# The Best Golf Courses in Fayetteville, North Carolina

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-fayetteville-nc/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / North Carolina


A leading golf course in North Carolina. Photo: Dan Perry from Atlanta, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Fayetteville golfs in the shadow of Fort Liberty, and that shapes everything. Soldiers rotate in, play for two or three years, and rotate out. Courses here do not survive on a century of members telling the same stories. They survive by being playable, available, and close to the neighborhoods on the west side of town where the gated communities and the public tracks sit a short drive apart.

Candor first: this is a thin bench. Three anchors, two with real records behind them, and nothing here that belongs in a state top twenty conversation. That is fine. Not every town is Pinehurst, and Fayetteville is close enough to the Sandhills that its own golf has always played a supporting role. What follows is the honest order for golf inside Cumberland County, scored on the golf itself first and on whether you can actually get on second.

## 1Gates Four Golf and Country Club

Gates Four is the private club west of town, a Willard Byrd design from 1967 inside a gated community that, in local telling, belongs to the Sam Snead era of Fayetteville golf ambition. Byrd built courses all over the Carolinas in that period, usually sensible, tree lined tests that rewarded positioning over power, and Gates Four fits the period: a members' course from the years when a subdivision and a country club were planned as one idea.

It takes the top spot because it is the most complete club golf in the county. Private conditioning, a membership that treats the course as the center of the community, and a design pedigree with a name locals recognize.

The concession is that private and gated are doing real work in that sentence. If you cannot get on, the ranking is academic, and Byrd's Fayetteville work was never meant to compete with the famous names an hour up the road. As a destination, Gates Four is a no. As the best course in Fayetteville, it is a yes.

## 2Cypress Lakes Golf Course

Cypress Lakes is also Willard Byrd, but a generation later, opened in 1998 and public. That pairing tells the Fayetteville story in miniature: the same architect, once for the gated club in 1967 and once for everybody else at the end of the century.

Public access moves it close to the top spot, and on value it probably wins the list. A visiting golfer, a soldier new to town, a retiree looking for a regular game: Cypress Lakes is the round they will actually play, and a Byrd layout from the 1990s gives them a proper course rather than a worn out afterthought.

The honest knock is ceiling. It does not have the club atmosphere or the maintained edge of Gates Four, and it was built to serve a market, not to make an architectural argument.

Second place here, first place for most people reading this with a tee time to book this weekend.

## 3Baywood Golf Club

Baywood closes the list, and we will be straight about why the section is short. We do not have a verified record for Baywood in front of us: no architect, no opening year, no championship history we can responsibly print. Inventing a pedigree for it would be exactly the kind of padding this site does not do.

What can be said is the role it plays. Fayetteville golf beyond the top two is local golf, the kind that fills weekend tee sheets for the people who live here and never appears in a travel itinerary. Baywood is in that fight, the third name in a three course town, and its case rests on the golfers who keep showing up rather than on anything a panel can verify from a distance.

That is the whole bench. Two Byrds and a local option, in a military town that sends its serious golf weekends north to the sand. Drive up there for the famous rounds. Play these when you are home.

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