Town Rankings / Pennsylvania

The Best Golf Courses in Hershey

The streetlights in Hershey are shaped like Kisses, the air near the factory can smell faintly of chocolate, and the whole town exists because one company decided to build a model community around making candy. It is easy to treat the golf as an amenity, something to fill an afternoon between the park and the factory tour. That undersells it. Chocolate money, spent seriously in the 1930s, built a golf course good enough to employ Ben Hogan.

Hershey's golf splits three ways: two courses at the country club, one classic and one modern, and a small public course that keeps the town honest. The ranking scores the golf first, then the day, then access, and Hershey is one of the few towns on this list where the order at the top has been settled for about ninety years.

1Hershey Country Club West Course

The West Course is a Maurice McCarthy design from 1930, and its most famous employee tells you what the place was. Ben Hogan was the professional at Hershey early in his career, before the majors, before the car accident, before the Hogan of legend. He was a working club pro here, giving lessons and playing exhibitions on a course the company built to a standard that would satisfy one of the most exacting golfers who ever lived. Hogan did not suffer mediocre golf courses gladly. He stayed.

McCarthy's West is a classic American parkland test of its era, routed over rolling ground with the creek in play and greens that reward the player who thinks a shot ahead. It has the quality the best 1930s courses share: nothing is tricked up, and nothing is free. You can see the whole problem from most tees. Solving it is your job.

The concession is that the West belongs to a resort and club world that can feel polished to the point of corporate. Hershey is a company town and the golf carries some of that sheen, packages and outings and all. None of it changes what is under the polish. The West is the best course in Hershey by a distance, and it has been since Hogan was on the lesson tee.

2Hershey Country Club East Course

The East Course is the West's younger, bigger counterpart, a product of a later era of American design when courses grew longer, broader, and more obviously built for the modern power game. It plays the role well. If the West is an argument for precision, the East is an argument for scale, and plenty of good players prefer it on a given day, the way plenty of players prefer a newer stadium to a beloved old ballpark.

Its concession is built into that comparison. The East is a good course standing next to a course with a 1930 pedigree and Hogan's name in its past, and standing next to history is a hard assignment. Played on its own terms, away from its sibling, it is a strong resort course and an easy No. 2 in this town. It loses only to the course across the way, which is no disgrace and no surprise to anyone who has played both.

3Spring Creek Golf Course

Spring Creek is Hershey's public golf, a smaller, shorter course on the edge of the resort machinery, and it matters more than its place on this list suggests. This is where local kids learn the game, where a quick loop costs a fraction of a resort round, and where Hershey golf stops being a package and becomes a habit. The golf itself is modest, and pretending otherwise would be unfair to it and to the two courses above it.

That modesty is the concession and the point at the same time. Spring Creek is not competing with the West. It is doing the other job, the one every golf town needs done: a cheap, friendly place to start. Hershey's list closes there, a Hogan course at the top and a little public course at the bottom, with the smell of chocolate drifting over both.