Town Rankings / Iowa
The Best Golf Courses in Des Moines
Iowa's capital has the deepest golf bench in the state, and it is not particularly close. Two private clubs with national tournament history, a municipal course that claims to be the oldest west of the Mississippi, and a second city course that does the everyday work. Des Moines golfers argue about this ranking the way other towns argue about high school football, which is to say the material deserves it.
We score the golf first, then the day, then access. That order matters here, because access would scramble the list completely: the two best courses in the city are private, and the most democratic one is a century and a quarter old. Ranked on the golf, this is how it stands.
1Wakonda Club
Wakonda hosted a U.S. Amateur, and it did so on a golf course in the Langford and Moreau style, which is the key to the whole ranking. Langford and Moreau were the Midwest's bold earthmovers, architects who built big features with steam shovels and little interest in subtlety, and their surviving work has a scale and a strangeness that modern golf rarely attempts. A U.S. Amateur venue with that pedigree is not just the best course in Des Moines. It is one of the more interesting pieces of golf architecture in the entire Midwest, a private club holding a style of design that the game has mostly lost.
The concession is the gate, again, and the related one: golden age architecture behind a membership means most Iowa golfers will know Wakonda by reputation rather than by round. There is also the standing question of how much of the original Langford and Moreau work any century old club retains. Even discounted, what is here outranks the field. The U.S. Amateur does not get awarded to local favorites. It gets awarded to courses that can examine the best amateurs in the country, and Wakonda did.
2Des Moines Golf and Country Club
Des Moines Golf and Country Club is the city's other national stage, 36 holes of Pete Dye golf and the host of the 2017 Solheim Cup, when the American and European women played a raucous match here and Iowa showed up in numbers that startled the LPGA. That is a serious resume. Dye's work gives the club a modern championship test completely unlike Wakonda's golden age bones, which makes Des Moines a genuinely rare city: two private clubs, two different centuries of design thinking, both proven at the national level.
It ranks second by a nose, and the argument is taste, stated openly. Dye's manufactured drama is a known language, spoken at famous courses all over the country. Langford and Moreau's language is nearly extinct, and Wakonda speaks it on ground that hosted a U.S. Amateur. Rarity wins ties on this site. The concession to the members here is that on tournament infrastructure, conditioning, and sheer depth across 36 holes, their club is the bigger operation, and if the Solheim Cup comes back to Iowa it will come back here. Second in Des Moines would be first in almost any other Midwestern capital.
3Waveland Golf Course
Waveland claims to be the oldest municipal course west of the Mississippi, dating to 1901, and the claim alone earns the reverence Des Moines golfers give it. A city course from 1901 that is still operating, still busy, still set on its rolling ground above the city, is a piece of American golf infrastructure as old as the game in this country gets. The golf has been refashioned many times across 125 years, as it had to be, but the bones and the setting remain: a real course, with real elevation for Iowa, walkable and civic and proud.
Third on this list is an achievement, not a slight, because look at the company. Waveland cannot examine a player the way the two private clubs can, and its conditioning rides a city budget against private money. What it has that neither club can buy is 1901 and the public. Estimates of what a round costs at the clubs above are beside the point, since no green fee exists. Waveland's price is posted at the counter for anyone. In a ranking about a whole city's golf, that counts, and it counts here at third.
4A.H. Blank Golf Course
A.H. Blank is the city's other municipal course, the south side's everyday golf: affordable, full length, busy with the leagues and regulars who are the actual population of Des Moines golf. It does not claim 1901. It does not need to. A two muni city needs one course that is a landmark and one that is simply there for everybody, every day, and Blank is the second kind done properly.
Fourth, honestly and without apology. Put Blank's best hole against Wakonda's and the conversation is over, but that was never its contest. Its contest is against an empty lot, a closed course, a city that gave up on public golf, and across Iowa plenty of cities have lost that fight. Des Moines kept both its munis and both its clubs. Blank finishing fourth on a list this strong says more about the city than about the course.
On a summer evening Waveland's old ground fills with walkers, 125 years of Des Moines golf still going off in the long light. Two national clubs, two city courses, one capital. The rest of Iowa is not catching up.