# The Best Golf Courses in Potomac

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-potomac-md/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Maryland


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

Potomac is horse country with a Washington address: big houses behind hedges, paddocks along the roads, and land that still rolls the way it did before the suburbs of Montgomery County filled in around it. Its golf comes in exactly two forms, and the contrast is the whole story of this ranking. One course hosted a PGA Tour event in 2022. The other is a county municipal where anyone can walk up and play. Same town, same rolling ground, two completely different ideas about who golf is for.

This is the whole bench, two courses, and we will not pretend it is more. But the pairing is genuinely interesting, because Potomac compresses the Washington golf economy into one zip code: tour level private golf on one side of town, public county golf on the other, and nothing in between.

## 1TPC Potomac at Avenel Farm

TPC Potomac got its national moment in 2022, when it hosted the Wells Fargo Championship because Congressional, the region's usual stage, was busy. Fill in venues get treated like understudies. This one used the week to make its case in public: a tour field, tour pressure, and a course that held up as more than a substitute. That week is the strongest evidence on this list. A course that can host the modern professional game, with its length and its demands, has passed an examination no amount of local reputation can fake.

The TPC identity cuts both ways and we should say so. The network exists to stage professional golf, which means the test is calibrated for players far better than the members who pay for it, and everyday play can feel like borrowing someone else's arena. Conditions will be superb. The golf will be hard in the modern way, long and exacting, and some members of some clubs would rather play a course designed for them.

None of that moves it off the top spot. In a two course town, the one that hosted the tour, on this kind of rolling Avenel Farm ground, is the best course in Potomac by any honest measure of architecture and examination. The concession we will make is about access, not quality: it is a private club, the 2022 crowds are long gone, and the version of TPC Potomac the public saw on television is a version almost nobody gets to play.

## 2Falls Road Golf Course

Falls Road is Montgomery County's muni in horse country, and it might be the most useful golf course in this part of Maryland. County golf is the game's public infrastructure: affordable, bookable, the place where Potomac's own residents, county employees, juniors and retirees actually play their golf while the hedges of the private game stand a few miles away.

The ranking is not close and Falls Road's fans should not want it to be. On design and examination it gives up enormous ground to TPC Potomac, as roughly every municipal course in America would to a tour venue. The holes are more straightforward, the presentation simpler, the whole enterprise aimed at getting a lot of golfers around enjoyably rather than identifying the best one.

But judge it on its own assignment and the verdict flips. A good muni in an expensive county is a civic achievement. Falls Road keeps golf public in a town defined by private wealth, on pretty horse country land, at prices that do not require a membership committee's approval. If TPC Potomac is Potomac's best course, Falls Road is Potomac's most democratic one, and a healthy golf town needs the second kind at least as much as the first.

Play the muni on an ordinary weekday, when the county golfers are out and the light is coming across the paddocks, and you will understand Potomac better than any tour broadcast showed you: money on one side of the road, a public tee sheet on the other, and the same rolling Maryland ground under both.

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