Town Rankings / California

The Best Golf Courses in Sacramento

Sacramento golf runs on valley oak shade and river air, an hour and a half inland from the famous coastal courses, in a city that takes its public golf seriously enough to keep a MacKenzie on the municipal ledger. That last fact decides this list before it starts. Alister MacKenzie, the architect of Cypress Point and Augusta National, built a course for the city of Sacramento, and the city still runs it, with a driving range that stays open around the clock beside it. There is no other sentence in California municipal golf quite like that one.

The rest of the town's golf is county and city parkland, honest and affordable, plus one river course out by the airport corridor. We score the golf first, then the day, then value. Sacramento scores unusually well on the third measure everywhere, which tightens the gaps behind the obvious No. 1.

1Haggin Oaks Golf Complex Alister MacKenzie Course

Start with the range, because everybody does: Haggin Oaks keeps a 24 hour driving range, which tells you the complex understands golfers as they are, awake at odd hours and working on something. The MacKenzie course is the real article from the game's greatest architect, a layout of his American period with his fingerprints in the green complexes and the way the holes use the flat valley ground without ever feeling repetitive.

The concession is conditioning and context. A municipal MacKenzie is not maintained like his private masterpieces, and the complex around it is a busy public golf factory, lessons and retail and range balls at midnight. Purists who want their MacKenzie behind a gate will grumble. Let them. The design is here, the public owns it, and a Sacramento golfer can play a MacKenzie on a Tuesday for municipal money. That is the best public golf story in the Central Valley, and it tops this list without a fight.

2Ancil Hoffman Golf Course

Ancil Hoffman sits inside the American River Parkway, Sacramento's great green corridor, and plays through mature oaks along the river. It is a county course with a country feel: deer on the fairways in the early morning, the river close enough to cool the air, and a routing that makes an ordinary parkland round feel like an escape from the city that surrounds the park.

Golf wise it is a solid test, tree lined and honest, the kind of course that rewards the straight ball and keeps a full tee sheet of regulars happy for decades. It ranks behind Haggin Oaks on design pedigree alone; the MacKenzie name is not a tiebreaker Ancil Hoffman can overcome. It ranks ahead of everything else in town on setting. If the MacKenzie course is Sacramento's claim on golf history, Ancil Hoffman is its claim on the river, and plenty of locals love it more. We score architecture first. The regulars are free to disagree, and do.

3Teal Bend Golf Club

Teal Bend is the modern entry, out in the open country near the river north of downtown, a course of wetlands and wide skies that plays nothing like the oak shaded parkland in town. Wind is a factor here in a way it never is under the trees, and the round has a links adjacent openness, hazards of water and native ground rather than canopy.

It places third as the change of pace. Golfers raised on Sacramento's parkland find Teal Bend either liberating or exposed, and both reactions are correct. What it lacks is the rootedness of the two courses above it, the sense of a place the city has played for generations. Give it time. The river bend setting is real, the golf is a genuine alternative, and a Sacramento rotation without it is missing the valley's other landscape.

4Land Park Golf Course

Land Park is the nine hole course in William Land Park, Sacramento's beloved in town green, and it is the shortest entry on this list in every sense. A compact loop among the park's trees, built for the quick round, the new golfer, the family foursome, it does the entry level job that every healthy golf town needs done close to home.

Fourth is the honest slot. Land Park does not compete with a MacKenzie or a river parkway course on golf, and it is not trying to. Its presence on the list is the point: Sacramento's golf ladder runs from a nine hole park course to a MacKenzie municipal without leaving the public system. The ladder matters more than any rung. Towns that keep the bottom rung in good repair keep producing golfers, and Sacramento, unglamorous and oak shaded, keeps its whole ladder standing.