Town Rankings / Minnesota

The Best Golf Courses in Minneapolis

Minneapolis golf has a championship heart and a municipal soul, and the two have been sharing the city for more than a century. In 1916, Chick Evans won the U.S. Open at Minikahda, an amateur taking the national championship in the era when amateurs still could. Evans is a name from golf's first golden age, and his win put Minneapolis on the game's map early. What the city did with the following century is the interesting part: it kept the private club at the top, and it built a system of city courses that Minneapolis golfers defend like parks, because that is what they are.

Four courses make this list, one private and three public, and the public three carry a live civic argument with them. Wirth and Hiawatha are the city courses Minneapolis argues about keeping, which means this ranking is not just about golf. It is about what a city owes its golfers. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. On golf, the 1916 champion's course stands alone. On access, the munis sweep. The order below respects both facts in that sequence.

1The Minikahda Club

Minikahda hosted the 1916 U.S. Open that Chick Evans won, and that sentence has been the club's calling card for over a hundred years, with justification. Evans was the finest amateur of his generation, and his Open win, by a player who never turned professional, is one of the early championship game's defining results. The club that hosted it sits by the city's lakes, in the part of Minneapolis where the park system and the private club share the same lovely ground, and Minikahda has remained what it was: the city's championship address, private, polished, and secure in its history.

The golf matches the billing in the classic style, a course that rewards position and patience over power, maintained to the standard its membership expects and its history demands. The concession is the standard private one, sharpened by contrast: Minikahda's gates stand in a city that runs three public courses on this very list, and the gap between the club's world and the munis' world is the gap in Minneapolis golf generally. First place does not care. A U.S. Open venue with Evans on the trophy, still operating at full standard a century later, tops any list its city can assemble.

2Theodore Wirth Park Golf Course

Wirth is the flagship of the city's public golf, set in Minneapolis's great park on the city's northwest side, and it plays bigger than its municipal label suggests. The ground rolls, the round feels like an excursion rather than an errand, and Wirth has the strongest claim among the city courses to being a genuine test as well as a public amenity. When Minneapolis golfers argue that their muni system is worth defending, Wirth is usually the evidence they reach for first.

The concession is the municipal condition of things: public traffic, public budgets, a course asked to serve everyone and therefore unable to be perfect for anyone. Wirth also sits at the center of the argument about keeping city golf, which hangs over every round in a low-key way. It finishes second here because its golf is the best the public can book in Minneapolis, and it is not particularly close below Minikahda or above the next city course.

3Hiawatha Golf Course

Hiawatha is the other course in the city's long argument, the south Minneapolis muni whose future has been debated for years while its golfers kept showing up. That persistence is the course's character. Hiawatha's players are loyal in the way only neighborhood golfers are loyal, and the course returns the loyalty with a flat, friendly, walkable round in the middle of the city, the kind of golf that keeps people in the game decades after a harder course would have shaken them loose.

Third place concedes the obvious: on architecture and conditioning, Hiawatha trails Wirth, and its fame is civic rather than golfing. But a ranking that scored only design would miss why the course matters to Minneapolis, and why its name comes up in city arguments at all. Hiawatha is proof that a course can be ordinary and essential at the same time.

4Columbia Golf Course

Columbia closes the list as northeast Minneapolis's public course, the working round for its side of the river: affordable, local, and entirely uninterested in competing with the names above it. It concedes design, conditioning, and history to all three, and it holds its place anyway, because a city system needs courses in its neighborhoods, not just flagships in its parks.

Fourth in Minneapolis is still a course with a constituency, which is the real story of this list. One private club from 1916, three city courses their golfers argue about keeping, and a winter that ends all of it every year by November. When the lakes freeze and the flags come in, Minneapolis golfers start the argument again indoors, and Minikahda, Wirth, Hiawatha, and Columbia each have their defenders at the table.