# The Best Golf Courses in Pasadena

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-pasadena-ca/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / California


A leading golf course in California. Photo: WilliamFMeyer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The strangest golf address in Los Angeles County sits below street level. The Arroyo Seco runs through Pasadena as a flood plain, and down in it, in the shadow of the Rose Bowl, the city keeps 36 public holes that play all year while the stadium next door hosts its handful of famous afternoons. Golfers park where tailgaters park. On game weeks the whole bowl of the arroyo turns into a festival that happens to have fairways in it.

Pasadena golf is a study in layers. A private club in the hills with a century of membership behind it. The big public pair in the arroyo. And down the wash in South Pasadena, a little course that treats golf as an afternoon errand. We score the golf first and access after, which produces one result the members will like and one the muni loyalists will argue about on the first tee.

## 1Annandale Golf Club

Annandale is the best golf course in Pasadena, and the membership structure is the only reason the sentence needs arguing. It is a private club on elevated ground above the arroyo, the kind of layout that uses its terrain: holes that climb and fall, views out over the valley, and a maturity to the whole property that new money cannot buy quickly. Clubs like this are the survivors of Los Angeles golf's first golden age, and Annandale plays like one.

The concession is the obvious one. You cannot book it. A ranking of a town's courses that leads with a private club is making a claim about quality, not a travel recommendation, and we make it knowing Brookside below serves ten golfers for Annandale's one. If the invitation comes, it is the best round in town. That is what No. 1 means here.

## 2Brookside Golf Club C.W. Koiner Course

The Koiner is the championship half of Brookside, the longer and more serious of the two arroyo courses, and it has carried tournament golf in its long life. Thirty six holes of public golf in a flood plain sounds like a compromise. The Koiner is not. It is a full size test with the Rose Bowl as its backdrop, walkable, priced as a municipal, and busy in the way beloved city courses are busy everywhere.

Its limits are municipal limits: pace on weekends, conditioning that follows a city budget, and a flatness the arroyo imposes on the routing. What it gives back is scale and honesty. A public golfer in Pasadena can play a real course, under the lights of the most famous stadium in college football, for a greens fee that respects the word public. The Koiner is the people's No. 1, and on access weighted math it would take this whole list. We put the private club's golf a nose ahead and say so plainly.

## 3Brookside Golf Club E.O. Nay Course

The Nay is the Koiner's shorter sibling, and shorter here is a feature. It is the course for the after work nine that stretches to eighteen, the junior's first full round, the senior game that has been running every week since before the stadium lights were new. Every strong municipal complex needs the course that keeps the whole town playing, and at Brookside that job belongs to the Nay.

It ranks third because its ambitions are deliberately smaller. The test is gentler, the yardage friendlier, and a strong player treats it as a scoring exercise. That is fine. Lists like ours exist to separate the championship test from the community course, not to pretend the community course matters less to the town. Pasadena would feel the Nay's absence in a month. It is third on quality and first in weekly rounds played, and both numbers are true.

## 4Arroyo Seco Golf Course

Down the arroyo in South Pasadena, Arroyo Seco is small golf: a compact course in the wash, built for the quick round, the beginner, the parent with a kid and two hours. It asks almost nothing of you except that you show up, and in return it asks almost nothing of your wallet or your afternoon.

Ranking it fourth is the easiest call on this page, and the least interesting thing to say about it. Courses like Arroyo Seco are where golfers come from. Nobody's first round happens at a private club. The arroyo gives Pasadena a ladder: a little course at the bottom, two public eighteens in the middle, and a private club at the top. Towns twice the size do worse.

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