# The Best Golf Courses in Lubbock

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-lubbock-tx/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Texas


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

Lubbock is flat cotton country on the High Plains, a place where the horizon does the talking and the wind edits every golf shot ever hit there. Into that flatness came Tom Doak. The Rawls Course is Doak on flat cotton land made interesting, it hosts Texas Tech, and it costs students almost nothing. A famous architect, a university course, and West Texas wind: that combination runs this whole ranking.

Three courses, three different Lubbocks. The university's public showpiece, the old country club, and a public course for the rest of the town. The order is not complicated, but the No. 1 is one of the more interesting stories in Texas golf, a lesson in what a good architect does when the land gives him nothing.

## 1Rawls Course at Texas Tech

The Rawls Course exists to disprove the idea that flat land means dull golf. Doak took cotton fields and built interest the manufactured way, with contour, with bunkering that creates decisions, with greens that punish the lazy approach even when the drive felt easy. Then the High Plains wind, which needs no architect, does the daily variety for free. The same hole is a different examination at 10 a.m. and at 4 p.m., and Tech's players learn shot making that calm weather golfers never have to learn.

It hosts Texas Tech's teams, which gives it a conditioning and setup standard most public courses never chase, and it costs students almost nothing, which may be the finest fact on this entire page. A nationally respected architect's course, open to the public, priced for a college kid. There are not many of those left in America.

The concession is the setting, and Doak would probably make it himself. Manufactured interest is still manufactured. The Rawls Course cannot offer the natural drama of a dunes or a canyon course, and on a rare calm day a strong player can see the scaffolding. It ranks No. 1 in Lubbock by a wide margin anyway, because imagination applied to nothing beats no imagination applied to nothing, which is the alternative on the High Plains.

## 2Lubbock Country Club

Lubbock Country Club is the old guard: the private club that was the center of Lubbock golf long before the university hired a famous architect. Tree lined in a town where trees are a decision, not an accident, it offers the sheltered, traditional round that the Rawls Course deliberately does not. Members who have played it for decades know every wind cheat and every green's bad side, and that local knowledge is a real form of golf.

It is second because the ceiling set by a Doak design is higher, and because a members' course that never seeks outside examination has to accept outside rankings it cannot refute. Within Lubbock society it remains first. Within a ranking of golf courses, the university course has passed it, and everybody in town knows when that happened.

## 3Shadow Hills Golf Course

Shadow Hills fills the third role in Lubbock golf: public, affordable, on the growing side of town, the round you book when the Rawls tee sheet is full or the budget is thin. It serves a lot of Lubbock golfers a lot of the time, and High Plains wind makes even an ordinary layout an honest test on the wrong afternoon.

It finishes third without argument. No architect story, no tournament role, no tradition to match the club. What it has is availability, which in a ranking counts least and in a golfer's actual month counts rather more. Every college town needs its third course. Shadow Hills is Lubbock's, and the wind off the cotton fields does not care which of the three you are playing.

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