# The Best Golf Courses in Greenwich

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Connecticut


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

Greenwich is one of the richest zip codes in America, and its golf could have been pure display. Mostly, it is not. The town's best course has hosted national championships. Its second club has carried the social and sporting life of the place for generations. And its third entry is a municipal course, a genuine town muni kept for the residents of a town that could have privatized everything and, to its credit, did not. That three layer structure, championship private, establishment private, public, is Greenwich in miniature. The ranking scores the golf first, and the golf at the top is serious.

## 1The Stanwich Club

Stanwich takes No. 1 on competitive evidence. It hosted a U.S. Mid-Amateur and a U.S. Senior Women's Open, championships that require a course to examine elite players across several days without gimmicks. Stanwich's reputation matches the assignments: demanding, immaculately kept, a test that starts at the tee and does not relent at the greens. In a town full of expensive things, Stanwich bought the one that matters in a ranking: a course the national game trusts with its trophies.

The concession is warmth. Stanwich does not charm you the way an old Raynor charms you; it examines you, and golfers who equate severity with quality will love it more than golfers who want a walk to feel like a walk. It can also feel like the money around it, hushed and exact. Fair criticisms, both. They describe the price of the product rather than a flaw in it. For the player who wants to know precisely how good he is, Greenwich offers no more honest answer than Stanwich, and honest answers win rankings.

## 2Greenwich Country Club

Greenwich Country Club is the establishment choice, the club at the center of the town's long social history, with golf that plays the classic Fairfield County parkland game: trees, turf, contour, and membership depth built over generations. Its members would argue that a club is a whole life, dining rooms and tennis and kids on the practice tee, and that ranking it against Stanwich on golf alone misses the point of the place.

They are right about clubs and wrong about this list. This list ranks courses, and on the course alone Greenwich stands second, a very good test without Stanwich's championship record or severity. That is still a higher finish than most famous clubs in America would get in their own towns. Second in Greenwich is a strong address, and the members who have played both for thirty years tend to split their loyalty exactly the way this ranking does.

## 3Griffith E. Harris Golf Course

Griff Harris, as everyone calls it, is the town muni for one of America's richest zip codes, and its existence is the most interesting fact on this list. Greenwich could charge almost anything, restrict almost anything. Instead it runs a public course where residents book times, juniors learn, and the town's golf stays connected to the town. The golf itself is pleasant, workmanlike, entirely adequate parkland, kept to a standard municipal budgets rarely reach, because this municipal budget is not like the others.

It finishes third on the test, a clear tier below the privates, and the concession runs the other way: on value and public purpose, Griff Harris laps the field. The privates will not be troubled. But if the measure of a golf town includes whether an ordinary resident can play a decent course without a sponsor and a six figure estimate of initiation, Greenwich, improbably, passes that test too. The muni's parking lot, full on a Saturday in a town famous for gates, is a small democratic miracle worth naming last and remembering longest.

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