# The Best Golf Courses in Galloway

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-galloway-nj/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / New Jersey


A leading golf course in New Jersey. Photo: Bain News Service, publisher, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Galloway Township holds a golf argument that has been running since 1942. In that year, on the Bay Course at Seaview, Sam Snead won his first PGA Championship, and the resort course entered the permanent record of American golf. A few minutes away, behind a private gate, sits a Tom Fazio course that its members will tell you is the better golf course, full stop. Both claims live in the same township, on the same flat, bayside, pine edged ground behind Atlantic City, and this ranking has to pick a side.

The bench is three: Seaview's two resort courses, Bay and Pines, and Galloway National. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and here access is not a footnote. The resort courses take the public's money. The private one does not, and the LPGA still comes to Seaview every year. History, access, and a major champion's breakthrough against a Fazio behind a fence. Good argument. Here is our side.

## 1Seaview Bay Course

The Bay Course takes No. 1 on the combined weight of Donald Ross, Sam Snead, and the fact that the argument for it keeps getting renewed on television. The Bay is a Ross course where Snead won his first PGA in 1942, which places it in the small set of American courses where a legend's career turned. Snead won plenty afterwards. He won here first, and the course has worn that fact gracefully for eighty years, neither milking it dry nor letting anyone forget.

Ross on bayside ground is its own education. The Bay plays along the marshes and the water toward Atlantic City, wind off the bay doing the work that elevation does inland, and the design trusts that wind completely. This is golf as the golden age understood it near the sea: position over power, the ground game alive, a shortish course by modern numbers that has never once played short for the women of the LPGA, who come for the ShopRite each year and leave with real scores posted by real champions.

The concession is conditioning and scale against its private neighbour. A resort course carrying public and hotel play will not match a Fazio club's polish, and the Bay's modest length means the longest hitters see a friendlier course than the scorecard of 1942 suggests. We concede both, and rank it first anyway, because a ranking that cannot put a Ross where Snead broke through and the LPGA still plays above a private Fazio has forgotten what it is for.

## 2Galloway National Golf Club

Galloway National is the best pure golfing test in the township, and we will give its members that sentence in writing. A private Tom Fazio design on the bayside, built with a serious budget on serious ground, maintained to the standard unlimited member money buys, and kept deliberately quiet. Fazio at his best builds courses that flatter and test in the same hole, and Galloway National is widely treated, by the golfers lucky enough to see it, as one of his strongest in the region.

The case for No. 1 writes itself: better conditioning, a harder examination, a membership experience the resort cannot approach. If this ranking scored only the quality of the test presented to an expert player, Galloway National would take it, and our inbox would be calmer.

It finishes second for two reasons we are prepared to defend. The first is the gate: a course essentially nobody reading this can play loses the day and access portions of our scoring by forfeit. The second is that Fazio's polish, here as elsewhere, sands off some of the argument that makes a course unforgettable. The Bay Course's holes pick fights. Galloway National's holes make statements. We prefer the fight, especially one with Ross's name and Snead's breakthrough attached.

Second in Galloway, first in plenty of other townships. That is the honest summary, and the members arguing otherwise at least know we showed up to the argument.

## 3Seaview Pines Course

The Pines is the other Seaview course, the inland sibling, routed through the pines while the Bay takes the water and the history. Every two course resort has this dynamic: one course gets the postcards, the other gets the overflow, the outings, and the second round of the trip. The Pines has played that role at Seaview for generations.

It plays it well. Pine framed golf in the Jersey barrens is a legitimate pleasure, sheltered where the Bay is exposed, and for the visiting group doing 36 holes, the contrast is the product: marsh and wind in the morning, trees and quiet in the afternoon. Judged as a second course, the Pines is a success. Judged in a ranking, it is third, behind a Ross classic and a private Fazio, through no particular fault of its own.

Play the Bay for the history and the Pines for the shade, and if a Galloway National invitation ever lands, cancel everything. That is not a contradiction. That is a township with three good answers and one great argument, still running since 1942.

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