# The Best Golf Courses in Dallas

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-dallas-tx/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Texas


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

South of downtown Dallas there is a links golf course built on a former landfill, and for a few years it hosted the city's PGA Tour event, the Byron Nelson, on firm, fenceless, treeless ground that looked like nothing else in Texas. Trinity Forest was a bet that Dallas, a city of money and polish and private clubs, would embrace a rumpled Coore and Crenshaw course on a reclaimed dump. The Tour eventually moved on. The course remains the most interesting argument in Dallas golf.

The rest of the city's game is club golf at a high level, Dallas National and Royal Oaks and Lakewood representing the private depth a rich city buys, with one beloved public course at the other end. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Access in Dallas is mostly a rumor for outsiders, and this ranking will not pretend otherwise. Four of these five doors need a member to open them.

## 1Dallas National Golf Club

Dallas National takes the top spot on the accumulated weight of everything a great modern club course is supposed to be: serious ground with more movement than Dallas geography usually allows, a layout that asks championship questions, and conditioning that money plus obsession maintains at a level the rest of the state measures itself against. It was built, plainly, to be the best course in Dallas, and the unusual thing is that most golfers who have played the city's full set agree it succeeded.

The concession is that ambition of this kind can feel engineered, a course and club constructed to a ranking rather than grown into one. Dallas National has no long history to lean on, no generations of members' stories in the walls. What it has is the golf, hole after hole of it at the highest standard in the city. Rankings here score the golf first. Dallas National is the best golf course in Dallas, and the fight underneath it is for second.

## 2Trinity Forest Golf Club

Trinity Forest hosted the Byron Nelson on a Coore-Crenshaw links in a former landfill site south of downtown, and it remains the most distinctive course in Texas, full stop. Links golf on reclaimed land, firm and fast, played along the ground in a state where championship golf usually means soft aerial targets, Trinity Forest is the connoisseur's vote and the traditionalist's headache. Its fans do not just prefer it. They proselytize.

We place it second on a split decision that this ranking will defend line by line. As originality, as philosophy, as a statement about what golf in Dallas could be, Trinity Forest is first by a mile. As a complete, repeatable championship test across all conditions and all games, Dallas National edges it. Conceded happily: on a firm October day with a breeze up, there is no round in Dallas we would rather play. The ranking is about the whole year and the whole argument, and the whole argument lands it a very close second.

## 3Royal Oaks Country Club Dallas

Royal Oaks is the established championship club of the group, a course with a tournament history of its own and a membership that has kept it in the serious golf conversation in Dallas for decades. Where Dallas National was built and Trinity Forest was imagined, Royal Oaks was sustained, renovation by renovation, into a modern test that good players respect without reservation.

Third place reflects the company rather than any weakness. Royal Oaks loses to the top two on singularity: it is an excellent version of a known thing, the big, fair, demanding Texas club course, where the leaders are each the only version of themselves. Its members get the best weekly golf argument in the city, since a case exists that on conditioning and tradition combined it belongs second. The case is heard. The order stands.

## 4Lakewood Country Club Dallas

Lakewood is the old neighborhood club, east Dallas golf with the community woven through it, the course by the lake where the surrounding streets grew up around the club rather than the other way around. The golf is classic in scale, a members' course of the older school, defended by position and green craft rather than length, and loved in the way only a course played ten thousand times by the same families gets loved.

It ranks fourth because the three above it operate at a championship scale Lakewood never chased. That restraint is also its charm, and we will concede the day argument outright: for pure club life, for a course as the center of a neighborhood's social world, Lakewood may be the finest golf address on this list. The ranking scores the test first, and the test says fourth. The neighborhood would not trade.

## 5Stevens Park Golf Course

Stevens Park is the public miracle of Dallas golf, a city course in Oak Cliff so well regarded that golfers call it the Little Augusta of the city's municipal system, a nickname repeated here as local affection rather than architecture criticism. Renovated with real care, set over rolling ground with downtown views, Stevens Park is the proof that Dallas did not leave its public golfers behind while it built its private monuments.

It is fifth because the four club courses above it are, as examinations, beyond a muni's reach, and honesty requires saying so. It is on the list, ahead of every other public option in the city by acclamation, because the ranking weights access too, and Stevens Park is the one round here that anyone reading this can simply go play. Play it and you will understand Dallas golf's full range faster than any member guest day: the city has taste at every price.

The landfill south of downtown grows better golf grass than most country clubs manage, the skyline sits behind the Stevens Park fairways, and somewhere between those two facts is the whole story of golf in this city.

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