Town Rankings / Illinois
The Best Golf Courses in Lemont
Drive southwest out of Chicago and the city gives up slowly, then all at once. The quarries appear, the river valley cuts in, and Lemont stops looking like a suburb and starts looking like a place the ice age worked over. That broken, rolling ground is why the golf here is better than the golf in most towns this size.
Most Chicago suburbs have a private club, a muni, and a forgettable middle option. Lemont has something rarer: a public complex that hosted tour golf for decades, with four courses stacked on one property, plus a second upscale public across town that plays a completely different game. This ranking scores the golf first, then the day, then what access actually costs you. On that order, the top is not a debate. The fight is for second.
1Cog Hill Dubsdread
Dubsdread hosted the Western Open and the BMW Championship, which makes it the rare public course where you can pay a green fee and play the same test the tour played. That sentence gets thrown around loosely in golf. Here it is just true, and it shapes everything about the place. The course is long, defended, and serious in a way most public golf is not. Miss in the wrong places and the round turns into work, the honest kind, the kind good players drive an hour for.
The name helps. Dubsdread was built to frighten the dub, and even after modern equipment softened every course in America, the intent still reads clearly: this is Cog Hill's examination paper, the No. 4 course at a complex that also sells gentle golf, and it has never pretended otherwise.
The concession is real. A tournament test asks more than some golfers want on a Saturday, the bill at peak times is a public course bill with a famous name attached, and nobody should book Dubsdread for a relaxed first round of the season. Play it cold in April and it will tell you things about your swing you did not ask to hear.
None of that moves it. Lemont's No. 1 is a course with a championship past that the public can still walk onto, and there are only a handful of those in the Midwest.
2Ruffled Feathers Golf Club
Ruffled Feathers is the other Lemont, wooded and wet where Cog Hill is open, a modern upscale public routed through wetlands and trees on the other side of town. Where Dubsdread beats you with length and reputation, Ruffled Feathers works on placement. Water keeps showing up in your eyeline. The round feels private in the ways public golfers actually notice: space between groups, a setting that closes the suburbs out.
Its fans will argue it should be first on pure shot values, and on certain holes the argument is not silly. It loses this ranking on two counts. Dubsdread's ceiling is higher, and its history is the kind you cannot manufacture. Ruffled Feathers is a very good modern course. The course across town is a landmark.
The concession cuts the other way too: for a group of mixed handicaps with one day in Lemont, this might be the smarter booking. More of the group will enjoy more of the holes. Rankings reward the best golf, though, and the best golf is at Cog Hill.
3Cog Hill Ravines Course
The Ravines course is Cog Hill's second act, and locals who play the complex every week are often fonder of it than of the famous sibling. The name is the scouting report: the ground drops and rises through the ravines on the property, the golf is more varied than a first timer expects, and the price of the day is kinder.
What it is not is a championship test, and it does not need to be. Third on this list means third behind a tour venue and an upscale headliner, which is a respectable place for any course in Illinois to land. If Dubsdread is the exam, Ravines is the course you would actually join if joining were an option.
Play Dubsdread once for the history and the bruises. Then notice how many of the cars in the Cog Hill lot are back the next week for Ravines, and you will understand Lemont golf better than any ranking can teach you.