# The Best Golf Courses in Boca Raton

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-boca-raton-fl/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Florida


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

Boca Raton is what happens when golf community development gets a fifty year head start and unlimited landscaping budget. The town is a quilt of gated clubs, each with its own courses, its own dining room, its own hierarchy, and the public golfer drives past all of it on the way to the county courses at the western edge of town. Boca West alone runs seven courses behind one gate. Seven. The outsider's Boca is two county facilities and whatever invitations he can cultivate.

So this ranking has to serve two readers at once: the member class, for whom the question is which private club's golf holds up best, and everyone else, for whom the question is where to play at all. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. On that scoring a tournament proven private course takes the top spot, the seven course empire takes second on sheer scale, and the best public course in town beats the second public course by a wide margin.

## 1Broken Sound Club

Broken Sound's Old Course is the Boca course with a national paper trail. A Gene Bates design from 1978, it hosted the PGA Tour Champions' TimberTech Championship for years, which means the best over-50 players in the world came to Boca every season and played this course under tournament conditions, and the course held up its end. Bates, who worked in the Nicklaus organization before his own career, builds the kind of Florida golf that ages well: water in play but rarely cheap about it, greens that reward the correct side of the hole, and a routing through mature trees in a town where most courses play through open subdivision.

The concession is that Broken Sound is a club, with a club's costs and a club's gate, and the Old Course asks members to share their home with a professional event's infrastructure and ambitions. Neither point is disqualifying. Tournament validation is the rarest currency in Florida golf, where a thousand courses claim championship status and a handful have ever proved it. Broken Sound proved it annually. No. 1.

## 2Boca West Country Club

Boca West runs seven courses behind one gate, and at some point scale becomes its own argument. A member here can play a different course every day of the week without repeating himself, in a community built entirely around the proposition that golf is not an amenity but the organizing principle of daily life. The individual courses vary, as seven courses under one roof must, and the best of them are good, serious Florida golf. The worst of them are still maintained to a standard most clubs would envy.

What Boca West cannot do is point to one course and call it the town's best. Depth beats peak in a membership brochure; in a ranking, peak wins. There is also the small matter that the entire operation exists for its residents, and the visiting golfer's relationship to Boca West is mostly architectural tourism from the road. Second place, as the largest golf machine in Boca and not quite its finest single test.

## 3Osprey Point Golf Course

Osprey Point is the outsider's way into Boca golf, and it is a genuinely good one: 27 public holes in South County Regional Park, designed by Robert von Hagge and opened in 2010, with an environmental brief that shaped the whole project. The three nines, Raven, Falcon, and Hawk, rotate through a landscape of lakes, wetlands, and native plantings that feels like the edge of the Everglades rather than the middle of a golf subdivision, because it is. County rates, real design, and a setting with actual birds in it. In Boca, that combination is close to radical.

Von Hagge's work is theatrical, and the concession here is that the theater occasionally shouts: mounding and water features that announce themselves where a quieter hand might have let the flat Florida land speak. It bothers purists more than it bothers the golfers who fill the tee sheet. Osprey Point is the best public golf in Boca Raton by a distance that embarrasses the private clubs' claims to run the town's golf scene. Third overall, first for anyone without a membership number.

## 4Southwinds Golf Course

Southwinds is the other Palm Beach County course in Boca, a Charles Ankrom design from 1978, and it is the workhorse option: flat, water heavy county golf, honestly priced, heavily played, and built for the local who wants a game rather than an experience. Ankrom's course does not pretend to be Osprey Point, which opened three decades later with a design budget Southwinds never saw.

It finishes fourth because on holes, setting, and ambition it is fourth, and pretending otherwise would insult the reader. Its real role in Boca golf is pressure relief: the affordable round that keeps the town's public golfers playing when Osprey Point's sheet is full. Every golf town needs one course like this. Boca, being Boca, buries it at the bottom of a list it would top in most American suburbs.

Evening comes down over the western county courses first, the egrets working the lake edges at Osprey Point while the gated clubs light up for dinner service. Boca built two golfs, one for its members and one for everybody else, and the surprise of this ranking is how much of the good stuff the everybody else side got.

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