# The Best Golf Courses in Rochester, Minnesota

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-rochester-mn/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Minnesota


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

Rochester is a company town, and the company is the Mayo Clinic. The clinic built the city, employs the city, and fills its hotels with people who have come from everywhere for care. Golf in a town like that plays a specific role: it is where the doctors unwind, where visiting families kill a nervous afternoon, where a community built around a hospital keeps its ordinary pleasures. Rochester's golf matches that brief with unusual neatness. A private club with a golden age architect at the top, and a pair of city courses underneath doing the everyday work.

Three courses, and the list is the whole town game. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. The private club wins the golf column outright, because a Tillinghast in southeast Minnesota is not a thing a ranking talks its way around. The city pair split the rest of the virtues between them, and their contest for second is closer than the top is.

## 1Rochester Golf and Country Club

Rochester Golf and Country Club is a Tillinghast, and that is close to the whole argument. A.W. Tillinghast's name sits on some of the most respected courses in America, and his work turning up in a clinic town in southeast Minnesota gives Rochester a golf asset completely out of proportion to its size. This is a Mayo Clinic town club in the best sense: serious golf for a membership of serious people, a course with a design pedigree that a city ten times Rochester's size would brag about, kept as the private center of the local game.

The golf carries the architect's signatures in spirit, strategic questions posed from the tee, greens that reward the golfer who arrives from the correct side, a round that thinks. The concession is access, stated without apology because the club will not apologize for it either: Rochester G&CC is private, and the public golfer's Rochester starts at No. 2. In a town where the clinic treats everyone who walks in, the best golf treats only its members. Rankings score the golf first. The Tillinghast is first, and the distance behind it is real.

## 2Eastwood Golf Course

Eastwood is the stronger half of the city pair, Rochester's public course for golfers who want a full round at a public price, and it earns second place by being the round the town's non-members actually build their weeks around. City golf at its best is infrastructure, as unglamorous and as necessary as the water system, and Eastwood is good infrastructure: a real course, honestly kept, serving a population that includes plenty of people whose connection to Rochester is a hospital bracelet and a free afternoon.

The concession is pedigree, which in this town is a brutal comparison. Eastwood's design cannot be discussed in the same paragraph as Tillinghast's without the paragraph going quiet, and its conditioning follows a city budget rather than a club's dues. It finishes second as the best public golf in Rochester, which is a genuinely useful title, just not the town's headline.

## 3Soldiers Memorial Field Golf Course

Soldiers Field is the city's other course, the downtown round, golf attached to Rochester's memorial park ground where the town gathers for everything else. Its virtues are proximity and price and the simple fact of existing in the middle of a city that runs on appointments: a golfer can play Soldiers Field the way Rochester does everything, efficiently, between other obligations. As a piece of civic design, a playable course in the town's central park is exactly right for a place built around a public mission.

Third place concedes the golf. Soldiers Field is the least of the three as a test, shorter on architecture and ambition than Eastwood and in a different universe from the Tillinghast up the hill. It closes the list as the town's most convenient golf rather than its best, and in Rochester, convenience is a virtue the whole city is organized around. The last round of the day there finishes with the clinic's towers lit in the distance, the reason for the town standing over the town's smallest pleasures, which is about as Rochester as a scene gets.

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