# The Best Golf Courses in Montgomery

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-montgomery-al/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Alabama


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

Montgomery's golf map has a quirk that decides this ranking before it starts: the biggest golf operation near the capital is not in the capital. It sits up the road in Prattville, where the Robert Trent Jones Trail built one of its largest facilities within commuting distance of the statehouse. Inside Montgomery proper, the game sorts into a Jack Nicklaus private club on the east side, an established country club, and the city course. Four entries, three of them genuinely different answers to what golf in a government town is for.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. Montgomery tests the value score hardest. The best golf requires a short drive or a membership. The golf that belongs to everybody is the simplest in town. The list is what those facts make of each other.

## 1Capitol Hill Golf Club (Prattville)

Capitol Hill is the Trail's capital city statement, a full scale Trail facility in Prattville built to draw golfers from well beyond the metro, and it takes No. 1 on volume and quality combined. This is destination infrastructure: multiple courses' worth of Trail golf at one address, maintained to the system standard, with the big, demanding character the Trail does at its most ambitious. A state capital generates conferences, legislative sessions, and lobbyist golf in industrial quantities, and Capitol Hill is the machine built to absorb all of it at a level the in town options cannot match.

The concession is geography, and it is written into the entry's name. The best golf in Montgomery is in Prattville, and a purist about town lines can fairly call that a cheat. Our view: golf towns are metros, golfers drive twenty minutes for the best round without thinking about it, and a Montgomery list that excluded Capitol Hill to protect a boundary would be describing a town nobody plays in. Ranked on the golf alone, the drive wins.

## 2Wynlakes Golf and Country Club

Wynlakes is the Jack Nicklaus private on the east side, and it is the best golf inside the city limits. A Nicklaus design in his prime building years means a specific kind of test: strategic, demanding off the tee, asking the player to work the ball into positions rather than simply advance it, with the difficulty worn openly. East side Montgomery grew up around growth corridors and new money, and Wynlakes is its golf statement, the club for the Montgomery that does not descend from the old in town establishment.

It finishes second only because Capitol Hill's scale overwhelms the comparison, and Wynlakes members, ranking their own lives, will put their course first with justification: the better everyday test, the stronger membership game, no drive up the interstate. The honest limit on Wynlakes is the door. Nicklaus golf behind a private gate is a rumor to most Montgomery golfers. It is a well supported rumor, and on golf inside the town line it is the champion. On the metro list, it is a strong second.

## 3Montgomery Country Club

Montgomery Country Club is the established in town club, the old answer to the question Wynlakes asked from the east side. Its golf serves a membership rooted in the capital's long standing families and institutions, state government and law and the businesses that orbit them, and the course carries the patina of a place that has hosted the town's golf life for generations. Nobody at Montgomery Country Club is trying to be a destination. The club is a room the town built for itself, and the golf is fitted to that purpose.

Third is fair. On architecture it gives ground to the Nicklaus design, and on scale it gives more to the Trail. What it holds is position: the in town club of record, the round that comes with belonging to Montgomery rather than visiting it. Rankings underrate that quality every time, and we note the bias while standing by the order.

## 4Lagoon Park Golf Course

Lagoon Park is the city course, Montgomery's public golf, and it closes the list the way municipal courses close most of our lists: last on architecture, first on belonging to everybody. This is where the capital's public golfers play, where a state worker can walk a round after work, where the game in Montgomery reproduces itself one beginner at a time. The golf is straightforward municipal golf, kept as well as a city budget allows, and it does not pretend to be more.

The concession and the defense are the same sentence. Lagoon Park is the least distinguished golf here and the most democratic, and a capital city, of all places, should have its public course counted in the ranking of its golf. The Trail and the clubs describe Montgomery's ambitions. Lagoon Park describes its citizens. The list is better for ending with them.

Session lets out, the lobbyists head for Prattville, the members for their clubs, and Lagoon Park takes the evening walkers under the pines. Four courses, one government town, and the public one still going at dusk. That is the truest picture of golf in the capital we can give you.

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