Town Rankings / New Jersey

The Best Golf Courses in Princeton

Princeton does everything in an older accent. The university, the stone, the trees planted before the republic settled in. Its golf matches: one course that has lived in the campus's shadow since the game's American childhood, and one that arrived a century later as a corporate estate with a tour brand on the gate. Two courses, two centuries of money, one small town. That is the whole bench, and the argument between them is really an argument about what golf in a place like Princeton should be.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access, though in Princeton access mostly means knowing the right alumnus or the right executive. On the golf and the day, this one is closer than the pedigree gap suggests, and we will say where the corporate course wins its points before we give the old one the verdict.

1Springdale Golf Club

Springdale takes No. 1 because it is the course that could only exist here. Designed by William Flynn, in Princeton's campus shadow, with roots running back to 1895, it is university golf in the best sense: a course woven into the life of an institution, walked by generations of students, faculty, and townspeople, on ground that feels like the university's green backyard because it essentially is. Flynn is one of the golden age's most respected names, the architect serious golfers invoke when they want to signal they have done the reading, and a Flynn in this setting is a piece of the game's history still in daily use.

The charm of a course like Springdale is the fit. University towns do not need a championship monster. They need a course with Flynn's virtues: strategy over brute force, greens that reward the player who has learned them, a routing you can walk in an afternoon and think about on the walk home across a campus that has been producing arguments since before golf arrived. Rounds here are part of an education whether the university counts them or not.

The concession is power, in every sense. Springdale was not built to test the modern professional game and does not pretend to. Its yardage and its defences belong to the golf of the steel shaft era, and a strong modern player will overpower parts of it. The setting, for all its beauty, is intimate rather than grand.

We rank it first anyway. Princeton is a town that believes old things done well outrank new things done loudly, and for once the town and this ranking agree completely. Springdale is the sound of that belief, with a Flynn routing underneath it.

2TPC Jasna Polana

Jasna Polana is the other Princeton, the one built by Johnson and Johnson money on a grand estate and handed to Gary Player to design under the TPC brand. Everything Springdale is not, this is: scale, polish, corporate hospitality infrastructure, a course built to impress clients and hold events where the golf is one line item in a day of deal making. As a piece of theatre, it is superb. The estate setting gives Player a stage most architects never get, and the course uses it to deliver the full modern country club production.

Player's design reputation splits golfers, and Jasna Polana will not settle the argument. It is a strong, handsome, demanding course in the modern championship idiom, kept to TPC standards, which means the conditioning on any given Tuesday embarrasses most private clubs. For the executive guest, which is the audience the place was built for, the day here may well beat the day at Springdale. Better range, better everything, except the one thing that cannot be renovated in: a hundred and thirty years of belonging to a university town.

The access story is its own kind of closed. This is a corporate and private facility, and the ordinary Princeton golfer is as far from a tee time here as from one at Springdale. So the ranking turns purely on golf and character, and on character the estate loses to the campus. A course built as a corporate asset, however beautiful, is a guest in the town. Springdale is a citizen.

Second place, handsomely appointed. If your Princeton day is about business, play here and close the deal. If it is about golf in Princeton, there is one course that means it, and it has been meaning it since 1895, in the shadow of the towers.