# The Best Golf Courses in Santa Rosa

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-santa-rosa-ca/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / California


A leading golf course in California. Photo: WilliamFMeyer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Santa Rosa's golf splits cleanly in two, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. On one side, up in the Mayacamas hills, is a private club of genuine national standing where golf is walked, caddies carry, and the outside world effectively does not exist. On the other side is a city course where anyone with a tee time and a pushcart belongs. The gap between them is the widest on any list in this series, and the ranking reflects it.

What Santa Rosa does not have is a middle tier worth inventing. There is the mountain, the muni, and a community course that rounds out the town game. We ranked what exists, in the order the golf deserves, and we weighted the top spot for the course itself rather than for who can get on it. Access gets its due further down the page, where it decides real Saturdays.

## 1Mayacama Golf Club

Mayacama is Jack Nicklaus in the Mayacamas, and it is walking only golf with caddies, a rule that tells you everything about the club's priorities before you see a single hole. No carts, no shortcuts, no casual relationship with the place. The course works through rugged wine country terrain, all elevation and oak and quiet, and it asks to be played the way golf was played for most of its history: on foot, at walking pace, with someone reading the greens who has seen your putt break before.

The concession is obvious and total. Almost nobody reading this will ever play it, and a ranking topped by an inaccessible course is a ranking with an asterisk. We accept the asterisk. Nicklaus built a serious course in serious country here, and seriousness is the first thing this list measures. If you ever get the invitation, the correct answer is yes, given before the sentence ends.

## 2Bennett Valley Golf Course

Bennett Valley is the muni answer, and Santa Rosa is lucky to have the question asked this well. It is the city's own course, priced for residents and regulars, walkable, busy, and good enough that the local game revolves around it. The layout gives everyday golfers a real round rather than a holding pen, and the setting, valley floor under the hills, is better than municipal golf usually gets.

Its concession is the mirror of Mayacama's. It will never make a national list, and conditioning rises and falls with a city budget. But judge the two courses by who they serve and Bennett Valley serves thousands of rounds a year to the people who actually live here. Second place, and in terms of rounds played it is not even a contest.

## 3Oakmont Golf Club Santa Rosa

Oakmont in Santa Rosa is a retirement community course (not the Pennsylvania Oakmont, a confusion worth clearing up in every bar in America), and it fills the third role in a town's golf ecosystem: accessible, social, built for the golfer playing three times a week well into their seventies.

It makes no claim on the two spots above it, and we make none for it. The test is gentler, the setting is the community itself. As a piece of a golf town, though, it matters. A place where people can keep playing for decades is a healthier golf town than one with a famous club and nowhere to grow old in the game.

So Santa Rosa ends up a two speed town: a mountain you will probably never climb and a muni that will take you tomorrow morning. The muni will host more good days this year than the mountain hosts in a decade, and both facts belong in the same ranking.

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