# The Best Golf Courses in Dayton

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Ohio


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

Dayton's best golf sits in one neighborhood, and it is one of the great accidents of American course geography. In Kettering, south of the city, Moraine and NCR share a fence line: a golden age Scottish emigre's design restored to national attention on one side, a Dick Wilson championship pair on the other, and between them an argument that has kept Dayton golf dinners going for decades. Add a Donald Ross across town that hosted a PGA Championship in the 1950s and you have a small city with a bench most big cities would trade for.

We score the golf first, then the day. Dayton's top two are close enough that the scoring order matters, and we will show our work.

## 1Moraine Country Club

Moraine is Alex "Nipper" Campbell's 1930 design, and for most of its life it was the connoisseur's secret of Ohio golf: wildly rolling glacial ground, holes that sweep and tilt, a course that felt linksy in its movement while sitting in a Dayton suburb. Keith Foster's restoration in the last decade took out trees, brought back the width and the fescue edges, and the national rankings noticed all at once. They were late. Dayton knew. Moraine also has the championship receipt, the 1945 PGA, won by Byron Nelson in the middle of the greatest season anyone ever had.

The concession, and Moraine's members will make it themselves after the second drink, is that the course can be eccentric: blind moments, fierce slopes, a few holes that ask questions a first timer cannot answer. That is the cost of character, and we pay it gladly. On architecture and on the ground itself, Moraine is the most interesting golf course in the Miami Valley and it is not particularly close. First.

## 2NCR Country Club

NCR counters with scale and with Dick Wilson. The club, born as the National Cash Register employees' recreation ground, has two courses, and the South is the championship one: big, bold Wilson golf, hosted the 1969 PGA Championship and senior majors after, with the kind of length and bunkering that still reads as modern. The whole place has an origin story no other club on this list can match. A company built a golf club for its workers, and the workers' club grew up to host majors. Dayton should put that on a sign.

NCR concedes to Moraine on quirk and on the romance of the restoration story, and it wins, honestly, on day to day championship infrastructure and on the South Course's sheer heft. Plenty of Dayton golfers, including some who belong to both, would flip this order, and their case is the scorecard. Ours is the ground Moraine sits on. Second place by the width of a shared fence.

## 3Miami Valley Golf Club

Miami Valley is the third act and a good one: a Donald Ross course from the game's golden age that hosted the 1957 PGA Championship, the last one ever played at match play, which gives Dayton a trivia answer nobody guesses. The golf today is a members' Ross, tree lined and traditional, giving up the drama of Moraine's terrain and the scale of NCR's South while keeping the essential Ross pleasure of greens that make you think from the fairway.

The concession is condition and company. It is third because the two courses across the fence line from each other are national class, and there is no shame in being the third best course in a town of Dayton's size when the first two are this good. Most American cities would frame Miami Valley's resume and hang it at No. 1. Here it closes the list, and the list closes strong.

Visitors with one day should pick between the fence neighbors by temperament rather than by ranking: Moraine if you want golf that moves and surprises, NCR South if you want to measure yourself against a championship setup and get an honest number.

Three courses, two architects' golden ages and a match play PGA that history forgot, all inside one small Ohio city. Dayton's golfers are not spoiled. They are just right, and they can prove it.

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