# The Best Golf Courses in Little Rock

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-little-rock-ar/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Arkansas


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Out in Roland, west of Little Rock, there is a golf course built to remind one very rich man of another golf course in Georgia. The Alotian Club is Tom Fazio's Augusta-inspired private for Warren Stephens, and its existence rearranges Arkansas golf the way a new tallest building rearranges a skyline. Before the Alotian, Little Rock golf was a normal capital-city scene, good clubs, a city course on the river, local hierarchies. After it, the state had a course that national panelists fly in to argue about, sitting twenty minutes from a muni.

This is the deepest list in Arkansas, five courses with five different jobs, and we rank the golf first by a wide margin. Access matters in our scoring, and it matters here in the telling, but it does not overturn the order at the top. The argument in Little Rock is really about places two through four, three strong private clubs with different flavors, and about how far a beloved city course can climb on value alone. Not to the top. Read on.

## 1The Alotian Club (Roland)

The Alotian is No. 1 and it is not a close call. Fazio working with Stephens money and an explicit Augusta National brief produced the most ambitious golf course in Arkansas history, a private club built to a standard that has nothing to do with the local market. Courses like this get ranked nationally or not at all; there is no neighborhood frame that fits them. Little Rock simply happens to be the nearest city to one of the most exclusive builds in American golf.

The concessions are severe and we will list them plainly. Almost nobody plays it. The Augusta inspiration invites the comparison every Fazio course dreads, and imitation, however lavish, is still imitation. Estimates put the cost of belonging well into six figures, and that is an estimate, since the club publishes nothing. None of it dents the ranking. On the golf alone, the Alotian laps this field.

## 2Pleasant Valley Country Club

Pleasant Valley is the strongest of Little Rock's conventional clubs, the west Little Rock institution that has carried the city's serious club golf for the modern era. If the Alotian is the outlier, Pleasant Valley is the establishment: the membership, the tournaments, the standard the other clubs measure against.

Second place in a list with the Alotian on it is the highest honest finish available, and Pleasant Valley takes it on completeness. It concedes the top spot's money and ambition and wins everything below that line.

## 3Chenal Country Club

Chenal anchors the other big west-side community, a club built as the centerpiece of its neighborhood, and it gives Little Rock a second modern club course of real substance. Chenal's golfers will argue it past Pleasant Valley on the day and the setting, and the argument is not silly. Planned-community golf done at this level produces a polished, playable test that members use constantly, which is a form of quality rankings underrate.

We place it third on standing rather than on a knockout fact, and we admit the margin is the thinnest on this list. Two strong clubs, one city, and the older establishment gets the nod by a nose.

## 4Country Club of Little Rock

The Country Club of Little Rock is the old name, the in-town club with the deepest roots in the city's golf life. Its case is history and location: golf as it was played in Little Rock for generations, close to the neighborhoods that built the city, against the newer clubs that followed the population west.

Fourth place reflects a real shift, not a slight. The center of Little Rock golf money moved, and the rankings followed it. What the old club keeps is character and convenience, and for its members that trade was never on the table anyway.

## 5Rebsamen Park Golf Course

Rebsamen is the city course on the Arkansas River, and it closes the list the way a good fifth course should, by being the one most Little Rock golfers actually play. A public round by the river, priced for the public, in a capital city whose top four courses are all private: Rebsamen is the access story of this entire ranking, and without it this list would describe a scene closed to nearly everybody in town.

It finishes fifth on the golf, gladly, and first on usefulness, also gladly. The sun goes down over the river at Rebsamen the same as it does out in Roland. The difference is who gets to watch it with a club in hand.

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