# The Best Golf Courses in Greensboro, Georgia

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-greensboro-ga/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Georgia


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

Greensboro is a small town in Greene County that happens to sit on Lake Oconee, and the lake rewrote its economy. Six courses ring this water, most of them inside Reynolds Lake Oconee, and the pecking order gets argued about in every grill room on the property. The short version people fly in for is the back nine at Great Waters, which plays along the shoreline coves and turns a resort round into something closer to a boat ride with golf shots in it.

This is resort and community golf, not muni golf, and the ranking should admit what that means. Conditioning is assumed. Money is assumed. Access runs through a resort stay or a membership, and we score the golf first, then the day, then what getting on actually involves. Within those rules, the fight here is real, because Reynolds hired Nicklaus, Rees Jones, and Fazio to build courses on the same lake and then let them argue with each other.

## 1Reynolds Lake Oconee Great Waters

Jack Nicklaus designed Great Waters, opened in 1992, and the back nine is the reason this course, and arguably this whole development, has a national reputation. It plays along Lake Oconee's shoreline coves, hole after hole where the water is not decoration but the hazard, the aiming line, and the excuse for every photograph. Nicklaus Design led a full renovation that reopened in 2019 and 2020, and the course regularly sits at No. 2 in Georgia on Golf Digest state lists, behind only Augusta National. It hosts the Linger Longer Invitational college event, which tells you the test holds up for players who hit it properly.

The concession: the front nine is good resort golf, not great golf, and the course's fame leans hard on that closing stretch. Plenty of famous back nines hide ordinary front nines. Here the split is just more visible. It still wins, because nobody else in Greensboro has a nine holes that golfers describe to strangers unprompted, and a ranking that ignored that would be lying about how this town's golf actually works.

## 2Reynolds Lake Oconee The Oconee

Rees Jones opened The Oconee in 2002 beside The Ritz-Carlton Reynolds, and it is the thinking golfer's pick on the lake. Risk and reward doglegs are its identity, Jones bunkering everywhere it needs to be, contoured greens that make the safe side of a fairway the wrong side often enough to keep you honest. It has been ranked among Golfweek's best residential and resort courses in Georgia, and on a calm day, played carefully, some locals will tell you it is the best pure test at Reynolds.

The concession is that it asks more than most resort guests brought. Jones's style, penal edges, demanding carries, greens that reject indifferent approaches, can turn a vacation round into a long afternoon. That is a compliment in a ranking and a warning on a tee sheet. It finishes second because Great Waters owns the lake's signature nine, not because The Oconee lacks substance. Pound for pound it might have the most.

## 3Reynolds Lake Oconee The National

Tom Fazio's National opened in 1997 as the Ridge and Bluff nines, with the Cove nine added in 2000, and it carries the most elevation change at Reynolds, more than 60 feet on some holes. That matters on a lake where most golf is flat. Fazio built parkland through hardwoods and lake fingers, ground that rises and falls, and the course has held a spot on Golf Digest's Georgia top 40. It was reconfigured in 2024 when the Richland course was created, reduced from its original 27-hole footprint, which tells you Reynolds itself treats the roster as a competition.

The concession is familiarity. Fazio's parkland language, wide corridors, sculpted bunkering, immaculate presentation, is a dialect golfers have heard at a hundred high-end developments. The National speaks it fluently and on better land than most. Third at Reynolds is no insult. It is the deepest bench in Georgia resort golf, and this is the course residents defend most stubbornly, which counts for something even if it does not change the order.

## 4Harbor Club on Lake Oconee

Harbor Club, a Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish design opened in 1991, is the alternative to the Reynolds machine: an established private and semi-private community on the same lake, with lake holes, rolling forest, and a calendar of local Georgia PGA and amateur play. Access runs through membership and limited outside play, which makes it the hardest of the four to sample casually and the easiest to overlook from the outside.

The concession is scale. Harbor Club does not have a Ritz beside it, a Nicklaus renovation in its past, or a national ranking to cite. What it has is 1991 bones from two architects who built playable, handsome golf for members rather than headlines, on the same water as everything ranked above it. In Greensboro that is fourth. Almost anywhere else in Georgia, it would be the story.

The lake does not rank them. The shoreline at dusk looks the same from every fairway on this list, and the argument about which course deserved your afternoon starts again at dinner, which is exactly how a six-course town should end the day.

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