# The Best Golf Courses in Sevierville

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-sevierville-tn/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Tennessee


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

Ask a local where the Gatlinburg golf course is and you will get the trivia answer with a grin: Pigeon Forge. The Smokies gateway towns blur into one long strip of traffic, pancakes, and outlet stores, and the golf sits right in the middle of it, close enough to the mountains to borrow their outline on every horizon without ever climbing into them. Sevierville is the first of the gateway towns you reach, and its golf is the valley game before the hills take over.

This is visitor golf, plainly and without apology. There are no private clubs on this list, no old money, no Ross. A city-owned 36-hole facility anchors the town, a municipal course wearing another town's name sits up the road, and a mountain course half an hour away in Townsend finishes the bench. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and here access is total. Every course below will take your money today. The ranking is about which of them deserves it most on a Smokies trip where golf competes with everything else the strip is selling.

## 1Sevierville Golf Club River Course

The River Course is the stronger half of Sevierville's city-owned 36, and the river in the name is the Little Pigeon, which gives the layout its shape and its trouble. Resort area golf often means water placed for photographs. Here the river is a working hazard, the kind that collects the ball you hit bravely and the one you hit scared, impartially.

It takes No. 1 because it is the most complete test in the gateway towns, long enough to use the whole bag, kept to a standard that city ownership does not always promise and this operation mostly delivers. The concession is pace and company. You will share it with every golf trip staying within ten miles, which on an October weekend is a cross section of American golf tourism, and the round will not be fast. Play it early, play it first on the trip, and it justifies its place as the anchor round of a Sevierville stay.

## 2Sevierville Golf Club Highlands Course

The Highlands Course is the second eighteen at the same facility, and sibling courses live hard lives. The Highlands gets the comparison treatment daily, and the fair verdict is that it is the friendlier, more scenic of the pair, trading some of the River's menace for elevation and mountain views that do more of the talking.

Members of the Highlands fan club, and every facility has one, argue the better day is here, less punishment, more scenery, more fun per dollar. They have a case. We rank it second on the golf itself, because when the two are separated the River Course asks more interesting questions more often. As a pair, though, they make the strongest argument in this whole list: thirty six public holes at the door of the Smokies, bookable in one phone call, is a genuinely useful thing for a golf trip to have.

## 3Gatlinburg Golf Course (Pigeon Forge)

The Gatlinburg course is actually in Pigeon Forge, a local trivia answer that tells you something about how this whole corridor works. Names here are marketing. The golf is municipal mountain golf, holes climbing and dropping through the foothills, shorter and quirkier than the Sevierville pair, with the kind of elevation changes that make a scorecard lie about the difficulty in both directions.

It ranks third because the Sevierville courses are more substantial tests, and because a muni budget in a tourist town shows in the surfaces by late season. What it offers that the others do not is character, the feeling of a course fitted to its hillside rather than built to a formula. On a trip with children or mixed abilities, plenty of groups will have their best day here. The ranking scores the golf first, and the golf says third, but the memory of a mountain muni round has a way of outlasting fancier ones.

## 4Wild Laurel Golf Course Townsend

Wild Laurel sits over in Townsend, on what the Smokies call the peaceful side, and the drive alone reframes it. Townsend is the gateway town that opted out of the strip, and its golf matches the town: smaller, quieter, mountain framed, played at a pace the Pigeon Forge corridor forgot decades ago.

We rank it fourth on the strength of the golf, which is modest. It is a mountain community course, not a test anyone builds a trip around. But it earns its line on this list for the day it makes possible, a round on the quiet side followed by the river road through the park entrance, with none of the traffic that defines the rest of this ranking's geography. Fourth place, honestly labeled, and the right choice for exactly the golfer who has read this far and is tired of crowds.

The strip lights up at night and the courses empty out, thirty six city holes and a mountain muni gone quiet under the same ridge line. Morning comes, the mist sits on the Little Pigeon, and the River Course is there waiting, first tee first come, no member required.

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