Town Rankings / Mississippi

The Best Golf Courses in Gulfport

Gulfport's golf starts with a claim from 1908. Great Southern, on the Gulf in Gulfport, says it is Mississippi's oldest course, and on a coast that hurricanes have rebuilt more than once, simply having a course with a claim like that, still open, still on its ground across from the water, is a small civic miracle. The rest of the town's golf is newer and more conventional, which makes this a short list with an unusual shape: the headline is not a new resort build but a survivor.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and Gulfport tests that formula, because the most interesting course here is not the strongest test in town and the strongest test is not the most interesting. Three courses, all public or publicly accessible in the Coast fashion, and an order we had to argue about more than the brevity of the list suggests.

1Great Southern Golf Club

Great Southern claims 1908, Mississippi's oldest course, on the Gulf in Gulfport. Take the claim at face value, as the club presents it, and you are playing on ground where golf has been played since before the First World War, with the Mississippi Sound in front of you and more than a century of coastal weather, storms included, having passed over these fairways. Longevity like that on a hurricane coast is not an accident. It means generation after generation of Gulfport golfers decided the course was worth rebuilding, worth keeping, worth their Saturdays.

Now the concession, and it is a real one. The golf itself, hole for hole, is modest: a short, friendly layout by modern standards, kept to a public-access standard, the kind of course a strong player will overpower on a calm day. Windance below is the sterner test, and if your ranking is a pure difficulty audit, flip them. Ours is not. A ranking of Gulfport that put a 1908 survivor with the Gulf as its backdrop anywhere but first would be ignoring what makes this town's golf worth writing about at all. History you can still play for a public fee is the rarest commodity on this site. No. 1.

2Windance Country Club

Windance is the championship entry in Gulfport, the course that hosted tour golf in the Mississippi Gulf Coast Classic era, when senior professionals came to the Coast and needed a course that could hold a professional field. That era is the credential. Courses do not get tour events by being pleasant. They get them by having greens, length, and enough movement to interest players who have seen everything, and Windance's routing through the pines north of the beach has that substance.

It finishes second on the one ground it cannot contest: it is a good course of its type, and its type exists in every state in the South. Nothing about Windance could only be in Gulfport, while everything about Great Southern is this town. For the visiting low handicapper, though, this is the round to book first of the two, and we say so plainly. Test first, story second, if that is your order of values. It is a defensible one.

3Bayou View Golf Course Gulfport

Bayou View is the neighbourhood course, the municipal-style golf that serves the residential heart of Gulfport up by the bayou, where the town's everyday players get their rounds in away from the beach traffic and the casino economy. It is the third course a visitor needs to know about and the first one many locals ever played, which is the usual municipal bargain: modest golf, honestly priced, deeply used.

It gets the least room here because its case is the simplest, not because it matters least to the town. Every golf community on this coast stands on a base of courses like Bayou View, where juniors learn and retirees play four mornings a week. Third in Gulfport, and a long way from unimportant.

An oldest-in-the-state claim by the water, a tour-era test in the pines, a neighbourhood course by the bayou. Gulfport's golf is small, old, and still standing, which on this coast is no small thing.