# The Best Golf Courses in Roanoke

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-roanoke-va/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Virginia


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ballyhack starts arguments. A Lester George links style course set in the Blue Ridge foothills, run as part of the Dormie Network, held up in Golfweek's Virginia public rankings debate as either the future of destination golf in the state or an overbuilt outlier, depending on who is talking. Courses that start arguments in Roanoke, a city whose golf used to be easy to summarize, are doing something right.

Roanoke sits in a valley in Blue Ridge Virginia, and its golf now has three distinct registers. There is the destination club built to pull golfers in from other states. There is the established in town country club. And there is Blue Hills, the accessible local option that keeps the city's everyday game going. A useful ranking has to judge those as different kinds of golf, not pretend they compete for the identical player on the identical Saturday.

We score the golf itself first, then the day, then what access actually costs you in money or connections.

## 1Ballyhack Golf Club

Ballyhack is No. 1, and the debate around it is part of the evidence rather than a distraction from it.

Lester George built a links style course in the Blue Ridge foothills. That phrase should not work. Links golf belongs to firm coastal ground, wind off water, sand underneath. Transplanting the style into Virginia foothills is either a bold act of shaping or an expensive costume, and golfers who follow Golfweek's Virginia public debate have landed on both sides of that line for years. The fact that the argument persists tells you the course is distinctive enough to be worth arguing about. Nobody argues for a decade about a forgettable course.

The Dormie Network model sharpens the point. This is destination membership golf. You do not simply book Ballyhack the way you book a daily fee course on a free afternoon, and the experience is built around arrival, stay, and a round that is meant to feel separate from ordinary life in the valley below. For golfers who buy into that model, Roanoke becomes a trip, not a detour.

The concession is access, stated plainly. A network club is closed to almost everyone reading this, and a ranking that put accessibility first would demote it for that reason alone. The foothills setting also cuts both ways. Links styling on rolling inland ground asks shaping to do work that nature does on a coast, and purists will always mark it down for the translation.

We still rank it first because the brief is best golf in Roanoke, not easiest golf to obtain. On ambition, distinctiveness, and the strength of the reaction it provokes from serious golfers, nothing else in town is close. Ballyhack changed what Roanoke means on a Virginia golf map. That change is the ranking.

## 2Roanoke Country Club

Roanoke Country Club is second, and its case is the opposite of Ballyhack's. Continuity instead of arrival. A members' club in the city itself, where the golf is woven into local life rather than staged as a destination.

That kind of club produces a type of knowledge no visitor can buy in one round. Members learn a course across seasons, across years, in member games and club events, until the place becomes less a test to be conquered than a language they speak fluently. Rankings written for travelers underrate that fluency, because it never shows up in photographs. Roanoke golfers know better.

The concession is that a private in town club cannot compete for the traveling golfer's attention, and does not try to. Without an invitation it is a name on this list and a fence you drive past. Its architecture also carries none of the national debate that follows Ballyhack, which limits how high it can climb in a ranking meant for readers beyond its membership.

Second is the honest spot. The best home game in the city, behind the one course here that people in other states talk about.

## 3Blue Hills Golf Course

Blue Hills is third, and the shortest defense on this page, because its role needs no inflating.

Every golf city needs a course where the everyday game lives. Where a round does not require a membership, a network, or a special occasion. Where juniors, retirees, league players, and the golfer squeezing in nine after work keep the sport ordinary in the best sense. Blue Hills fills that role in Roanoke, and filling it reliably year after year is a genuine contribution to a town's golf, even if it never starts a rankings argument.

The concession is built into the ranking itself. Blue Hills is not competing with a Dormie Network destination club on design ambition, and pretending otherwise would insult both courses. It is the accessible end of a three tier town.

Roanoke's list ends where it started, with a valley city that now contains multitudes: a links experiment in the foothills that people argue about at state level, and, below it, the quieter golf that locals were playing all along.

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