Town Rankings / West Virginia
The Best Golf Courses in Morgantown
Morgantown is West Virginia University's town, and its golf has grown up in the university's orbit: a resort on Cheat Lake east of town, a private club for the faculty and professional class, and a local course carrying the Mountaineer name. Three anchors, three different constituencies, one small market. The list is short and we will keep it honest. What gives it interest is that the university's golf program trains between the top two, which means Morgantown's best golf is tested by Division I players on ordinary weekdays.
We score the golf first, then the day, then access. In Morgantown the resort wins the first two and the private club wins the loyalty, and the ranking follows the golf.
1Lakeview Golf Resort
Lakeview sits on Cheat Lake, the big recreational water east of Morgantown, and it is the town's destination golf: a resort operation with the scale and conditioning budget that come with guest play, in a lakeside hill setting that shows West Virginia off properly. Its competitive credentials are real for a course of its class. It hosted USGA qualifying golf on the 2023 circuit, the kind of one day examination that only works on a course officials trust to be fair and difficult in the right proportions.
The concession is the resort feel itself. Lakeview is a facility as much as a golf course, and golfers who like their clubs quiet and member run will find the operation's scale a minus rather than a plus.
Scale is also why it wins. Morgantown has no other course with Lakeview's combination of setting, test and public availability, and WVU's players training across these fairways tells you the golf underneath the resort wrapper is genuine.
2The Pines Country Club
The Pines is Morgantown's private club, the members' course where the town's golf establishment plays its season, and it shares the university connection: WVU golf works between Lakeview and the Pines, which gives a small city club an unusual role in a Division I program's life. The golf is classic West Virginia parkland in the pines its name advertises, a members' test refined by daily play rather than by events.
The concession is reach. The Pines' virtues are internal, known to its membership and to the college players who rotate through, and a private club in a college town will always be a smaller story than the lake resort up the road.
Second place, and the course Morgantown's serious resident golfers would probably put first on their own ballot. Rankings score the golf and the day for a visitor too, and the visitor's answer is Lakeview. Members can live with that. They get the Pines to themselves.
3Mountaineer Golf and Country Club
Mountaineer Golf and Country Club carries the name every business in this town eventually carries, and it fills the local slot on this list: the accessible round, the course for the wider Morgantown golf public that neither belongs to the Pines nor books resort weekends at the lake. Towns need this course. It is where the non affiliated game lives.
The concession is plain. Third of three, without the resort's setting or the private club's polish, and no honest paragraph can promote it past either on the golf alone.
What it has is the name and the town. On a fall Saturday when the Mountaineers are playing at home and half of West Virginia is in Morgantown, the golf that gets played by the people who drove in for the weekend happens at courses like this one, under the same name, in the same hills.