# The Best Golf Courses in Opelika

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-opelika-al/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Alabama


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

Robert Trent Jones looked at the ground on Lake Saugahatchee and called it the finest natural site he had seen for a golf course. Jones said that kind of thing for a living, so discount it a little. Then go stand on the property at Grand National in Opelika and discount it less. The lake, the hardwoods, the way the land rolls down to the water: this is the one Trail site where the setting does half the arguing before you hit a shot.

Opelika golf is Grand National golf. That is the whole story, and it is a good one. One complex, three courses, 54 holes counting the short course, and a PGA Tour event, the Barbasol Championship, on the record to prove the big course can hold a professional field. The ranking below is really an argument inside one clubhouse, and that is fine. We score the golf first, then the day, then what access and value do to the order, and inside a single property those questions have clear answers.

## 1Grand National Lake Course

The Lake Course is the headliner and it earns the spot. It hosted the Barbasol Championship when the PGA Tour came to Opelika, and tour players are not sentimental about venues: a course that works for them at that level, on that ground, with the lake in play as more than scenery, has passed the hardest audit in the game. The water here is not decoration pasted on at the edges. It shapes decisions, which is the difference between a pretty course and a good one.

The concession: it is a Trail course, with the Trail's habits, big scale, bold shaping, a certain confidence that more golf is better golf. Purists raised on subtler architecture will find holes that shout. But shouting, on this site, sounds right, and no other course in town is close.

## 2Grand National Links Course

The Links Course is the second 18 at Grand National, and it suffers the fate of every strong second course: it gets reviewed as a comparison instead of a round. Take it on its own and it is a full-size, serious layout on the same lake property, the round you schedule on day two without feeling shortchanged.

Where it loses is identity. Ask a room of golfers who have played both to describe the Links in one sentence and most will describe the Lake instead. That is not a design failure so much as a branding one, but rankings run on what sticks. It sticks less. Second place, comfortably, with daylight behind it.

## 3Grand National Short Course

The Short Course rounds out the property, and ranking a par-3 course third in its own hometown needs a sentence of defense. Here it is: as a third course it is nearly perfect. It is the late-afternoon round, the warm-up, the place a group settles bets without another five-hour commitment. Every serious golf destination eventually learns it needs one of these.

What it is not is a championship test, and it does not pretend to be. It finishes third because the two courses above it are the reason Opelika is on the golf map at all. But if we ranked by hours actually enjoyed per dollar on a long weekend, the little course would put up a fight, and everyone who has looped it at dusk knows it.

That is Opelika: one great piece of ground, used three ways, with the lake doing quiet work in the background of all of it.

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