# The Best Golf Courses in Nantucket

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-nantucket-ma/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Massachusetts


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

Getting to Nantucket golf costs you a ferry ride or a short flight, a rental or a bike, and a level of planning that weeds out the casual before the first tee. Thirty miles out to sea, the island keeps its golf the way it keeps everything else: a small number of courses, fiercely local loyalties, and summer money pressing against old ground. Four courses cover the whole island. They range from one of the most exclusive clubs in America to a nine hole course in 'Sconset that feels like a village secret, and ranking them means deciding what island golf is actually for.

Our order will annoy people, which on Nantucket is traditional. We score the golf first, then the day, then setting and access, and that order puts the old links ahead of the famous modern club. Golf first means the course that asks the most interesting questions in the island wind wins, even if the other one has the longer waiting list and the bigger reputation with people who collect memberships.

## 1Sankaty Head Golf Club

Sankaty Head takes No. 1 because it is the island's true links, set out on the open, rolling ground in 'Sconset under the lighthouse, where the wind comes off the Atlantic with nothing to slow it down and the ground game is not a stylistic choice but a survival skill. Bump it along the turf or watch the breeze take your ball somewhere you did not aim. That is the oldest examination in golf, and Sankaty administers it in its original language.

The club also keeps one of the last caddie camps in America, housing young caddies on site through the summer in a tradition that has nearly vanished from the game. That detail matters beyond nostalgia. A club that still runs a caddie camp is a club where people walk, where the golf is the point, where knowledge passes from a kid who has looped the course two hundred times to a guest playing it once. It shapes the whole culture of a round there.

The concession: Sankaty is private and summer driven, and its season and membership put it out of reach for nearly everyone reading this. The turf can also play firm to the point of argumentative in a dry August. Links golfers call that the point. Resort golfers call it unfair. We side with the links golfers.

## 2Nantucket Golf Club

Nantucket Golf Club is the modern titan of the island, a private club of national reputation, built to the highest contemporary standard on big, open ground, and by most measures the most prestigious tee time in this ranking. Its defenders will say, with evidence, that it is the strongest outright test on the island, conditioning included, and that a ranking that puts it second is being clever at the expense of the obvious.

We hear them. The case for No. 1 is real: modern championship golf, immaculately kept, a course that would hold its head up in any state ranking in New England. If the question were which club impresses a visiting executive most, this is the answer.

It finishes second here because golf first, for us, includes the ground and the wind and a sense that the course could only exist where it sits. Nantucket Golf Club is a superb course that happens to be on Nantucket. Sankaty Head is Nantucket itself, poured into eighteen holes. That is the whole argument, and we concede it is an argument about character as much as shot values. Character counts. Estimates for getting in here, for anyone keeping score, run well into territory that makes even wealthy golfers blink, and the waiting is measured in years.

## 3Miacomet Golf Course

Miacomet is the island's public 18, expanded from a nine in 2003, and it is the most important course on this list for golf on Nantucket as a whole. An island of private clubs needs one door that is open, and Miacomet is it: a full length, links flavored course on open, windswept ground south of town, where the same Atlantic breeze that tests members at Sankaty tests anybody with the green fee.

The expansion from nine to eighteen could have gone wrong, as those projects often do. Instead Miacomet grew into a coherent, challenging round that locals defend with real pride. It will not match the private clubs for conditioning in peak season, and summer tee times require planning and patience, because the whole visiting golf population of the island funnels onto this one tee sheet.

None of that keeps it from being the Nantucket round we recommend first to an actual traveler. You can book it. You can play it. And on a windy afternoon, with the light going gold over the moors, you will not feel you settled for the public option. You will feel you played island golf.

## 4'Sconset Golf Course

'Sconset Golf Course, known locally as Skinner's, is the nine hole village course, one of the oldest little layouts in the country, short, quirky, and utterly unbothered by the arms race happening elsewhere on the island. It finishes fourth because as a test of golf it is a light one. It finishes on the list at all because the day it offers, a quick nine on foot in a rose covered village at the edge of the Atlantic, is a day the other three cannot sell you at any price.

Play Miacomet for the real round, dream about the top two, and walk 'Sconset in the evening when the cottages catch the last light. That is the island, all four of it, in one day.

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