# The Best Golf Courses in Austin Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-austin-tx/ [The Course Rankings](/) Town Rankings / Texas A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons A 1924 municipal course in the middle of Austin keeps refusing to die, and the man who led the fight to save it grew up playing it. Ben Crenshaw learned golf at Lions Muny, and when development pressure came for the land, as it comes for every valuable acre in this city now, Crenshaw stood up for the muni. That fight tells you more about Austin golf than any resort brochure. The city's golf soul is public, old, and a little stubborn, even as the money builds fancier options in the hills west of town. The split here is geographic and cultural. West, in the Hill Country edge, sit the resort courses at Barton Creek and the private Austin Country Club, polished and expensive in feel. In the city sits Lions, scruffier and beloved. South sits Grey Rock, the suburban daily option. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and Austin is the rare list where the resort pair, the private club, and a muni all have a genuine claim to a top two finish. ## 1Omni Barton Creek Fazio Foothills Course The Fazio Foothills Course at Barton Creek is the resort answer west of town, and it takes the top spot because it is the most complete examination in Austin, Hill Country ground used at full stretch. The land does the heavy lifting: elevation, limestone, live oaks, holes that climb and fall in a way nothing in the flat city game can imitate. Resort courses often soften the test for the paying guest. Foothills mostly does not. The concession is the resort frame itself. You are a guest in a hospitality machine, priced accordingly, and the course's difficulty tips into punishment in places where a member course would offer a bail out, because a resort round has to give the once a year visitor a story. Some of those stories are about lost balls. Even so, the combination of ground, design ambition, and conditioning tops the list. The best golf course in Austin is the one the city built its golf tourism around, and it holds up under the compliment. ## 2Austin Country Club Austin Country Club is the private establishment entry, the club where the city's golf has been played at its highest social altitude for generations, and its course, set along the river west of downtown, carries the setting argument against everything else on this list. River frontage and Hill Country bluffs in one property is a hand no muni can match. Why second, then? Because the ranking scores the golf course as a test first, and on that measure the Foothills layout asks slightly more, slightly more often. Conceded with real feeling: as a day, as a club, as a piece of Austin, it may be the finest golf address in the city. Our call is architecture over atmosphere by a nose. Plenty of Austinites will flip these two and sleep fine. ## 3Omni Barton Creek Crenshaw Cliffside Course The Crenshaw Cliffside Course is the gentler sibling at Barton Creek, and the name over the door matters to its character. Crenshaw's design instincts run to the ground game, to greens that accept a running ball and reward the player who thinks in contours rather than carry distances. At Cliffside that philosophy gets Hill Country terrain, and the result is the more playable, more traditional of the resort's two big courses, the one better players often prefer on a second playing when the Foothills bruises have faded. Third place is the honest spot. It shares the resort frame, so it cannot claim the city soul of Lions below it, and it stands in its sibling's shadow as a test. What it has is charm with a spine, a course you would choose for the pure pleasure of the shots it invites. Play Foothills for the verdict and Cliffside for the love of the game. ## 4Lions Municipal Golf Course Lions Muny is a 1924 course Ben Crenshaw grew up on and fought to save, and ranking it fourth on golf while knowing it is first in Austin's heart is exactly the tension this list exists to state plainly. The course itself is a short, walkable, old fashioned municipal layout, modest in length, honest in its demands, and entirely outgunned as an examination by the three courses above it. None of that is the point of Lions. The point is what it proves. A city that keeps a 1924 muni in its center, where generations learned the game for a few dollars and where a Masters champion came back to defend a public course against the developers, is a city whose golf culture runs deeper than its resorts. Conditioning is municipal. The pace is municipal. The meaning is unmatched in Texas public golf. Fourth on the card, and the one course on this list whose loss would actually wound the city. ## 5Grey Rock Golf Club Grey Rock serves south Austin, the daily fee game for the neighborhoods around it, with more Hill Country character than a suburban course has a right to. The rocky ground in its name is real, and it gives south side golfers a home course that requires no resort stay and no membership. It is fifth because the list above it is loaded: two resort courses, a great club, and a civic monument. Grey Rock's lane is the weekly game, and it fills it well enough that its regulars would not trade places with the hotel guests at Barton Creek. Every healthy golf city needs a fifth course like this, unfamous and fully booked. The sun drops behind the hills and the last walkers at Lions are coming up the fairway in the middle of the city, a hundred years of Austin golf still going at municipal prices. The resorts will be there tomorrow. Lions is the one that needed saving, and got it. **Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.