# The Best Golf Courses in Rehoboth Beach

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-rehoboth-beach-de/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Delaware


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

Rehoboth is Delaware's real beach town, the one with the boardwalk, the summer houses handed down through families, and a golf scene that splits cleanly by which side of the gate you live on. The old country club sits on Rehoboth Bay, where it has been since 1956. The public golf sits west of Route 1, where the vacation traffic is. Ranking this town means ranking two different worlds that happen to share a zip code.

The bench is three deep if you count the resort course down in Ocean View, which Rehoboth golfers do, because beach towns borrow each other's courses the way they borrow each other's restaurants. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in Rehoboth that last category does real damage to the top of the list, where the best golf in town is private.

## 1Rehoboth Beach Country Club

Rehoboth Beach Country Club has occupied its point on Rehoboth Bay since 1956, which at the Delaware beaches makes it close to ancient, and the setting is the argument. Bay views, marsh edges, and wind off the water give the round a sense of place that the inland courses here cannot manufacture. It is a members' club in the old beach town mold, where the golf is one part of a summer that also includes the dock, the dining room, and families who have belonged for three generations.

The concession is the gate. This is private golf in a town full of visitors, and Rehoboth Beach Country Club does not need the public's money or attention. A golfer spending a week here will likely never see its best holes. But a ranking that starts with the golf cannot put a public resort course ahead of the bayfront club that local players, given one round anywhere in town, would choose. First place, behind a locked door, which is very much the Rehoboth way.

## 2Kings Creek Country Club

Kings Creek is the other private address, a residential club course west of the beach that serves the year round community Rehoboth has become. Where the country club is about the bay, Kings Creek is about the membership: a solid, well kept test built for people who play several times a week and want the course to hold up its end of that bargain. It is the least known name on this list outside Sussex County and the one local low handicappers mention with the most respect.

It gives up the top spot on setting and history, and it shares the country club's access problem without quite the same payoff at the end of the drive. What it offers instead is consistency, a strong playing membership, and none of the vacation circus. Second place, and the steadiest golf in town.

## 3Bear Trap Dunes Golf Club (Ocean View)

Bear Trap Dunes, Rick Jacobson's public course down in Ocean View, is the round the rest of Rehoboth actually plays. It is a resort layout in the modern beach style, dunes and woods and water arranged for scenery, wide enough for vacation swings and kept well enough that nobody feels shortchanged by the green fee. For a town whose top two courses are private, Bear Trap is functionally the public championship course of the whole beach strip.

It ranks third because the two clubs above it are better golf, full stop. Its defense is everything else: you can book it, you can afford it without wincing, and the day it gives a visiting foursome is probably better than the day either club would give them even if the gates opened. Rankings reward golf first. Vacations reward Bear Trap.

The boardwalk empties out by ten and the bay goes flat and silver, and somewhere behind the dunes a sprinkler is doing its slow circuit over an empty fairway. Rehoboth's best golf has always belonged to the people who summer here. The rest of us get Bear Trap, the beach, and no real reason to complain.

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