# The Best Golf Courses in Huntsville

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Alabama


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

Huntsville builds rockets, and its golf history has a launch date. Hampton Cove was the Robert Trent Jones Trail's first site in 1992, the proof of concept for the whole improbable project of state backed destination golf, set down at the edge of the rocket city before anyone knew whether the Trail would work. It worked. Above the town, meanwhile, sits a private club on a mountain, which is about as Huntsville a sentence as golf produces: the engineers built the public golf in the valley, and the best day in town is up on the ridge.

Four courses, two worlds. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and Huntsville is where the day keeps trying to beat the golf to the top of the list.

## 1The Ledges Golf Club

The Ledges sits on a mountain above the rocket city, and setting does heavy lifting here. Golf played along a ridgetop, with the Tennessee Valley falling away and Huntsville spread out below, has a scale that valley golf cannot imitate. Every round carries the sense of playing on top of the region rather than in it. Private clubs usually sell exclusivity. The Ledges sells altitude, and altitude turns out to be the better product.

The concession is built into that sentence. This is private golf, and private golf on a mountain is not a tee time a visiting engineer books from his hotel. Ranked for the traveling public alone, the Trail courses below would swap into the top spot and this list would be less honest for it. The Ledges is the best golf day in Huntsville for the people who can have it, on ground no public budget in the valley could buy. It takes No. 1 on the golf and the setting together, which is exactly the order our scoring is supposed to produce when a course maxes out both.

## 2Hampton Cove Golf Club Highlands Course

The Highlands is the lead course at the Trail's first site, and the historical weight is not decorative. When the Trail opened here in 1992, the Highlands had to convince a skeptical golf world that Alabama municipal ambition could produce a course worth traveling to. Its answer was upland golf: more movement in the ground than the valley floor suggests, a test with elevation in it, the hillier and harder headed of the Hampton Cove pair.

It finishes second on golf that most visiting players will rate the best they can actually book in Huntsville, and that is no small finish. The concession, beyond access already covered, is that the Highlands' partner gets the friendlier press and the Highlands can feel like the sterner sibling, the one that respects you by not flattering you. Good. A first site should have a spine. Thirty plus years into the Trail experiment, the Highlands is still the public course the whole project gets judged by locally, and it holds up.

## 3Hampton Cove Golf Club River Course

The River Course is the Highlands' opposite number: valley floor golf along the river, flatter, more open, a walking friendly test where the water in the name is the hazard and the interest. Where the Highlands climbs, the River spreads. Played together over a weekend, the pair makes the Trail's original argument better than any brochure did: one address, two genuinely different kinds of golf day.

It ranks third because in the family argument the Highlands is the stronger test, and because flat river golf, however pleasant, has a ceiling on memorability that upland golf does not. The River's defenders, and there are plenty among Huntsville's regulars, value exactly what the ranking discounts: playability, pace, a course that lets a mixed group all have their day. For the once a year visitor, play the Highlands. For the golfer building a Huntsville habit, the River may quietly become the favorite, and we would understand.

## 4Valley Hill Country Club

Valley Hill is Huntsville's established in town club golf, the members' course that predates the Trail era's drama and carries on serving the local game: league nights, member events, the social architecture of a southern country club. Its name promises the valley and the hill at once, and the golf splits the difference, neither the mountain drama of the Ledges nor the Trail scale of Hampton Cove.

Fourth is the honest spot. The golf is a step below the three above it in ambition, and the club's real product, like most clubs of its kind, is belonging rather than architecture. A Huntsville ranking without Valley Hill would miss where a large share of the town's committed golf actually happens. It closes the list as the local institution, outscaled by history above it and unbothered by the fact.

From the Ledges at dusk the valley lights come on in grids, the rocket city's orderly sprawl under a ridgetop golf course. The Trail started below, in 1992, with something to prove. Looking down at it from up here, it appears to have proved it.

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