# The Best Golf Courses in Kohler

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-kohler-wi/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Wisconsin


A leading golf course in Wisconsin. Photo: Jhansen23, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The wind comes off Lake Michigan and the flags stand straight out and nobody at Whistling Straits pretends this is Ireland. It is a former airfield on the Wisconsin shore that Pete Dye bulldozed into a fever dream of dunes, fescue and bunkers beyond counting, and then the PGA of America kept bringing majors to it until the argument was over. Three PGA Championships and the 2021 Ryder Cup, on a manufactured links in a company town built on plumbing fixtures. Golf has produced stranger stories. Not many.

Kohler is a resort golf town in the purest sense: five courses across two properties, all of it open to anyone willing to pay resort prices, all of it designed within one man's imagination. Pete Dye built Whistling Straits and Blackwolf Run both, which means this ranking is really an argument inside a single architect's head about what hard golf should look like. We score the golf first, then the day, then the cost of getting on, and in Kohler the cost is real. Budget accordingly. The golf earns it anyway.

## 1Whistling Straits Straits Course

The Straits is the most theatrical championship course in America, and the theater is backed by a genuine test. It walks the lake shore, it plays in whatever wind the lake sends, and its bunkering is so dense that the 2010 PGA turned on whether a patch of sand in the rough was a bunker at all. Dustin Johnson grounded his club in it, took a penalty, and lost a playoff spot. That is the Straits in one story: beautiful, severe, and capable of swallowing a major on a rules technicality in a waste area.

The concession is that the difficulty is partly performance. Some of those thousand bunkers are scenery. The course knows how it photographs and leans in.

None of that survives contact with the closing stretch along the water, or with the record. Three PGAs. A Ryder Cup the Americans turned into a rout. The Straits is the rare resort course that has hosted the game's biggest weeks and come out with its reputation bigger each time. It is No. 1 here and it is not close.

## 2Blackwolf Run River Course

The River Course is the connoisseur's pick at Kohler and the one good players argue for over the Straits after the second drink. It works through river valley ground rather than along the big lake, and the golf is more intimate and more punishing in a quieter way: water in play, decisions on nearly every tee, Dye's target golf instincts at their sharpest. Where the Straits overwhelms, the River corners you.

The concession is that it can feel relentless for a resort round, and its best holes lack the Straits' postcard moment. Nobody's phone comes out on the River the way it does on the lake holes.

Play both and the River is the one you keep thinking about on the drive home. It takes second here on the strength of the golf alone, which is what this list claims to reward.

## 3Whistling Straits Irish Course

The Irish is the inland sibling at Whistling Straits, same dunescape language, no lake frontage, and a reputation as the course resort guests book when the Straits is full and then quietly prefer for a second round. It is a full sized Dye examination with the volume turned slightly down from the Straits' theatre, and for many visiting handicaps it is simply the better day: fewer lost balls in decorative sand, more golf played from grass.

The concession is obvious. It lives in a shadow it can never escape, on the same property as a Ryder Cup course, sharing a clubhouse with the main event. Fair or not, visiting golfers measure it against its brother on every hole.

As third courses at American resorts go, the Irish is absurdly strong. Most towns would build their entire golf identity around it. Kohler has it as a supporting act, which tells you everything about the depth of this place.

## 4Blackwolf Run Meadow Valleys Course

Meadow Valleys is the gentler half of Blackwolf Run, routed away from the river's menace into more open, rolling ground, and it fills a role the other three courses on this list refuse to fill: it lets a resort group of mixed abilities have a good day. The golf is honest Dye, scaled down. Greens still ask questions. The punishment is just survivable.

The concession, and it is a real one, is that survivable is not why anyone flies to Kohler. Given four rounds most golfers book the other three twice before they book this once, and the resort's own history treats the Meadow Valleys as the companion piece.

Companion pieces matter on a four day trip, though. After the Straits and the River have had their way with a group, Meadow Valleys is the round that gives everyone their swing back.

## 5The Baths at Blackwolf Run

The Baths is a short par 3 course, a place to settle bets and play barefoot golf with a drink in hand after the big courses have taken their toll, and ranking it fifth is both correct and faintly ridiculous. It is not trying to be the other four. It is the resort admitting that the best hour of a golf trip is often the unstructured one.

As golf architecture it is a footnote here. As a piece of the Kohler day, golfers who have been will tell you it punches absurdly above its acreage.

The lake wind does not care which of the five you are playing. It finds the Baths too, and a knockdown wedge with the sun going down over Sheboygan County is as good a closing scene as American resort golf offers.

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