# The Best Golf Courses in Lake Ozark

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-lake-ozark-mo/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Missouri


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Lake of the Ozarks does not do compact. It is a flooded river valley with fingers of water running everywhere, and its golf sprawls across four towns, so a Lake Ozark ranking is really a ranking of a shoreline. The courses below sit in Lake Ozark itself, in Camdenton down the road, and in Linn Creek, and the drive between them, over bridges and along the water, is part of the golf day whether you planned it that way or not. Nobody comes here for a single course. They come for a lake week with golf in it.

That shapes the order. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and at the lake the day counts double: a course that fits the rhythm of boats, docks, and long evenings beats a marginally better test that fights it. All three courses here are open to the visiting public in resort country fashion, which makes this a refreshingly usable list. Book any of them and you are playing this weekend.

## 1Old Kinderhook Golf Club (Camdenton)

Old Kinderhook, out in Camdenton, is the lake's serious golf address, a Tom Weiskopf design built into a valley of the kind this region does well: wooded hollows, water in play where the ground dips, and holes that feel carved out of the Ozarks rather than pasted onto them. Weiskopf has always designed for the thinking golfer who still wants to be entertained, drivable temptation here, a green angled to reward the brave line there, and the course has matured into the round the lake's regulars measure the others against.

The concession is geography, the same one this whole list carries. From a dock in Lake Ozark, Kinderhook is a drive, and on a short weekend that drive competes with the boat. But the question is which course is best, not which is nearest, and on golf alone Kinderhook takes it. It is the one course at the lake that visiting players talk about on the drive home for the golf rather than the setting, which at a lake famous for its setting is saying something.

## 2Osage National Golf Resort (Lake Ozark)

Osage National is Arnold Palmer with 27 holes by the Osage River, and the Palmer name plus the extra nine make it the lake's most flexible day of golf. Three nines mean a resort can absorb crowds, an outing, and your foursome all at once, and the river ground gives the golf a flatter, more open character than the holler country at Kinderhook, with the water a presence rather than a hazard on most holes. Palmer designs of this era were built to be enjoyed by the people who paid to play them, and Osage National honours that brief: playable, well kept, and scaled for a holiday crowd.

Why not first? Rotation is both its strength and its weakness. With 27 holes, the round you get depends on the day's combination, and no single 18 has quite the coherence or the shot-making interest of Kinderhook's set. For a group trip where half the party plays casually, Osage National may honestly serve you better, and we concede the point. As a golf course, judged hole for hole, it sits second.

## 3The Golf Club at Deer Chase (Linn Creek)

Deer Chase, in Linn Creek, is the local's entry on this list, a public course through wooded, rolling ground that asks for accuracy where the resort courses ask for your credit card. It plays tighter and scruffier than the two above it, and that is not entirely a criticism. There is a pleasure to a round where the trees are close, the stakes are small, and the golf feels like the Ozarks before the developers arrived with their renderings.

What it cannot do is match the conditioning or the design pedigree of the top two, and a visitor with one round to spend at the lake should spend it above this line. But every lake community needs the course the locals actually play on a Tuesday, and Deer Chase is that course here, priced and built for the people who live with this water all year.

Three towns, three courses, one shoreline. Play Kinderhook for the golf, Osage National for the day, and Deer Chase for the version of the lake the brochures leave out.

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