# The Best Golf Courses in Nashville

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-nashville-tn/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Tennessee


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

The most important name in Nashville golf belongs to a man the old clubs would not have let through their gates. Ted Rhodes was Nashville's Black golf pioneer, a caddie who became one of the best players of his era and fought for the right to compete, and the city course on the Cumberland River carries his name now. Any honest ranking of this town starts by knowing whose name is on the public game here.

Nashville golf otherwise divides cleanly. West of downtown sit the private clubs of the old neighborhoods, Belle Meade and Richland, where the city's money has played for generations. Out by the resort sits the public test built for visitors. Between them sits the municipal system, which is better than its reputation and cheaper than it has any right to be. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and Nashville is one of the few big Southern cities where the public entries genuinely complicate the argument.

## 1Belle Meade Country Club

Belle Meade is the private Donald Ross-era club, and it holds the top spot the way it holds everything, quietly and without visible effort. Ross-era design in the hands of a club that has kept its course as the centerpiece for a century produces a particular kind of golf: playable for the member who plays every week, exacting for the player who thinks a friendly member round will be soft. It will not be.

The concession is the obvious one. This is among the hardest doors in Tennessee golf to get through as a guest, and the day around the golf is formality of a kind that suits its members and excludes nearly everyone else. Rankings here score the golf before the welcome mat. On the golf, Belle Meade's combination of design lineage, ground, and a membership that has maintained both keeps it first. Nashville's best course is the one almost nobody reading this will play, and pretending otherwise would be a different kind of dishonesty.

## 2Gaylord Springs Golf Links (Nashville)

Gaylord Springs is the resort course, the public facing test out by the big hotel, and it is built to a scale the in-town clubs never attempt. Links styling in name, parkland muscle in practice, it asks longer and louder questions than Belle Meade and gives the visiting golfer a full championship length examination with no member required. For a bachelor weekend or a conference with a free afternoon, this is the Nashville round that gets booked, and it earns the bookings.

What keeps it second is that resort golf optimizes for the first visit. The wow is front loaded, and players who return find the course mostly as they left it, very good and slightly impersonal. Conceded: for ninety percent of golfers reading this list, Gaylord Springs is the best Nashville course they can actually play, and if the ranking were restricted to public tee times it would win walking away. It knows its job and does it at a high level.

## 3Richland Country Club

Richland is the second of the west side private clubs, and in any other Tennessee city on this site it would be fighting for the top spot. The course has been renovated and rethought over the years, as ambitious clubs do, and the current version plays modern: firmer, faster, with the kind of conditioning that members compare against Belle Meade over drinks neither club would approve of us describing.

Third place here is a function of the company. Richland loses to Belle Meade on lineage and to Gaylord Springs on nothing it can control, since it does not sell tee times at all. Its members get the best argument in Nashville golf, two elite clubs close enough to sustain a genuine rivalry. The rest of us get the ranking: Richland is an excellent club course, third by inches, not by miles.

## 4Ted Rhodes Golf Course

Ted Rhodes is the city course on the Cumberland, named for Nashville's Black golf pioneer, and it is the most important public course in Tennessee even if it is not the hardest. The layout along the river is open, forgiving in the right places, and designed by use if not by intent as the place where Nashville learns the game the way Rhodes himself did, from the caddie yard up.

We rank it fourth on golf and first on meaning, and the ranking should say both things plainly. Conditioning runs on a city budget. The test will not frighten a good player. But a municipal course carrying that name, on that river, open to anyone with the green fee, does more for golf in this city than any renovation at a private club. Play it once for the history. Plenty of locals play it every week for better reasons.

## 5Harpeth Hills Golf Course

Harpeth Hills closes the list as the municipal workhorse, the hilly city course in the hills southwest of downtown where a huge share of Nashville's public rounds actually happen. The terrain is its identity. Where Ted Rhodes spreads along the flat river ground, Harpeth Hills climbs and falls, and the walk alone separates it from the flat muni stereotype.

It is fifth because the top four are each exceptional in a different way and Harpeth Hills is merely good at being what a city needs. That is not a small thing. A town's fifth course being a walkable, hilly, affordable public track is a sign of a healthy golf culture, and Nashville, for all the velvet rope noise around its private clubs, has one.

Down on the Cumberland in the evening, the public game is still going, walkers coming up the last holes in the river light. The private clubs have the better courses. Rhodes and Harpeth Hills have the city.

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