# The Best Golf Courses in Hot Springs, Virginia

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-hot-springs-va/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Virginia


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Sam Snead started as a pro at The Homestead. Sit with that for a second. Before the slouch hat became a logo, before the swing became the one every teacher still slows down on video, he was the local pro in a mountain town in western Virginia, giving lessons to resort guests who had come up for the springs and the air.

Hot Springs is not a golf town in the modern sense. There is no corridor of courses fighting for your tee time, no ranking of twelve that collapses into an argument about ninth place. There are two courses, both tied to the same resort, both at Omni Homestead, and that is the whole bench. The ranking is honest about that from the start. What makes the short list worth writing is that the top course is not a footnote to Virginia golf. It is central to it.

The Cascades is William Flynn's mountain course from 1923, and a perennial top-100 public course in the national conversation. That combination does a lot of work. Flynn on flat ground was already hard to beat. Flynn in mountains, working with elevation and sidehill lies and greens that have to be read against slopes that lie to you, produced the course people still drive hours into the Alleghenies to test themselves against. The Old Course at the resort is the other half of the stay, older in feel, shorter in reputation, and useful mainly because a two course resort trip needs a second morning that does not repeat the first.

We rank the golf first here, as usual. Then the day around it. In a town like this the day is not a tiebreaker so much as the reason the trip exists at all: a big old resort, mountain air that actually cools off in summer, and golf that was built for guests who intended to stay a week, not squeeze in 18 before a flight.

## 1The Cascades Course at Omni Homestead

The Cascades gets No. 1, and it is not close, and pretending otherwise for the sake of a debate would be dishonest.

Flynn built it in 1923, and the reputation has held for a century for a plain reason. Mountain golf usually cheats. Architects either blast a flat course into a hillside and call the views architecture, or they let the slope dictate holes so severe that good shots get punished by gravity. The Cascades has kept its place on top-100 public lists because it threads that problem better than most mountain courses ever manage. The land moves. The golf still makes sense.

That is the evidence, and the hook carries a second piece of it. Snead's connection to The Homestead is not a plaque in a hallway. He started as a pro here, which tells you what kind of golf culture this resort had long before golf resorts became a marketing category. Serious players worked here. Serious guests expected serious golf. The Cascades was built to satisfy people who played a lot, not people who wanted a photo with a waterfall.

The concession is access and effort. This is resort golf in a remote mountain town, which means you are committing to the trip, the drive, and the resort rate structure to play it. Nobody stumbles onto the Cascades as a walk-up bargain, and if your test is value per dollar against a good muni near home, this course will lose that argument every time. It also asks more of your legs and your patience than a flat resort course does. Sidehill stances are part of the deal, not an accident of it.

None of that moves it off the top spot. A perennial top-100 public course, by a major Golden Age architect, in this setting, in a town with exactly two courses, is the ranking. The only real question was whether the gap would be described politely. It should not be. The gap is the story.

If you come to Hot Springs for golf, you come for this course first, and everything else on the trip arranges itself around the tee time you get here.

## 2The Old Course at Omni Homestead

The Old Course takes second because there are two courses in town, and candor requires saying what second means here. It means the companion round. The course you play on arrival day, or on the morning after the Cascades has taken its toll, or with the member of your group who wants golf at the resort without the full mountain examination.

That role gets mocked in rankings and then quietly relied on by every real golf trip. Play the big course twice and the trip feels thin. Play it once and leave, and the drive feels out of proportion. The Old Course solves the arithmetic, and lets the Cascades round be the centerpiece instead of the entire production.

The honest concession goes the other way from usual. The Old Course does not get argued up on architectural grounds, and it should not be sold as a co-headliner. If a friend told you both Homestead courses were equals, that friend was being kind to the resort brochure. One of these courses is a Flynn design from 1923 that lives on national lists. The other is the reason a two or three night stay works.

So the verdict is narrow and, we think, fair. Second in Hot Springs is still a round at a grand old mountain resort in a town with real golf history running through it. It is just not the reason to make the drive. Play it, enjoy the easier day, save your best concentration for the Cascades.

Hot Springs in the end is simple to explain and hard to substitute. Two courses, one resort, one Flynn mountain test that has outlasted a century of resort golf fashion, and the memory of a young Sam Snead on the practice ground before the world knew the swing.

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