# The Best Golf Courses in Biloxi

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-biloxi-ms/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Mississippi


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Biloxi is casinos and shrimp boats on the Mississippi Sound, and its golf, like everything else on this coast, refuses to stay inside the city limits. The two best courses on this list are not in Biloxi at all. One sits up in Vancleave, in a nature preserve in the pines. The other is down the coast in Gautier, on the Pascagoula River marshes. Biloxi is the base, the hotel, the dinner, and the name on the trip. The golf is a short drive in either direction, and any ranking that pretended otherwise would be lying about how the Coast actually works.

That sprawl is the character of the place. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and on the Gulf Coast the day includes the water, the seafood, and the fact that every course here is open to the public or playable through the casino resorts. No gates worth mentioning. For a visitor, this is one of the most usable lists in Mississippi.

## 1The Preserve Golf Club (Vancleave)

The Preserve is Jerry Pate's nature-preserve course in Vancleave, and the preserve part is not marketing. The course runs through protected land of longleaf pine and wetlands, set aside as conservation ground, and the golf was fitted into it under rules most developers would walk away from. Pate, who has spent a career building courses in the Southeast that respect Southern ground, produced a layout where the environment is the architecture: holes framed by savanna and marsh, no houses crowding the fairways, and quiet of a kind you cannot fake with landscaping.

It is also a genuine test, which is what separates it from other scenic conservation golf. Pate's greens ask questions, the par 3s play over wetlands you must carry, and the course has the conditioning and ambition of a place built to be the region's best. The concession is the drive and the seclusion itself. Some golfers want a scene after golf, and The Preserve offers trees. We rank it first without hesitation. It is the Coast's most complete marriage of land and design, and the round serious players plan the trip around.

## 2Shell Landing Golf Club (Gautier)

Shell Landing is a Davis Love III design in Gautier, set where the land gives out into river marsh, and it plays as the more open, wind-exposed counterpart to The Preserve's pine corridors. Love's design work tends toward the playable and the handsome, and Shell Landing fits: wide enough to enjoy, strategic enough to respect, and routed to bring the marsh into play as both hazard and backdrop on the holes golfers remember. It has hosted serious competitive golf in its time and holds up as the second-best test on this stretch of coast.

Head-to-head with The Preserve, it loses on atmosphere and on the distinctiveness of the ground. Marsh and river are fine settings, but Pate's preserve land is rarer, and Shell Landing's openness can make it a harder day when the Gulf wind is up, which is often. Second here is still a strong result. Plenty of Coast visitors play Shell Landing first, enjoy it more than they expected, and only later learn what the fuss up in Vancleave is about.

## 3Sunkist Country Club

Sunkist is the in-town entry, Biloxi's own club golf, the course that belongs to the people who live here rather than the people visiting the casinos. That role matters on a coast where so much golf is built for tourists. Sunkist is where local games happen, where Biloxi golfers have their handicaps and their Saturday routines, and a ranking of a town's courses that skipped it in favour of another drive-out resort course would misdescribe the place.

As pure golf it gives ground to the two designs above it, and nobody sensible argues otherwise. The name architects, the preserved land, and the marsh settings are out of town. What Sunkist offers instead is membership golf at a human scale, a few minutes from the beach. Third, as the hometown course, which is an honourable thing to be.

## 4Dogwood Hills Golf Club Biloxi

Dogwood Hills is the everyday public option in Biloxi, the affordable round you can book without a resort package, a casino host, or a plan. Courses like this keep a golf town honest. The presentation will not trouble the top two on this list, the architecture is straightforward, and a visitor with one day for golf should spend it in Vancleave or Gautier.

But Biloxi golfers play Dogwood Hills by the thousand, because it is there, it is theirs, and the price is right, and a complete picture of the town's golf includes it. Fourth, and content to be.

Two drives, one hometown club, one locals' track, and the Sound glittering behind all of it. Base yourself in Biloxi, point the car at the pines first, and the Coast will take care of the rest.

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