# The Best Golf Courses in Chaska

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-chaska-mn/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Minnesota


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

Chaska is a small town southwest of Minneapolis that most Americans could not find on a map until its golf course started hosting the game's biggest weeks. Then the Ryder Cup came to Hazeltine in 2016, the town filled with flags and grandstands, and a quiet Minnesota suburb briefly became the center of the golf world. That is Chaska's strange position in the sport: a two-course town where one course has a resume most states cannot match and the other course exists, in part, because the famous one needed somewhere for the overflow to play.

Two courses, then, and no pretense that this is a deep bench. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and Chaska is the rare town where the columns split cleanly down the middle. The golf and the day belong to the private club by a distance that does not require arguing. Access and value belong entirely to its public neighbor. The ranking scores golf first, so the order is settled, but the second course on this list might be the most useful No. 2 in Minnesota.

## 1Hazeltine National Golf Club

Hazeltine hosted two U.S. Opens, two PGA Championships, and the 2016 Ryder Cup. Read that resume again and consider the town it happened in. Major championship golf is supposed to live at coastal clubs and century-old eastern addresses. Hazeltine built its claim in Minnesota farmland, on the strength of a long, demanding course that governing bodies kept trusting with their biggest events, and of a membership that wanted exactly that burden. The 2016 Ryder Cup is the modern peak of the story, the week the whole sport watched an American team finally win one back on a course set up to let them swing.

The golf itself is a championship examination in the fullest sense: length, pressure, and no interest in your feelings, a course built to separate fields rather than to charm members. The concession, and it is the standard one at this altitude, is access compounded by severity. Hazeltine is private, so the public golfer's Chaska starts at No. 2, and even as a guest you should know the course was not designed for your handicap. It was designed to find out who the best player in a field of the best players is. Recreational golfers are welcome to watch.

None of that touches first place. Hazeltine is not just the best course in Chaska. It is one of the most credentialed championship venues in the country, hiding in a suburb, and any list that manufactured a debate at the top here would be lying for sport.

## 2Chaska Town Course

Chaska Town Course is the Arthur Hills public course built for overflow, which is the most honest origin story a municipal course has ever had. When Hazeltine's big weeks came to town, somebody sensible asked where everyone else was supposed to play, and the answer was a proper public course next door rather than a patch of overflow parking with flags in it. Hills gave the town a genuine golf course, and Chaska golfers have had a home game worthy of the neighborhood ever since.

The concession is the company. Any course sharing a town with Hazeltine's resume finishes second, and the Town Course's golf, good as it is, operates at a civic scale rather than a championship one. It was never meant to be a rival. It was meant to be the town's course, and it is an unusually good one, the rare muni whose founding story involves a Ryder Cup's worth of demand rather than a parks budget's worth of leftovers.

So Chaska's list is two lines long and complete. A private club with two Opens, two PGAs, and a Ryder Cup on its wall, and a public course built because the crowds for all of it needed somewhere to play. Late on a summer evening, with the championship ground quiet behind its gates and the town course still sending groups off, that seems less like a thin bench than a fair division of labor.

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