# The Best Golf Courses in Jekyll Island

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-jekyll-island-ga/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Georgia


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

Jekyll Island is a Georgia state park with a beach, a historic district built by millionaires a century ago, and 63 holes of golf that cost a fraction of what the resort islands up and down this coast charge. The golf is flat. Say that first and get it over with. Barrier island golf under moss-draped oaks, lagoons instead of hills, wind off the marsh doing whatever elevation would have done. Cheap, walkable, and played at a pace the rest of the Golden Isles forgot.

The setup is unusual and worth stating plainly. One state-run clubhouse, Jekyll Island Golf Club, runs three 18-hole courses, and a separate nine-hole course, Great Dunes, carries the island's oldest golf back to 1926. Everything is municipal or state park access at value pricing. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and here access is so good that the ranking has to work hard not to just reward the whole complex and go home. The differences are in the architects, and Jekyll quietly hired good ones.

## 1Jekyll Island Golf Club Oleander

Dick Wilson designed Oleander in 1964, and Wilson is the strongest architectural name on this island. He built bold, demanding golf in Florida and the Southeast in an era when resort courses were already softening, and Oleander keeps that spine: flat barrier-island ground through oaks and marsh edges, historically the closest of the Jekyll courses to the beach cottages, with greens and bunkering that ask more of a player than the yardage suggests.

The concession is that Oleander's charms are not photogenic. There is no ocean hole to put on a brochure, and on a still, humid morning it can feel like a long walk in a green tunnel. But a ranking exists to separate design from scenery, and Oleander has the best design bones at the complex. Wilson first, sentiment second. It wins by a nose over the course below it, and locals argue this one both ways, which is the sign of a real ranking problem rather than a fake one.

## 2Jekyll Island Golf Club Pine Lakes

Pine Lakes, a Clyde Johnston design from 1968, is the longest of the Jekyll courses, and length is its argument. It plays through pines and lagoons across the island's interior, the biggest and most complete test of the three 18s, the one a low handicapper picks when the group wants a full examination rather than a holiday round. Johnston's lineage runs through a lot of well-regarded Southeastern golf, and Pine Lakes feels like the complex's championship course even though nobody calls it that.

The concession is that longest is not the same as best, and Pine Lakes can grind. More water, more distance, more of the island's flat sameness at full volume. On a windy day it is the hardest walk in the complex to enjoy. It finishes second because Oleander's Wilson architecture is a touch finer, not because Pine Lakes lacks anything a serious golfer needs. Plenty of Jekyll regulars flip these two, and we would not call them wrong with any confidence.

## 3Jekyll Island Golf Club Indian Mound

Joe Lee designed Indian Mound in 1975, the third 18 at the complex, named for the Native American mound features in the area. Lee was Wilson's associate and carried a similar school of design across the Southeast, so Indian Mound speaks a familiar language here: flat, scenic Lowcountry-island golf, generous enough for the vacation player, honest enough to keep score meaningful. And then there is the wildlife, because deer and alligators are part of a Jekyll round in a way no architect planned and every golfer remembers.

The concession is that third of three is third of three. Indian Mound is the course you play on the second day, the one locals reach for when the other two are busy, and it knows it. Consistency is its virtue. Nothing out here will embarrass it, and nothing lifts it past its siblings either. In a complex priced like this, a perfectly good third course is a luxury most public golf never gets.

## 4Great Dunes Golf Course

Great Dunes is the nine-hole course, the one that dates the island's golf to 1926, decades before the state park era and back when Jekyll was a private retreat for some of the richest families in America. Nine holes cannot win a ranking against three full courses, and this one does not try to. It is a walk through the island's first golf life, short, old, and unbothered.

The concession is the format itself. Nine holes is an appetizer, and golfers planning a Jekyll trip around the 18s can treat it as optional. Do not. It is the cheapest history lesson on the Georgia coast, and playing it in the late light, oaks dripping moss, marsh going gold, explains the other 54 holes better than any of them explain themselves.

The millionaires left, the state took over, and the golf stayed cheap. Somewhere under those oaks is the best public golf value in the Golden Isles, still priced like the public actually owns it, because the public does.

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