# The Best Golf Courses in Greensboro, North Carolina

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

Sam Snead won Greensboro's tournament eight times. Eight. The event moved around, changed names, outlived courses and sponsors, and Snead kept winning it across decades, which tells you something about both Snead and this city. Greensboro is not a golf resort town. It is a working Piedmont city that has hosted professional golf, on and off, since the late 1930s, and its courses carry that history without making a fuss about it.

The modern center of it is Sedgefield, a restored Donald Ross that brought the PGA Tour back in 2008. Around it sit two older private clubs with their own claims on the old Greater Greensboro Open, and a resort on the edge of town that gives visitors somewhere to play without a member sponsor. The ranking that follows scores the golf first, then the day, then access, and in Greensboro that order produces a clear winner and a genuine argument for second.

## 1Sedgefield Country Club

Ross opened Sedgefield in 1926, and the course hosted Greensboro's Tour event in its original era after the Greater Greensboro Open began in 1938. When the Wyndham Championship came to Sedgefield in 2008, it did so after Kris Spence restored Ross features in 2007, a sequencing that matters. The club did the historical work first, then invited the cameras back.

The result is the rare Tour venue where the architecture is the attraction. Ross greens do not care how far the modern ball flies. They shed sloppy approaches the same way they did when Snead was winning here, and a field of professionals still has to think its way around a course that was drawn before the bulldozer became the main design tool.

The concession is access and intent. Sedgefield is private, with costs in the high estimate tier, and the public sees it at full stretch only during tournament week, set up for players who are considerably better at golf than the membership. The everyday member course is a gentler thing.

It still wins this list by a distance. A restored Ross, a current PGA Tour event, and Snead's eight wins in the city's record books is more evidence than the rest of Greensboro can assemble combined.

## 2Greensboro Country Club

Greensboro Country Club fields two courses, the Farm Course and the Irving Park course, and the Farm is the one that carries the ranking. Ellis Maples designed it, opening in 1963, with a later renovation by Donald Steel. Maples learned the trade in the Ross orbit in the Sandhills, and his courses tend to be playable, sensible, and harder to score on than they first look.

The club is the in town institution on this list. Where Sedgefield feels like a championship venue that members borrow back after the Tour leaves, Greensboro Country Club feels like a club first, with the golf arranged around a membership's whole life.

The knock is straightforward. A 1963 Maples, however well kept, does not have a Ross original's ceiling, and the two course setup spreads attention that a single great course concentrates. Second place is a compliment in this town, and the Farm Course earns it on consistency rather than on any single famous week.

## 3Starmount Forest Country Club

Starmount's claim is historical and it is a good one. The club dates to 1930, with a George Cobb design lineage, and in the club's own telling it hosted LPGA golf and Greater Greensboro Open play before Sedgefield became the event's permanent home. For years, this was where Greensboro's tournament golf lived.

That history puts it ahead of the resort below it. Cobb knew Carolina golf as well as anyone of his generation, and a private club that has been part of the city's game since 1930 has a texture a 1990s resort cannot copy.

The concession is that the claim is largely backward looking. The Tour is at Sedgefield now, the restoration money and the national attention followed it there, and Starmount's modern case rests more on membership life than on the course's current standing among architects.

Third, then, with respect. If you love the old tournament, the version of Greensboro golf that existed before the Wyndham era, Starmount is the room where it happened.

## 4Grandover Resort Golf

Grandover is the visitor's answer. David Graham and Gary Panks designed the East Course, opened in 1996, as part of a two course resort in Greensboro, and it has hosted local championship play while doing the daily work a resort course does: conferences in the morning, tee times all day, nobody asked who they know in town.

That openness is worth real credit. It is the only course on this list a traveling golfer can simply book, and a Graham and Panks layout is a proper test, not a hotel amenity with flagsticks.

It finishes fourth because the golf, hole for hole, sits a level below a Ross restoration and two established private clubs, and resort golf everywhere carries the same trade: convenience now, character later. In Greensboro the character lives at Sedgefield, in black and white photographs of Snead, still winning the local event long after anyone should have stopped him.

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