# The Best Golf Courses in Mesa

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-mesa-az/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Arizona


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

Mesa is the East Valley's big sprawl, spring training crowds in March, subdivisions running out toward the Superstition Mountains until the desert stops them. Its golf splits along the same line as the town itself: serious desert golf on the eastern edge where the land starts to rise, and community golf in the flat middle where most of Mesa actually lives.

This is a working town's list. No course here trades on a tour stop the way Marana does, and none needs to. We score the golf first, then the day, then value and access, and Mesa quietly does well on the last two: you can play everything on this list, which is more than half the towns in this series can say.

## 1Las Sendas Golf Club

Las Sendas is Robert Trent Jones Jr. desert target golf in east Mesa, and the key word is target. Fairways are ribbons through raw desert, the carries are forced, and a ball that misses the ribbon is usually a ball you wave goodbye to. Jones built this kind of examination all over the Southwest, and Las Sendas is the full-strength version: elevated tees, mountain backdrop, greens that demand you arrive from the correct side.

The concession is real. High handicaps can get beaten up here, and a windy day turns a hard course into a long one. But a No. 1 ranking is about the ceiling, and Las Sendas has the highest ceiling in Mesa by a wide margin. It is the round in this town that a good player circles before the trip, the one that might go wrong in interesting ways.

## 2Longbow Golf Club

Longbow hosted NCAA and AJGA fields for years, and tournament golf leaves a mark on a course: it has to be fair at speed, defendable without tricks, and honest under pressure from players who hit it a long way. Longbow passes that test. It is desert golf with the volume turned down a notch from Las Sendas, more playable for the rest of us, still interesting enough that college coaches kept bringing teams back.

Why second and not first? The setting. Longbow sits near the airport side of east Mesa, flatter and more open, and the round feels less like an escape into the desert than its rival's does. That is a small thing across 18 holes and a real thing across a ranking. Play both on a trip. Argue about the order in the car. That argument is Mesa golf at its best.

## 3Red Mountain Ranch Country Club

Red Mountain Ranch is the private club golf of east Mesa, a Pete Dye design in the community beneath the mountain it is named for, built when Dye's name on a subdivision course still meant sharp edges and strong opinions. Members get a course with more architectural personality than the public options below it, and a quieter tee sheet than either of the courses above it.

The limits are the usual private ones, plus this: Dye's community work rewards the member who learns it over a season more than the guest who sees it once. Third place, and the first phone call to make if you know someone in the community.

## 4Painted Mountain Golf Club

Painted Mountain is the resort and neighborhood option, friendlier, flatter, the course attached to a hotel stay or a winter rental, where the round is the morning's activity rather than the trip's purpose. Nothing wrong with that. Most golf played in America looks like this.

It lands fourth because the other three ask more of you. But if your Mesa trip involves kids, in-laws, or a conference, this is the tee time that fits the actual day you are having, and there is no shame in a ranking admitting it.

The Superstitions turn the color of old copper in the late afternoon, and the best tee times in Mesa are the ones that finish in that light, desert going dark on one side of the fairway.

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