Town Rankings / Wisconsin

The Best Golf Courses in Madison

Madison is a university town squeezed onto an isthmus between two lakes, and its golf divides the way the town divides: the university's big public showcase on the edge of the city, two old private clubs in the leafy west side neighborhoods, and the city muni where everybody else plays. Four courses make this list. The argument is really about whether a ranking should reward the best golf course or the golf Madison actually plays, and this one rewards the golf course, with the muni getting its honest hearing at the end.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Madison tests that formula, because its best course is also its most accessible big course, and its most exclusive courses are not its best. That inversion is the whole list.

1University Ridge Golf Course

University Ridge is the Badgers' home course, a Robert Trent Jones Jr. design in the rolling ground southwest of campus, and it has the strongest competitive résumé in town: it hosts the American Family Insurance Championship on the PGA Tour Champions circuit, which means senior tour fields walk it every year and the course has to stand up in June conditions for television. It does. This is a big, modern, tournament grade public golf course, and Madison golfers get to play it without knowing anybody.

The concession is character of a certain kind. University Ridge is a championship facility, with the scale and the polish that implies, and golfers who love cramped, quirky, old fashioned golf will find it a little corporate around the edges.

Almost nobody in Madison argues with its place at the top. A public course that hosts a tour event and serves as a Big Ten program's home is the anchor of a city's golf scene by any measure, and it anchors this list.

2Blackhawk Country Club

Blackhawk is Madison's hilltop private club on the west side, old money Madison in the best sense, the kind of club where membership is a family fact rather than a purchase. The golf is traditional parkland, kept to a standard the public courses cannot match day in and day out, and the setting above the lakes gives it the best sense of place of any course on this list.

The concession is that the test is a members' test: enjoyable, exacting in spots, but designed for the thousandth round as much as the first. A scratch guest expecting a championship examination will find a very good club course instead of one.

Second place is where very good club courses with this setting belong, behind a tour venue and ahead of everything else in the city.

3Nakoma Golf Club

Nakoma is the other west side institution, a private club in the neighborhoods near the arboretum with deep roots in Madison's civic life. Generations of Madison families have learned golf there, which produces a particular kind of course: walkable, sociable, kept beautifully, and full of holes that members play with local knowledge no visitor can fake in one round.

The concession is separation. Nakoma and Blackhawk are close enough in quality that this order will start arguments at both clubs, and the honest difference is setting and ceiling rather than any single hole.

What Nakoma unquestionably has is belonging. In a town where the university dominates every ranking that can be measured, Nakoma is proof that Madison's private golf culture has its own long memory.

4Odana Hills Golf Course

Odana Hills is the city muni, Madison's public workhorse on the west side, and it finishes fourth here while being, by rounds played and by democratic importance, first in the city's golf life. This is where Madison learns the game, where the after work leagues run, where a round costs what a round should cost. The golf is honest municipal golf, better than it needs to be, on ground with enough movement to stay interesting across a hundred plays.

The concession writes itself: conditioning and architecture sit a clear tier below the three courses above, and no amount of affection closes that gap in a ranking that scores the golf first.

But lists like this one should say plainly that the fourth course here might be the most valuable golf property in Madison. University Ridge takes the bow. Odana Hills does the daily work, in the flat evening light, with the tee sheet full of the whole city.