# The Best Golf Courses in New Haven

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-new-haven-ct/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Connecticut


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

Most towns on this list have an argument at the top. New Haven has a monument. The Course at Yale is so far ahead of everything else in its city that the ranking below is really two exercises: explaining why Yale sits in a class of its own, and giving the other two courses a fair hearing for the local game that exists in its shadow. Pizza towns are allowed one nonnegotiable opinion. New Haven golfers have theirs, and it is a golf course.

## 1Course at Yale

Yale is Macdonald and Raynor's wildest university course, a consensus top 50 course in America, and the Biarritz green here is the famous evidence: a green split by a swale so deep it reads like a canyon, a hole that golfers describe to other golfers the way travelers describe terrain. The whole course works at that scale. Bold contours, huge greens, shots that demand nerve and imagination in equal measure, all of it built for a university on a scale no university would attempt now. It is not a gentle museum piece. It is a big, strange, thrilling test that happens to belong to a school.

The concessions are access and ease, and both are real. Yale's course is not a public tee time; playing it runs through the university's world of students, alumni, faculty, and their guests. And the same boldness that makes it great can beat up a casual player having an off day. Neither point dents the ranking. This is the best course in Connecticut on most serious lists and a top 50 course in the country on the rest. In its own town, it laps the field. Everything below is a fight for a distant second, and the course would not have it any other way.

## 2New Haven Country Club (Hamden)

New Haven Country Club, just over the line in Hamden, is the private club option, and it gives the area what Yale structurally cannot: a member's home course, played weekly, known intimately, with the full club life wrapped around the golf. The test is traditional New England parkland, a level below Yale's drama and several levels above a casual round, and the membership includes plenty of golfers good enough to know exactly where their course stands in the local order.

Second place, earned cleanly. The club's honest advantage is repetition: Yale is an event, New Haven Country Club is a routine, and golfers build their games and friendships on routines. If the ranking measured golf per year actually enjoyed by local players, this would be closer than the architecture gap suggests. It measures the course. The course is second, respectably, in a town where first is a national monument.

## 3Alling Memorial Golf Course

Alling Memorial is New Haven's municipal course, the public game in a city whose famous golf is behind a university's gates. It does the necessary work without glamour: affordable rounds, a place for the city's golfers who are neither Yale connected nor club members, leagues and beginners and the whole broad middle of the game.

Third, obviously, and without embarrassment. Alling was never meant to compete with a Macdonald and Raynor masterpiece, and judging it by that standard would be a category error. Judge it instead by whether New Haven's public golfers have a course of their own. They do. In a town where the No. 1 is world famous and effectively closed, that modest fact matters more than the gap in the rankings. Play Yale if life ever hands you the invitation. Play Alling on the Saturdays it does not, under the same coastal Connecticut sky.

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