# The Best Golf Courses in Frisco

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Texas


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Frisco was farmland and then a suburb and then, almost overnight, the center of American golf's business map. PGA Frisco is the PGA of America's headquarters, with Gil Hanse's East course and Beau Welling's West course on the same campus, and majors are already booked there. A town that did not register in golf conversations a generation ago now hosts the game's future calendar.

That makes this a ranking of a campus first and a town second. Three of the four names here belong to the PGA Frisco development, and the fourth is the established private club that existed before the headquarters arrived. The order rewards the championship test, then the better day out, then access.

## 1Fields Ranch East at PGA Frisco

The East is the reason the campus exists in its current form. Gil Hanse was hired to build the course that would hold majors, and majors are already booked there, which tells you what the PGA of America thinks it bought. Hanse's work elsewhere rewards angles and ground game over aerial target golf, and on open North Texas land with real wind, that philosophy has room to breathe. This is the course in Frisco that will be judged by the best players in the world, in public, and that scrutiny is the strongest evidence any new course can offer.

The concession: it is young, and young championship courses sometimes take a decade to grow into their reputation. The East has not yet had its defining Sunday. It gets the benefit of the doubt at No. 1 because of who built it, who booked it, and what it was built for, but the doubt is noted.

## 2Fields Ranch West at PGA Frisco

Beau Welling's West course has the harder job on the campus: be good enough to belong next to a major venue while being the course resort guests and everyday players actually enjoy more often. Second courses at famous developments usually fail by trying to be a smaller version of the first. The West succeeds in the rankings, and in most visitors' affections, by being its own round: more forgiving, quicker to play, easier to like on a first visit.

It ranks second because the East's ceiling is higher, full stop. On a windy corporate day, half the group would privately pick the West for a second round. That is not a contradiction. It is exactly what a two course campus is for.

## 3Stonebriar Country Club

Stonebriar is Frisco before the PGA arrived: the established private club of a fast growing suburb, built for members who wanted their golf close to home and their club life fuller than a daily fee facility could offer. It has served that purpose for a long time and, by local accounts, served it well.

It comes third because the town moved around it. Stonebriar did not get worse. Its competition got built by a national governing body with major championships in hand. As a members' club it may give its regulars a better year than either Fields Ranch course gives a visitor. As a golf course in a public ranking, it sits behind the campus, and the members, one suspects, are untroubled by that.

## 4The Trail PGA Frisco

The Trail is the smallest piece of the PGA Frisco puzzle and it ranks last for that reason alone. Supporting golf, the short and informal kind that fills an hour rather than a day, has a real place on a big campus. It introduces kids, settles bets, and gives a headquarters development something for the golfer who does not have five hours.

What it is not is a rival to three full courses, and this list will not pretend a supporting act is a headliner. Play it, enjoy it, and do not confuse it with the reason you came.

Frisco's golf story is still being written, and the East course will either earn its booking list or it will not. For now a suburb holds the game's headquarters, two new courses with real pedigrees, and a private club watching the circus from a comfortable distance.

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