# The Best Golf Courses in Hutchinson

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-hutchinson-ks/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Kansas


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

There are sand dunes in the middle of Kansas, and Perry Maxwell built a golf course in them. That sentence still sounds wrong to people who have not been to Hutchinson, and completely ordinary to people who have. Prairie Dunes sits in rolling sand country outside a modest plains town, and by broad consensus it belongs in the top 25 courses in America. Hutchinson, Kansas. Top 25 in America. Both facts are true.

This is the most lopsided town ranking we publish. One course is a national landmark. The other is the local municipal. We will rank them both honestly, because that is the job, but nobody should pretend the gap is a gap. It is a canyon. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and on the first two measures Hutchinson has a course that most states cannot match at any price. On access, the muni wins in a walk, which is its own kind of win.

## 1Prairie Dunes Country Club

Prairie Dunes is Perry Maxwell's inland links, and the word links is doing real work. The dunes give the course movement that Kansas is not supposed to have, the wind is a permanent member of the foursome, and the ground game matters in a way it simply does not on a flat parkland course an hour away. Maxwell routed holes through the sand hills rather than over them, so the course feels discovered. You walk a hole and think, of course it goes there, and then you realize how few architects would have seen it.

The national ranking is not nostalgia. Courses stay in the top 25 on reputation for a few years, not for decades. Prairie Dunes stays because the holes hold up to repeated play by good players who have seen everything. The par 3s ask for nerve, the short holes ask for judgment, and the wind turns a familiar yardage into a new problem every afternoon.

The concession, and it is a large one, is access. Prairie Dunes is private, and most golfers will never play it. A No. 1 ranking you cannot book is a frustrating thing, and we understand the reader who scrolls past it in irritation. Our rule is that the ranking starts with the golf itself, and the golf here is so far ahead of the field that any other order would be a lie told to be helpful. It is the best course in Hutchinson, the best in Kansas, and one of the best in the country. That is the whole argument.

## 2Carey Park Golf Course

Carey Park is Hutchinson's municipal course, and it carries an unfair burden in this list: it follows Prairie Dunes. Judged on its own terms, it does the job a city course is supposed to do. It gives Hutchinson golfers affordable, accessible golf, a place to learn the game, a place to play every week without needing a sponsor, a member, or a letter of introduction.

The concession runs in both directions. Carey Park is not a destination course and does not claim to be. No one drives across Kansas for it, and the player who gets a rare invitation to Prairie Dunes will not spend the evening comparing the two. But in the actual golf life of this town, Carey Park is the course that gets played. Prairie Dunes is the course that gets talked about. Both things matter, and a town ranking that only honored the famous one would miss how Hutchinson actually plays golf.

So the list is two courses long because that is the honest bench. One is a masterpiece behind a gate. The other is open tomorrow morning. Hutchinson golfers live with that split every week, famous sand over the hill, regular golf in the park, and most of them would tell you the town is lucky to have either one, let alone both.

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