# The Best Golf Courses in Baton Rouge

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-baton-rouge-la/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Louisiana


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

Baton Rouge golf runs on LSU time. The university is the town's second government, and its golf course carries that weight, while across the city a private club guards the top of the order and a city owned course designed by Robert Trent Jones quietly embarrasses richer facilities. Add a resort course up in the bluffs at St. Francisville and a public option out in Zachary, and the capital region has the deepest bench in Louisiana. Five courses, five different owners, five different ideas of who golf is for.

That spread is the story. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and Baton Rouge is the rare town where each column crowns a different winner. The best pure golf is private. The best day might be at the bluffs. The best value is city owned, which should not be possible with a name architect attached, and is anyway. The order below takes the private club on golf, defends the university course at second against a strong public challenge, and lets the rest fall where the evidence puts them.

## 1Country Club of Louisiana

Country Club of Louisiana is the state's standing answer to the question of where its best private golf lives, and Baton Rouge golfers have treated that as settled for a long time. The course was built to a national ambition in a city that usually builds to a local one, and the gap shows in every part of the round: the scale of the ground, the severity of the greens, the standard of the conditioning. Set against the rest of this list it is not a close call, and pretending otherwise to manufacture suspense would insult the reader and the club in equal measure.

The concession is access, again, and in Baton Rouge it stings because the alternative at No. 2 is genuinely strong. Country Club of Louisiana is a members' course in a members' city, and the public golfer's Baton Rouge starts at second place. We rank the golf first. The golf here is first by a margin no other Louisiana town on this swing can match, and No. 1 is where it stays.

## 2University Club of Baton Rouge

University Club is LSU's home, a Jim Lipe design built to house a serious college program, and college courses with real programs behind them are a distinct species: long enough to test elite amateurs, maintained to a standard a coaching staff demands, and open, in this case, to a public that gets to play where the Tigers practice. Lipe's work gives the course a modern championship shape, and the university's ambitions keep the conditioning honest in a way a purely commercial course in this climate would struggle to match through a Louisiana summer.

It concedes the top spot on ceiling and on setting. Nothing about a university facility carries the private club's sense of occasion, and the golf, while stern, does not reach the state best level of the course above it. What University Club offers instead is the best combination in town: near championship golf, public access, and a program's pride keeping the whole operation sharp. Most towns get one of those three. Baton Rouge gets all of them at No. 2.

## 3Santa Maria Golf Course

Santa Maria is a Robert Trent Jones design owned by the city, and that sentence should stop any golfer who knows what municipal golf usually looks like. Cities do not typically own name architect courses. They own compromises. Baton Rouge owns a Jones layout, a full size, full ambition golf course running through a residential landscape of lakes and mature trees, at municipal prices, as public infrastructure. It is the strongest argument in Louisiana that a city can run golf properly if it decides the game is worth running properly.

The concession is the municipal reality underneath the pedigree: public traffic, public budgets, conditioning that peaks and dips with the calendar. Santa Maria's best month can stand close to University Club. Its average month cannot. Third place prices in the average, while tipping its hat to the best public value on this list and, frankly, in the state.

## 4The Bluffs Golf Resort (St. Francisville)

The Bluffs makes its case with the one asset nothing else near Baton Rouge has: terrain. St. Francisville sits in the hills where Louisiana stops being flat, and a resort course built on bluff ground above the river country gets elevation change, views, and holes that fall and climb in a state where most golf is a negotiation with water on level ground. As a day out, a drive up from the city to play golf that feels un-Louisiana, the Bluffs may be the best entry on this list.

Golf first, though, and on pure design and conditioning the bluffs come fourth. Resort operations rise and fall with their owners' fortunes in a way a university and a city course do not, and the Bluffs' history has had more chapters than its rivals. The setting is first. The golf operation is fourth. Both things are true, and the ranking holds both.

## 5Beaver Creek Golf Course (Zachary)

Beaver Creek, up in Zachary, closes the list as the local public game: the round for golfers north of the city who want a real course without driving into Baton Rouge or paying resort money. It loses to a private flagship, a university championship layout, a Jones muni, and a bluff country resort, which is another way of saying it loses to the strongest top four in Louisiana. Fifth here would lead weaker towns.

Its role is secure because it asks for so little: show up, pay a fair price, play honest golf. The last light over Baton Rouge golf falls on a town that can offer five different versions of the game inside an hour, and the fifth is a public course in Zachary doing its job without complaint.

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