# The Best Golf Courses in Manhattan

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-manhattan-ks/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Kansas


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

Manhattan, Kansas sits in the Flint Hills, and the Flint Hills are not what people picture when they picture Kansas. This is tallgrass country, rolling and open, with rock close to the surface and long views that change with the light. Golf built in it starts with an advantage that flat farmland golf never gets: the land is interesting before anyone touches it.

This is a two course town for ranking purposes, and we will say so plainly rather than pad the list. One course is Kansas State's big, ambitious home. The other is the local club where the town plays its regular golf. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and the order follows the land and the ambition. Colbert Hills was built to make a statement. Stagg Hill was built to serve a community. Both statements can be true at once, and the ranking still has to pick one first.

## 1Colbert Hills Golf Course

Colbert Hills is Kansas State's course, a Jeff Brauer design in the Flint Hills built with Jim Colbert's money and his name on the door. Colbert, a Kansas State man who went on to a long professional career, put his own resources behind giving his school a course that could stand up to Big 12 golf. That origin story matters because it explains the scale. This was never meant to be a modest college nine. It was meant to be a championship test set in the best landscape the region has.

Brauer used the hills rather than flattening them. The course plays as a kind of prairie links, open to the wind, with the tallgrass waiting for the ball that wanders and the Flint Hills giving the holes a rise and fall that keeps your attention. College courses are often hard in a manufactured way, long for the sake of long. Colbert Hills is hard in a landscape way. The wind, the slopes, and the rough are the defense, and they do not have off days.

The concession is that the same openness that makes it distinctive can make it punishing. On a windy day, and Manhattan has plenty, a casual round can turn into a long afternoon of searching and reloading. It is also a commitment of a course, not a quick nine after work. We rank it first anyway. In a two course town, the course that uses the Flint Hills best wins, and it is not a close call on the golf.

## 2Stagg Hill Golf Club

Stagg Hill is the local answer, a club course where Manhattan golfers play the bulk of their actual rounds. Its virtues are the unglamorous ones that keep a golf town alive: familiarity, a membership and public mix that knows each other, a round that fits into a normal day. If Colbert Hills is the course Manhattan shows visitors, Stagg Hill is the course Manhattan uses.

The honest knock is the ceiling. Stagg Hill does not have Colbert's land drama or its championship ambitions, and it does not pretend otherwise. Hole for hole it is a step down in scale and in the questions it asks. That step down is also the appeal for plenty of players. Not every round needs to be a test you prepare for. Some rounds are just the game, with your usual group, on a course you know by heart.

We put Stagg Hill second without much hesitation and without much apology either. A town needs its everyday course more often than it needs its showcase. Manhattan is lucky that its showcase sits in the Flint Hills and its everyday course is a real club rather than an afterthought.

Play Colbert when the wind is up if you want the full story. The tallgrass will be moving, the hills will look endless, and you will understand in about four holes why Kansas State built its golf out there and not somewhere flatter and easier.

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