# The Best Golf Courses in Midland

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Texas


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Midland golf smells faintly of oil money and desert wind. This is Permian Basin country, flat and hard and rich in cycles, and Midland Country Club is big oil golf in the desert, the kind of club that booms when crude booms. Hogan and Trevino stories both pass through here, which for a city this size, this far from everything, tells you how serious West Texas once was, and still is, about the game.

Three courses carry the town: the big club, and two public or semi public options that keep Midland's non members playing. Candor helps here. This is not a deep bench, and the ranking reflects a town where one club has always held most of the money, the history and the best players.

## 1Midland Country Club

Midland Country Club is No. 1 because in the Permian Basin, the club is the institution. When the oil business is flush, this is where its deals and its golf both happen, and the course has been maintained and renewed to a standard the desert public courses around it cannot match. The Hogan and Trevino stories that pass through Midland pass through rooms like these: West Texas golf in the middle of the last century ran on oil fields, long drives between towns, and players who learned the game in wind that never asked permission.

The concession is that the club's case is partly a case about resources. Money buys conditioning, trees in a desert, and greens that survive August. A ranking that scores the golf first still has to notice when the golf is inseparable from the budget behind it. Strip the money away and the land here gives an architect very little. Midland Country Club's achievement is what it has built and kept on that land, cycle after cycle.

Members will say the ranking understates it. Outsiders cannot verify that, which is the permanent problem with private No. 1s. Here the gap to the rest of town is wide enough that the benefit of the doubt is easy to give.

## 2Ranchland Hills Golf Club

Ranchland Hills takes second as Midland's established alternative, the course with a longer local history than a pure daily fee facility and a following built over years of regular play. In a town dominated by one club, the second course matters more than it would elsewhere: it is where good players without a Midland Country Club membership actually test themselves, and where the town's public golf reputation mostly lives.

It ranks second rather than third on that substance, and second rather than first by a distance nobody in Midland would seriously dispute. The honest line about Ranchland Hills is that it gives the town a real second round. In the Permian Basin, with wind and heat taxing every course's upkeep, keeping a real second round going is an achievement in itself.

## 3Nueva Vista Golf Club

Nueva Vista is the newer name on the list, the additional public option that rounds out a Midland golf week and serves the side of town the other two do not. Newer in West Texas golf usually means built for the growth that oil brings in waves, with the playability a broad public needs.

It finishes third because new and useful is not the same as established and tested. It has no Hogan stories, no Trevino stories, no decades of member testimony, and on flat desert land it has had the least time to grow into whatever character it will eventually have. Trees out here are measured in decades.

Midland will keep having exactly the golf its oil price can support, which is a more honest sentence about this town than about most. When the basin is booming, the club gleams, the public courses breathe easier, and the wind, unimpressed by all of it, keeps blowing through every story Hogan and Trevino left behind.

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