Town Rankings / Tennessee
The Best Golf Courses in Johnson City
Johnson City is the Tri-Cities town that golf forgot to hype, which is unfair to a bench that covers three centuries of the game's habits. A country club from 1913. A modern Arthur Hills design in Jonesborough, Tennessee's oldest town. A state park course over near Kingsport that has been serving public golfers for generations. Three courses, three eras, spread across three towns that locals treat as one golf market even if the map insists otherwise.
That spread is the honest complication in this ranking. Two of the three courses on this list are not, strictly, in Johnson City, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of error. The Tri-Cities share everything: hospitals, an airport, a workforce, and weekends. Golfers here drive between Johnson City, Jonesborough and Kingsport without thinking of it as travel. So this list ranks the market the way its golfers actually use it, scores the golf first, then the day, then access, and says the geography out loud instead of hiding it.
1Blackthorn Club at The Ridges (Jonesborough)
Blackthorn is an Arthur Hills design in Jonesborough, and Hills is the right architect for this argument. His best work takes rolling ground, and the foothills country around Tennessee's oldest town is nothing but rolling ground, and turns it into golf where the strategy changes with the elevation: uphill approaches that play a club longer than the card says, sidehill lies that punish the lazy line, greens set into slopes rather than on top of them.
That gives Blackthorn the strongest claim to No. 1 on the golf alone. It is the most deliberately designed course in the market, a private club test built for players who want the modern game, shaped and bunkered and thought through in a way the older courses here never aimed at.
The concession has two parts. It is private, so the market's best course is its least accessible. And it is in Jonesborough, not Johnson City, which its fans accept and its critics in town mention whenever this ranking comes up. Both points stand. Neither changes which course a good player, given one invitation in the Tri-Cities, should use it on.
2Johnson City Country Club
Johnson City Country Club dates to 1913, and in a market this size, a club that has operated since 1913 is not just a golf course. It is the institution that carried the game here through everything the twentieth century did to East Tennessee. Old clubs like this play a certain way: compact ground, mature trees, a course that fits its original acreage because there was never any more to buy, and a membership that knows every bounce on it.
Modern design it is not, and the concession in its favor should be stated clearly, because it is the strongest emotional argument on this list. If this ranking scored the day and the place at even weight with the test, the 1913 clubhouse and a century of local golf would finish first, and many Johnson City golfers will read Blackthorn at No. 1 as a Jonesborough opinion wearing a Johnson City title. Fair enough. On architecture and test, the Hills course wins. On everything that makes a town's golf a town's golf, the old club is still the center of it.
3Warriors Path State Park Golf Course Kingsport
Warriors Path is the state park course near Kingsport, and it finishes third while doing the most democratic work on this list. State park golf in Tennessee is the game's public floor: affordable, unpretentious, maintained for the whole public rather than a membership, and played by more first time golfers in a season than the two clubs above it will host in a decade.
Its golf is honest parkland golf without the design pedigree of Blackthorn or the century of history behind Johnson City Country Club, and a ranking has to say that plainly. The concession runs the other way. Take Warriors Path away and the Tri-Cities lose their entry point to the game; take either club away and their members would find each other. Courses that introduce a region to golf matter out of proportion to their rankings, and third place here is a ranking of tests, not of importance.
Three eras in three towns, and the market works because of the spread: a Hills design to test yourself against, a 1913 club to belong to, and a state park course where anybody in the Tri-Cities can start.