# The Best Golf Courses in McKinney

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Texas


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

McKinney was the quiet county seat north of Dallas until the growth reached it, and then the tour reached it. TPC Craig Ranch hosts The CJ Cup Byron Nelson, which means a course in McKinney is examined on television every spring by fields chasing one of the game's famous names. Pete Dye's Stonebridge Ranch is the members' counterpoint a short drive away. Town rankings are rarely this top heavy.

Three anchors tell the story: a PGA Tour venue, a Dye design behind a membership gate, and a public course holding the access end of the list. The golf comes first here, and the golf at the top is not close.

## 1TPC Craig Ranch

Craig Ranch leads because tournament golf is evidence. The CJ Cup Byron Nelson brings a full PGA Tour field to McKinney every year, and tour players are unsentimental critics: a course that bored them or tricked them unfairly would hear about it in public, quickly. Craig Ranch has instead settled into the calendar as a scoring venue where the examination is execution. Wide enough to let the best drivers in the world swing, defended by water and positioning rather than by gimmicks, it produces the low scores modern tour golf wants while still asking who is controlling the ball best that week.

The concession, made by its critics every May, is exactly that scoring. A course where the winner goes very low will always lose architecture arguments to sterner tests, and TPC venues as a class are built for galleries and hospitality as much as for shot values. If your taste runs to Dye style punishment, you will rank the next course first.

We do not, by a nose. Craig Ranch's combination of a tour record, public profile and sheer scale of examination puts it No. 1 in McKinney. It is the course the town is known for, and for once the famous one is also the right answer.

## 2Stonebridge Ranch Country Club Dye Course

Pete Dye's Stonebridge Ranch is the counterpoint the hook promises. Where Craig Ranch hosts the public game, Stonebridge serves members with a Dye design, which means visual intimidation, sharp edges, and holes that look harder from the tee than they play, until the one that plays harder than it looks. Dye in a suburban Texas setting does not get the attention of his coastal or desert work, and that underrates it: the full Dye vocabulary, available to members every week rather than once a year at resort prices.

It ranks second on access and on evidence. Private, unexamined by tour fields, its reputation is a members' reputation, passionately held and hard to verify from outside. The members' counterargument, that they get Dye every Saturday while Craig Ranch's best week belongs to the tour, is the strongest second place case on this list. It loses on the public record, not on the golf.

## 3Westridge Golf Course

Westridge is McKinney's public round, the course that gives the town a game for golfers who are neither tour spectators nor club members. It does the daily work: outings, leagues, the after work nine, the first real course a local junior graduates to.

Third of three, and by a clear distance from the Dye course above it, let alone the tour venue. But a McKinney list without Westridge would describe a town with golf only for the invited and the televised, and that is not the town that actually exists north of Dallas. Play the Byron Nelson week as a spectator, play Westridge the week after, and you will have seen McKinney golf from both ends, which is more than most tour towns let you do.

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