Town Rankings / Florida

The Best Golf Courses in Daytona Beach

Daytona runs on engines and, quietly, on golf history that predates the speedway by decades. The LPGA made its headquarters here, and its two course facility still sits west of the track like a second campus for the women's game. Downtown, the city runs a Donald Ross course from 1922, from the winter tour era when the best players in America came south by train and played their way down the Florida coast. Three courses, three eras, one small beach city.

The bench is exactly that deep, and it divides neatly. Two modern courses share a clubhouse at LPGA International, one by Rees Jones and one by Arthur Hills, and the old Ross muni carries the town's history and its value argument. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and Daytona's ranking asks a real question inside that scoring: how much does a century old pedigree weigh against modern championship length and polish?

1LPGA International Jones Course

The Jones Course is the serious test at LPGA International, a Rees Jones design from 1994 that became the facility's qualifying workhorse, hosting LPGA events and Q-Series, the gauntlet where tour cards are won and lost. Rees Jones built his name preparing courses for championships, and this is that school applied to flat Florida ground: clearly defined targets, bunkering that shows you the intended line and punishes the refused one, and greens that demand the approach be played from the correct side. It is examination golf, and the examination has been administered to professionals often enough that the grades mean something.

The concession is warmth. The Jones Course tests more than it charms, and a resort golfer can finish the round respecting it without loving it. Love is available elsewhere in Daytona, at the old muni downtown. But a ranking that scores golf first has to put the course that has sorted out tour players at the top of a three course town, and it does.

2LPGA International Hills Course

The Hills Course, Arthur Hills in 1998, is the second half of the LPGA International pair and the friendlier half, which is a relative term at a facility built around qualifying. Hills works the same flat, wet Florida canvas as his neighbor with a lighter hand: more room to miss, more holes that invite the average player to have a go at something, and a round that feels like a resort course with championship bones rather than the other way around. It has its own qualifying history for the US Open and the LPGA, so the bones are documented.

Hills versus Jones is the oldest argument in two course facilities, the test against the day out, and reasonable Daytona golfers split on it. This ranking gives the edge to Jones on difficulty proven at the highest level, and gives Hills the better Saturday. Second place, and the first booking for most visiting foursomes, which tells you something true about what golfers actually want.

3Daytona Beach Golf Club

The city's South Course is a Donald Ross from 1922, municipal golf from the winter tour era, when Daytona was a stop on the circuit and Ross was the most in demand architect in America. The facility runs North and South courses now, and the South carries the Ross lineage: compact, walkable, routed through the old in town ground with the economy of an architect who designed on paper and trusted the land he was given. A round here costs what a round at a city course should cost, which in modern Florida is its own form of heritage.

Honesty requires the third place finish. A century of municipal budgets sits between the Ross on paper and the course on the ground, and the two LPGA International courses are longer, better kept, and harder in every measurable way. Ross loyalists will argue the pedigree should outrank at least the Hills Course, and on architecture alone, in a seminar room, they might win. On the course as it plays today, the muni finishes third, beloved and outgunned.

The speedway gets the February crowds and the television cameras, but the oldest sporting institution in Daytona is a city golf course drawn up when the beach itself was the racetrack. Play the Jones for the test. Play the Ross because it is still here, and still costs a working person a fair price to find out what 1922 felt like.