Town Rankings / Georgia
The Best Golf Courses in Athens
Athens produces tour players the way it produces bands, steadily and out of proportion to its size, and the University of Georgia Golf Course is where a generation of them learned to play championship golf in public. The course is university owned, open to anyone, and hard enough to hold NCAA regionals. Across town sits the other pole of Athens golf: Athens Country Club, a Donald Ross from 1926, private, 27 holes, where the town itself has belonged for a century. A college town's golf, split between the institution that makes it famous and the club that makes it home.
We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. Athens is one of the rare towns where the public option and the private option are both genuinely good, so the argument is real. The university course takes No. 1 on championship depth and the fact that anyone can test the claim. Ross takes the history, as Ross usually does, and loses on the one measure this ranking cannot waive: you probably cannot play it.
1University of Georgia Golf Course
Robert Trent Jones Sr. designed the University of Georgia Golf Course, opened in 1968, university owned, home of the UGA golf teams. The competitive record is the case: host of NCAA regionals, host of the Liz Murphey Collegiate Classic on the women's side, and in the 2010s era it hosted the Stadion Classic, a PGA Tour developmental event, which means professionals were paid to play a college muni and found it plenty. By public standards it is a demanding championship layout, Jones Sr. in his muscular mode, and it has seasoned a long line of Georgia players who went on to the tours.
The access story completes the ranking. College and public play at university rates puts a championship test inside a student's and a townie's budget, in a state where the comparable tests mostly sit behind gates. The concession: it is a stern walk and a stern test, Jones Sr. never built a gentle one, and on a football Saturday the whole apparatus of Athens in autumn swallows the golf course's quiet whole. Some golfers also find the university atmosphere, team facilities, the sense of playing on a practice ground for an elite program, less charming than a club. Fair. But the question a ranking answers is where the best golf is, and in Athens the best golf is the course the Bulldogs defend, open to the public, at college prices. That combination wins almost anywhere it appears.
2Athens Country Club
Donald Ross, 1926, private, 27 holes: the original Ross 18 plus a North nine added later. Athens Country Club is classic Ross in Bulldog country, his green complexes doing the quiet work they do everywhere, and the club carries SEC and Georgia amateur history and home club ties to University of Georgia golf, because in Athens everything golf eventually connects back to the university anyway.
The case for Athens Country Club at No. 1 is the case Ross partisans make everywhere and often win: the greens are the most interesting putting surfaces in town, the 1926 routing has a walkability and rhythm that a 1968 championship course trades away for length, and the club has been restored in spirit to emphasize exactly that Ross character. If you value the approach shot over the drive, this is your No. 1 and the argument is respectable. It loses here on championship depth and on access, estimates placing its costs in the mid to high private tier, behind a gate a visiting golfer cannot open. The members, who get Ross every week and the UGA course whenever they want it, hold the best hand in Athens golf and know it.
3Jennings Mill Country Club
Arthur Hills designed Jennings Mill, opened in 1987, over in Bogart in Oconee County, private. It has hosted local tour qualifying in its history, which places it in the competitive ecosystem of Athens area golf rather than purely the social one, and Hills gave it the flowing, playable parkland he was building across the Southeast in those years.
Third is the honest spot. Jennings Mill is a good private club course in a town where the other two options are a championship public test and a 1926 Ross, and there is no version of this ranking, on golf, history, or access, where it climbs over either. What it offers its members is the Oconee County version of the club life Athens Country Club offers in town, a home course with a qualifying pedigree and none of the university circus on autumn Saturdays. Some Athens golfers choose exactly that, on purpose, and drive past two more famous courses to get to it. A ranking can respect the choice and still grade the golf third.
The pipeline is the closing picture here: kids learn the game around Athens, the good ones end up playing the university course against the best college fields in the country, and a few of them come back years later with tour cards and play it again for fun. A public course sits at the center of that whole story. Most towns, in Georgia and everywhere else, cannot say so.