# The Best Golf Courses in Cleveland

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-cleveland-oh/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Ohio


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Cleveland's serious golf lives east, in the suburbs that climb away from Lake Erie into beech and maple country: Pepper Pike, Beachwood, out to Chardon where the snow belt starts. It is a golden age town. Two of the four courses on this list hosted major championships before the Second World War era had fully closed, one is a modern Fazio retreat built inside an old sand quarry, and the fourth is a Donald Ross municipal run by the Metroparks, which might be the most Cleveland sentence on this page. Grit and pedigree, same list.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Cleveland scores unusually well on all three for a city its size, and the Ross muni at the bottom of this ranking is the reason the access score survives.

## 1The Country Club (Pepper Pike)

The Country Club, everybody in Cleveland just calls it Country, is William Flynn's work in Pepper Pike and the finest all around golf course on this list: rolling, strategic, beautifully bunkered parkland that hosted the U.S. Amateur in the 1930s and the U.S. Women's Amateur in 2012, where a teenage Lydia Ko won. That pairing of championships, seventy years apart, says what the club is. The golf has not dated. Flynn's greens ask you to come in from the correct side and forgive nothing from the wrong one, and the course builds to a finishing stretch that has decided club championships and national ones with the same holes.

The concession is Canterbury, two spots of history over: its major record is heavier, and its partisans argue, with documents, that it should lead this list. We land on Country for the quality of the everyday test, hole after hole, over the weight of history. It is close. In Cleveland, close at the top is the tradition.

## 2Canterbury Golf Club (Beachwood)

Canterbury's record is the one that stops arguments in other towns: two U.S. Opens, in 1940 and 1946, both won in playoffs, and a PGA Championship in 1973, on top of a run of senior majors later. Herbert Strong built a big, demanding course on hilly ground in Beachwood, and it remains a stern walk. The closing holes climb and press, and the whole place has the bearing of a club that has watched the best players in the world sweat on its 18th green and found the experience repeatable.

Why second? Because on a Tuesday in June, Country's variety and Flynn's green complexes give a good player more to think about, and a ranking has to choose what it is measuring. Canterbury concedes charm and wins on consequence. If your standard is what a course has hosted, reverse the top two and we will not call you wrong. We will just note that hosting is history, and the golf itself, today, tips the other way by a nose.

## 3Sand Ridge Golf Club (Chardon)

Sand Ridge is the modern entry: Tom Fazio built it in the late 1990s inside a worked out sand and gravel quarry in Chardon, and the land does things no parkland course can. Fairways run along quarry lakes, holes dive and climb through terrain that looks transplanted from somewhere wilder than Geauga County, and the club keeps the whole experience deliberately small and quiet. It is a retreat model club, few members, fewer tee times, golf as escape.

The concession writes itself: almost nobody can verify any of this, because almost nobody gets out there, and a course that functions as a rumor has a ceiling on a public ranking. On the golf alone, those who have played it put it level with the top two. We put it third, with respect, and note that third in Cleveland still means Fazio working with a quarry, which is more raw material than most architects get in a career.

## 4Manakiki Golf Course

And then the muni, and what a muni to have. Manakiki is a Donald Ross design in Willowick, run by Cleveland Metroparks, where a resident can play a genuine Ross for public money on the east side. The bones show: plateau greens, bunkering placed with intent, a routing that walks the ravines instead of fighting them. Conditioning rises and falls with municipal budgets, and the pace on a summer Saturday can test a marriage. Both things are true and neither changes what the course is.

It finishes fourth because the other three are exceptional, full stop. On value it finishes first in this town and near first in Ohio. A rankings site that cannot find room to praise a playable public Ross is a site that has forgotten who golf belongs to. Cleveland has not forgotten. The Metroparks kept the Ross, the majors live out east, and the whole argument fits inside one county.

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