# The Best Golf Courses in Bellevue

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-bellevue-wa/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Washington


A leading golf course in Washington. Photo: Atomic Taco from Seattle, WA, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Start with a confession about geography. The best golf course on this list is not in Bellevue. It is in Redmond, up in the tall pines, and another one sits across the line in Medina. That is how Eastside golf works. Bellevue is the address people give, the courses spread out into the suburbs around it, and any honest ranking of golf in Bellevue has to follow the golfers rather than the city limits.

What Bellevue itself has is money, evergreens, and rain for much of the year, which produces a specific kind of golf: tree-lined, soft underfoot in winter, and split sharply between private clubs with long waiting lists and one municipal course that carries the public game for the whole Eastside. This list reflects that split. The top is private and, in one case, championship proven. The bottom is the course most Bellevue golfers actually play, and it matters for exactly that reason.

We rank the golf first. Access counts, but it does not rescue a weaker course past a stronger one, which is why the order below will annoy public golfers and private members in roughly equal measure.

## 1Sahalee Country Club Redmond

Sahalee hosted the 1998 PGA Championship, won by Vijay Singh, in corridors of pine so tall and tight that the course felt carved rather than built. That week told you everything about the place. The trees do not frame the holes so much as police them. Miss the fairway and you are not scrambling, you are negotiating.

That is a particular kind of test and not everybody loves it. The concession: Sahalee asks the same question for eighteen holes. Drive it straight, then drive it straight again. Golfers who prize variety, width, and angles will call it relentless, and they have a point. There is little room out there to swing freely and think your way back into a hole.

But a ranking has to respect a course that a major championship could be dropped onto without apology, in a metro where that is a short list. Sahalee is the strongest golf anywhere near Bellevue, and it is not close. The pines, the quiet, the sense that the course has not had to change itself for anybody. No. 1, comfortably.

## 2Overlake Golf and Country Club Medina

Overlake sits in Medina, on the Lake Washington side of the Eastside, and it is the classic old-money club of this list: established membership, traditional parkland golf, a place where the social side and the golf side have had decades to settle into each other.

The golf is a step below Sahalee in severity and in ceiling, and Overlake partisans would probably accept that trade. What you get instead is a well-kept, walkable, traditional test that rewards positioning over power. The concession is the usual one for clubs of this type. Estimates put the cost of belonging well beyond casual reach, the waiting list does the rest, and for the vast majority of Bellevue golfers Overlake is a course they will drive past rather than play.

Second place on the strength of the golf and the setting. If access were the whole ranking, it would fall. It is not.

## 3Glendale Country Club

Glendale is Bellevue's own private option, inside the city in a way the two courses above it are not, and that alone earns it a serious hearing. Members get a tree-lined parkland course in the middle of their own suburb, the kind of club built around weekday golf and family use rather than championship ambition.

It gives up ground to Sahalee on test and to Overlake on pedigree and setting, and pretending otherwise would be flattery. The concession cuts the other way too, though. Of the three private courses here, Glendale is the one an ordinary Bellevue professional might plausibly join, which makes it the most relevant private golf in the city for most readers.

Third is fair. Good golf, honest role, no inflated claims.

## 4Bellevue Golf Course

The muni. Bellevue Golf Course is the Eastside's everyman course, the public game for a city full of people who work in tech, play in leagues after work, and need a tee time that does not require a membership committee.

It finishes last on architecture and it would finish last on any list that only measured the golf hole by hole. The conditioning will not match the private clubs, the layout is a municipal layout, and nobody is flying in to play it. All true.

And yet. Rankings that ignore the course a town actually plays are lying about the town. Bellevue Golf Course is where Bellevue learns the game, where the twilight rounds happen, where the public golfer on the Eastside goes. Last on this list, first in rounds played, and the gap between those two facts is the story of Bellevue golf.

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