Town Rankings / Iowa

The Best Golf Courses in Cedar Rapids

Cedar Rapids has a claim most golf towns would trade for: it taught a two time major champion how to play. Zach Johnson learned the game here, on the courses of a mid sized Iowa city, and the wedge game that won him a Masters and an Open Championship was built in wind and weather nothing like Augusta in April. That is the town's golf story, and it is a better one than cities five times its size can tell.

Three courses anchor this list, one private club with the famous son attached and two city courses that do the daily work. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and here the private club wins on golf while the munis win everything else, which is more or less the natural order of American golf towns.

1Elmcrest Country Club

Elmcrest is Zach Johnson's home course, where he learned the wedge game that won two majors, and that sentence alone would put it on this list. It does not have to carry the ranking by itself. Elmcrest is the city's established private club test, kept to a member standard, with the kind of greens and conditioning that produce a player whose short game holds up under major championship pressure. Golfers do not develop that touch on indifferent surfaces. They develop it on good ones, hitting the same chips and putts ten thousand times. Elmcrest was the laboratory.

The concession is access, and it is total: this is a private club, and the ranking a reader can act on starts below. There is also an honest caveat about the Johnson effect, which is that a famous member can gild a course beyond its architecture. Plenty of fine players have come out of ordinary clubs. But Elmcrest's reputation in Iowa golf predates the green jacket, and the club course remains the best pure golf in Cedar Rapids. The hometown hero is the story. The golf underneath the story is the reason it ranks first.

2Twin Pines Golf Course

Twin Pines is one of the city's municipal courses and the public round most Cedar Rapids golfers would point a visitor to first. City golf in Iowa is a real culture, seasonal and weather beaten and loyal, and Twin Pines is its local headquarters: affordable, busy, kept with civic pride, and playable in the way that keeps leagues full and juniors coming back. The layout will not frighten a good player. It is not trying to. It is trying to give a city of this size a course it can use every day from April to November, and it succeeds completely.

Second place, ahead of its municipal sibling, comes down to that centrality. When a town's public golfers treat one course as the default (the league night course, the Saturday morning course), the ranking should listen. The concession is ceiling. Twin Pines has no argument with Elmcrest about architecture, and nobody here pretends it does. It wins its own category, which is the course the city actually plays.

3Jones Park Golf Course

Jones Park is the other city course, golf inside one of Cedar Rapids' public parks, and it does the most democratic job in town: the cheapest, easiest entry into the game, the round for beginners, families, and the nine after work crowd. Park golf is where American golf quietly reproduces itself, and a city that keeps a course like this in good order is spending its money correctly.

Third, because somebody has to be, and because Jones Park's purpose is access rather than examination. Its greens will not teach anyone a major winning wedge game, and its holes do not ask hard questions. But hold it against the right standard and it is beyond criticism: more Cedar Rapids residents probably played their first round here than at the other two combined. Rankings measure courses. Towns run on on ramps like this one.

Somewhere at Elmcrest there is a practice green where a kid from Cedar Rapids once hit wedges until the light went. The city still plays golf in his shadow, three courses deep, and that is deeper than most towns ever get.