# The Best Golf Courses in Lake Charles

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-lake-charles-la/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Louisiana


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Lake Charles golf has money in it, and the money smells faintly of the casino floor. Southwest Louisiana runs on petrochemical plants and gaming boats, and its best courses were built with resort dollars on river and marsh ground that, a generation ago, nobody would have driven to for golf. Now the drive in passes the casino towers on the way to a Tom Fazio course, and a development on the Calcasieu River holds the other top layout in town. Hurricanes have tested all of it more than once. The golf keeps coming back, which in this parish counts as a tradition.

Four courses, and an unusual shape to the list: the top two are both resort plays built to pull visitors, the third is the local private club, and the fourth is another casino course up the road in Kinder. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and Lake Charles scrambles the usual order, because here the resort courses are not the soft option. They are the ambitious ones, and the ranking crowns the one wrapped around the river over the one attached to the casino, by a margin locals will happily dispute over dinner at the steakhouse neither course is paying us to mention.

## 1Mallard Golf Club at Gray Plantation

The Mallard course at Gray Plantation wraps a Calcasieu River development, and water is the architecture here as much as any drawing was. The river and its lakes and marshes give the round a permanent sense of place: wide skies, wet ground at the edges of vision, holes that turn with the water instead of crossing it and forgetting it. Development courses often feel like real estate with fairways threaded through. Gray Plantation's golf feels like the reason for the property, the development arranged around a course that was given the riverfront and the best ground first.

The concession is the development trade itself, houses in the sightlines and a community's rhythms layered over the golf, plus the exposure that comes with river country in hurricane season, a risk this region prices into everything it builds. Neither knocks it off the top. On golf and setting together, the Mallard is the strongest round in southwest Louisiana, and its regular place near the top of the state's public course conversation is earned in the wind off the Calcasieu.

## 2Contraband Bayou Golf Club

Contraband Bayou is the L'Auberge casino course, designed by Tom Fazio, and Fazio's name on a casino course buys a particular thing: polish. Everything at a Fazio resort layout is considered, the framing of the holes, the conditioning budget, the way the course photographs at dusk with the casino towers in the middle distance. As a resort product it is complete in a way few Louisiana courses bother to be, and a golfer in town for the weekend, playing one round, will likely remember this one as the slickest golf of the trip.

It finishes second on a distinction that matters to a ranking and maybe to nobody else: polish is not the same as place. Contraband Bayou could, in its bones, be a fine course in several resort towns. The Mallard course could only be on the Calcasieu. Golf first says Fazio's execution deserves real respect, and it gets it, in second place, by a head. The day column might flip them. The golf column does not.

## 3Lake Charles Country Club

Lake Charles Country Club is the local answer to the resort pair: the members' course, the standing games, the golf that belongs to the town rather than to the town's visitors. In a place where the top of the market is built to impress strangers, a private club that simply serves its membership well across decades has a steadiness the resorts, for all their budgets, do not replicate. Their customers change weekly. Its customers are the city.

The limit is ambition. Measured hole for hole against a riverfront development course and a Fazio, the country club's golf is the plainest of the three, and a ranking that scored anything other than golf first might hide that. This one does not. Third place, held with dignity, at the club where Lake Charles golfers actually live their golf lives, while the tourists fight it out at the resorts above.

## 4Kosati Pines Golf Club (Kinder)

Kosati Pines sits up in Kinder, another casino backed course, pine country rather than marsh, and the fourth slot on this list says more about the region than about any failure of its own. Southwest Louisiana has built a small corridor of gaming golf, and Kosati Pines is the outlying stop on it: a solid, well kept resort round among the pines, worth the drive for a second day's golf and not quite armed to displace the two Lake Charles headliners or the town's own club.

Its concession is geography and gravity. Everything in this market pulls toward the river and the big properties, and Kinder is a detour, which makes Kosati Pines the course people praise and then play less often than they mean to. The pines at dusk, quieter than the casino floor an exit away, are its closing argument, and on the right evening they nearly win it.

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