Town Rankings / Louisiana
The Best Golf Courses in Shreveport
Shreveport is Louisiana's northwest corner, closer in spirit to Texas than to Baton Rouge, and its golf peaked, in public terms, in the 1990s, when the PGA Tour stopped here and Southern Trace briefly stood in the national light. The Tour left. The golf stayed, at the level Shreveport golf was always really played at: two private clubs, a city course from 1922, and a second municipal option, serving a city that takes its games seriously without needing anyone to watch.
Four courses, no resort money, no new builds, and that stability is the ranking's problem and its charm. Nothing here is rising or falling fast. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. The old Tour venue wins on what it once had to be. The second private club holds second the way second private clubs do, on standard and steadiness. And the 1922 city course takes third ahead of the other public option, because a century of continuous use by a whole city is a credential a ranking should respect more than it usually does.
1Southern Trace Country Club
Southern Trace hosted the PGA Tour's Shreveport event in the 1990s, and like every course on this swing that once held a Tour week, it keeps the shape of that assignment: a layout built to examine professionals, conditioning and ambition set by the years when the best players alive were coming to northwest Louisiana on purpose. Tour stops in cities this size are never accidents. The course had to be found sufficient, and the verdict of that era still anchors its reputation now, long after the circus moved on.
The concession is time, and Shreveport golfers make it themselves: the Southern Trace of the Tour years exists now mostly as a standard the club measures itself against, in a market that no longer asks it to be that. What remains is still the most complete golf in the city, a private club whose ceiling its rivals never reach. First place belongs to the course that once had to prove itself to the Tour. Nothing since has come along to take the proof back.
2East Ridge Country Club
East Ridge is Shreveport's other established private club, and its case is the durable one: a members' course kept to a private standard, woven into the city's golf life, played by the people who run Shreveport's standing games. If Southern Trace is the city's golf reputation, East Ridge is its golf routine, and routines are what clubs are actually for. The test is honest, the upkeep is a level public golf in Louisiana rarely sustains through August, and the whole operation runs with the quiet confidence of a place that has never needed a headline.
It concedes the top spot on ceiling and history alike. East Ridge never had to satisfy a Tour field, and its layout was never asked the questions Southern Trace was built to answer. Second in a two private town is a real standing, not a consolation, and East Ridge holds it without an argument anyone in Shreveport finds interesting enough to start.
3Querbes Golf Course
Querbes is the 1922 city course, and a municipal layout that has served a city for a century deserves more than the polite nod rankings usually give old munis. Consider what Querbes has been: the first golf for generations of Shreveport players, the affordable round through depressions, wars, oil booms and busts, the place where the city's public game literally learned to play. Courses this old are usually either famous or gone. Querbes is neither. It is simply still there, still public, still turning beginners into golfers at a price a city can defend.
On golf alone it cannot climb past two private clubs with bigger budgets and sterner tests, and its conditioning will always be a municipal negotiation with the weather. Third place is the ranking's respect, paid honestly: the most historically important course in Shreveport that a reader can actually play, and the one whose loss the city would feel most.
4Huntington Park Golf Course
Huntington Park is the city's other public course, the second muni, and fourth on this list is where second munis live. Its value to Shreveport is capacity and access: another tee sheet for a golf public that Querbes alone could not hold, another affordable option keeping the game wide in a city that has always kept it wide. Nothing about that role requires apology, and the golfers who play their weekly golf there are not reading rankings to validate it.
The honest limit is distinction. Huntington Park makes no historical claim like Querbes, no standard like the privates, and a list has to rank the claims it can see. The closing picture in Shreveport is not the old Tour course at all. It is a weekday afternoon split between two city courses, one from 1922 and one still earning its years, in a town whose golf outlasted its moment in the national light and did not seem to mind.