that changed what Texas cities thought a muni could be. Shady Valley's members, it should be said, are not waiting on this ranking's approval. Their course is the one place in Arlington where the tee sheet is theirs. That has a value no public ranking fully prices in.

Two ideas for city golf, one private club, and a metro area spilling over with alternatives in every direction. Arlington's small list punches above its size, and the strangest sentence in Texas golf remains true here: the best course in town is the baseball one.