# The Best Golf Courses in Savannah

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-savannah-ga/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Georgia


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

Savannah's best golf course is not in Savannah, not quite. The Club at Savannah Harbor sits across the river on Hutchinson Island, and you play it under the Talmadge Bridge, with the city's spires and cranes across the water and container ships sliding past close enough to read the names on the hulls. It is one of the great settings in Georgia golf precisely because it is industrial: river, bridge, port, golf.

Below that headline, be straight about the bench. Savannah is a city people visit for the squares and the food, and its golf roster is a resort course, a practical public facility by the airport, an old private club, and a city muni. Four courses, four different jobs. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and the gaps between these four are wide enough that the ranking is mostly an argument about second place.

## 1The Club at Savannah Harbor

Savannah Harbor is a resort course in the proper sense, built for visitors and maintained like it means it, on flat Hutchinson Island ground where the river wind substitutes for elevation. For years it hosted senior tour golf, the Legends of Golf era, which tells you the layout holds interest for players who have seen everything: water in play, marsh edges, and greens that sit exposed to whatever the river is doing that day. The bridge is not a backdrop. On the holes that face it, the Talmadge is the aiming point, and a round here is paced by ships as much as by the group in front.

The concession is resort economics. This is the premium round in town, priced for the hotel guest, and on a still August afternoon the island heat over flat ground is a genuine test of character. It still wins going away. Best design, best conditioning, best setting, and the only course in Savannah a golfer would cross a state line to play.

## 2Crosswinds Golf Club

Crosswinds is the working golfer's answer, a public 27-hole facility near Savannah's airport, opened in 2000 with a William Byrd design lineage, plus a par-3 course on the side. Twenty-seven holes matters more than visitors think. It means the regulars always have a nine to play, the facility absorbs traffic the way a single 18 never can, and Crosswinds has become the popular Pooler and Savannah public option by simply being available, affordable, and decent, every day, for two decades.

The concession is ambition. Crosswinds was not built to examine tour players, and its golf is straightforward where Savannah Harbor's is theatrical. But second place in this town belongs to the course that serves the most real golf, and a 27-hole public facility with a short course attached serves more of it than anything else on this list. Members of the club below will object. They can book their own course. Nobody else can.

## 3Savannah Country Club

Savannah Country Club is the private entry, old-guard member golf on the Wilmington Island side of the city, the kind of club that exists for the families who belong to it and measures success in full tee sheets and junior programs rather than visiting golfers' reviews. In a ranking built on evidence available to everyone, that privacy cuts both ways: the golf may be lovely, and from outside the gate there is limited public record to argue it higher.

The concession is that this ranking may simply be wrong about it, and private members will say so with feeling. What can be said from outside is that it carries Savannah's traditional club golf, in a city where tradition is the whole brand, and that counts for third in a field of four. If the gate ever opened for a day, this is the course in town we would most want to re-rank with our own eyes.

## 4Henderson Golf Course

Henderson is Savannah's municipal round, city golf at city prices on the south side, and every golfer in town has a Henderson story because everyone has played it. Muni golf asks to be judged on what it provides per dollar and per memory, and Henderson provides the cheapest full round in this ranking and the one most local beginners started on.

The concession is the familiar muni one: conditioning varies, pace varies, and nobody confuses it with the island across the river. Fourth of four, and an essential fourth. A golf town is healthier for having a course where a teenager can learn the game for lunch money, and Savannah, whose best golf sits behind a resort rate, needs Henderson more than it admits.

The ships keep sliding past Hutchinson Island, indifferent to the scores being made under the bridge. That indifference is the charm of the place. Savannah's golf, like its river, is mostly about what passes through.

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