# The Best Golf Courses in Nicholasville

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-nicholasville-ky/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Kentucky


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

Nicholasville is Lexington's southern shoulder, where the suburbs thin out and the horse farms take over again. The pastures run right up to the golf here. Bentgrass fairways in bluegrass country, plank fences in the middle distance, and one course that the PGA Tour visits each summer while the yearlings a few miles away are being prepared for sales worth more than the purse.

This is a three course town, and we will not dress it up as more. Two of the three belong to the same Keene Trace family, which means the ranking is partly a family argument, settled the way those usually are, by the one with the television cameras. The third is a different idea of golf entirely. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. In a small town, access matters more than usual, because the best course is only the best course for the people who can actually play it.

## 1Champions Golf Club at Keene Trace

Champions hosts the PGA Tour's ISCO Championship, and in a town of three courses that ends the argument about the top spot before it starts. A Tour event, even one played opposite a major, demands a course that can separate a field of professionals across four days: length that cannot be overpowered carelessly, greens that reject the shot hit to the wrong section, and enough room around the golf for the machinery of a televised week. Champions carries that load in horse farm country, which gives its Tour week a backdrop no purpose built stadium course can buy. The horses got there first. The golf fits around them.

The concession is that a Tour venue's hardest setup is not the course a visiting amateur meets, and the gap between the two can disappoint anyone who arrives expecting Sunday pins. The ranking does not depend on the pins. It depends on the bones, and the bones are the strongest in Jessamine County by a distance. Champions is the reason anyone outside Kentucky can find Nicholasville on a golf map, and it earns that status every summer on camera.

## 2Keene Run Golf Club

Keene Run is the other half of Keene Trace, and second courses in a family usually know their place. This one plays the quieter sibling: the members' round, the course you choose when the championship layout next door is set up hard or booked solid, the golf without the grandstands. There is a real virtue in that role. A two course property where the second layout is genuinely good gives a town depth it has no business having, and Nicholasville's bench is mostly this one family's doing.

The honest limit is distinction. Keene Run lives in Champions' shadow in every public conversation, and the shadow is earned. Nothing about Keene Run demands a trip on its own, and a ranking has to price that in. But take the family away and Nicholasville is a one course town with a links experiment. Keene Run is why the word depth appears anywhere near this list, and second place in a three horse race, in this county, is a compliment the locals will understand.

## 3Connemara Golf Links

Connemara is the different idea: links golf, or at least links intentions, in landlocked central Kentucky. No ocean, no dunes, no salt in the air. What a Kentucky links can offer is the ground game and the wind, an open landscape where the ball runs and the shot along the turf is sometimes smarter than the shot through the air, a style of play the parkland courses around it rarely ask for. On a dry, breezy August afternoon, Connemara makes an argument no other course in the county can make, because it is playing a different game.

The concession is obvious and Connemara's regulars would make it themselves: an inland links is an interpretation, not the thing itself, and players who want bentgrass precision and tree lined definition will find it austere. It finishes third because the other two courses are simply stronger operations with stronger resumes. It finishes on the list, rather than off it, because variety is a real asset in a small town's golf, and a place with three courses where one plays links golf, one hosts the Tour, and one keeps the members happy has more range than towns three times its size. The last word belongs to the wind over open ground, doing its impression of a coastline, almost pulling it off.

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