Town Rankings / South Dakota

The Best Golf Courses in Sioux Falls

Sioux Falls is the biggest city in South Dakota, and its golf looks like it: a real country club with old bones, a proper municipal system, and one course out east that suburban growth built a neighborhood around. Four courses make this list, which is a deeper bench than any other town in the state gets, and the ranking splits cleanly into two arguments. One is about architecture. The other is about who actually keeps golf alive in a city this size.

The architecture argument wins at the top, as it should. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. But the access story in Sioux Falls deserves respect rather than a footnote, because three city courses plus Willow Run east of town means nobody in Sioux Falls is far from a tee time they can afford. Plenty of bigger cities do worse.

1Minnehaha Country Club

Minnehaha is a Langford and Moreau design that restorers have rediscovered, and that sentence carries the whole ranking. Langford and Moreau built bold, engineered golf in the Midwest a century ago, big features and deliberate scale, and for decades their work was softened, shrunk or simply forgotten by clubs that did not know what they had. The restoration movement changed that. Clubs across the region started recovering those features, and a Langford and Moreau course that gets its bones back becomes the most architecturally interesting round in its state almost by default.

That is the case here. Minnehaha is the one course in South Dakota where the conversation can start with design rather than setting or price, and it gives Sioux Falls a No. 1 that would not embarrass a much larger city.

The concession is access, in its purest form. This is a private country club. The best golf in Sioux Falls is the golf most Sioux Falls golfers will rarely play, and a restorations-are-wonderful argument means little to a public player standing outside the gate. It stays No. 1 because this ranking scores the golf first. But the gap between Minnehaha and everything below it is also an argument for why the public system underneath it matters so much.

2Elmwood Golf Course

Elmwood leads the municipal side of the list. As the city's flagship public course, it carries the heaviest load in town: the leagues, the regular foursomes, the players who learned the game on city rates and never saw a reason to leave. Its golf is honest municipal golf, maintained for volume, routed for a broad range of players, and that is a design brief with real constraints. A course built for everybody in a city gives up some sharpness at the edges.

The concession in Elmwood's favor is that second place here is not a polite nod to the muni. On the combination of access, value and how much golf it delivers to how many people, Elmwood might be the most important course in Sioux Falls. It loses only on the golf itself, to a restored classic, which is a loss any city course in America would accept.

3Prairie Green Golf Course

Prairie Green is the second city course on the list, and its role is the modern counterweight: the newer style municipal option, the round you book when Elmwood's tee sheet is full or when your group wants the other flavor of public golf in town. Sioux Falls running multiple city courses that are genuinely distinct is a strength most towns its size cannot claim.

Its concession is identity. Sitting behind the city's flagship public course and a private club with a famous pedigree, Prairie Green has to make its case on condition, convenience and value rather than on a story, and those are arguments that win repeat customers more easily than rankings. Third is fair. It is also the spot on this list most likely to move if the city ever puts serious renovation money behind it.

4Willow Run Golf Course

Willow Run, east of town, is the suburban option: the course that serves the growth on Sioux Falls' edge, where new housing and new golfers arrive together. That role is easy to underrate from a desk and hard to overrate in practice, because courses like Willow Run are where a growing city manufactures its next generation of regulars.

It finishes fourth because the list above it contains a restored Langford and Moreau and two established city courses, and fourth in the state's deepest town ranking is no disgrace. Play Minnehaha if you get the invitation. Play Elmwood if you do not. Sioux Falls, unusually for the northern plains, gives you a good answer either way.