# The Best Golf Courses in Ocean View

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-ocean-view-de/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Delaware


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

Ocean View is the quiet town behind Bethany Beach, the one without the boardwalk crowds, where the roads run west from the ocean toward the bays and the golf takes over from the beach houses. Two courses carry the whole town. That is the entire bench, and this ranking says so up front rather than padding a list to five with courses from three towns away.

Both are modern, both are open to the public, and both were built for the second home and vacation traffic of the Delaware beaches. What separates them is ambition. One is a Jack Nicklaus design with a bayfront finish meant to be the area's headline round. The other is a solid resort course that has been giving beach families good golf for years. We score the golf first, then the day, then the price of admission.

## 1Bayside Resort Golf Club (Selbyville)

Bayside, just up the road in Selbyville, is Nicklaus's Delaware beach course, set on Assawoman Bay with views across the water to Ocean City. It is the prestige round of the southern Delaware coast, and the design knows it. Nicklaus gives you width off the tee in places, then takes it back at the greens, and the holes along the bay are the ones the whole round builds toward, exposed to whatever wind is coming off the water.

The concession is price and pretense. Bayside charges like a headline course and can play like one too, which means a slow, difficult Saturday in peak season if your game is not ready for it. Beach week golfers looking for a relaxed loop sometimes leave happier from the course ranked second here. But judged on the golf itself, the design pedigree, the setting on the bay, and the strength of the closing stretch, Bayside is the best course attached to Ocean View and the only one people drive past other courses to play.

## 2Bear Trap Dunes Golf Club

Bear Trap Dunes is Rick Jacobson's course on the bayside in Ocean View proper, a public resort layout built through dunes, woods, and water in the manufactured links style that beach golf does well. Jacobson, who learned the trade in the Nicklaus organization, builds friendly width and visible trouble, and the course is honest about its job: give vacation golfers a scenic, playable, well kept round they can finish in the morning and still make the beach by lunch.

Its case against Bayside is value and temper. It costs less, punishes less, and treats the average beach week player better. There is also a local argument in its favor that deserves a hearing: it is the course actually in Ocean View, the one town residents point to as theirs, while the No. 1 course on this list answers to a Selbyville address and a resort's ambitions. Town rankings usually forgive that kind of borrowing, and this one does too, but the regulars at Bear Trap make the point every summer and they are not wrong to make it.

What Bear Trap cannot match is the top end. The best holes at Bayside are simply better golf holes, and the bay setting there is real where parts of Bear Trap's landscape are constructed. Second place in a two course town is no insult when the course does its job this reliably.

That is Ocean View golf, two courses deep, both public, both built this century for people whose primary address is somewhere else. Play Bayside for the round you will talk about at dinner. Play Bear Trap for the round everybody in the house can enjoy. A town this small is allowed to keep it that simple.

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