# The Best Golf Courses in South Burlington

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-south-burlington-vt/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Vermont


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

Jack Nicklaus built exactly one golf course in Vermont. Not a portfolio, not a phase of a development strategy. One. It sits in South Burlington, in the Champlain Valley, and that scarcity alone would anchor a ranking. But the more interesting fight on this list is between that single Nicklaus design and a Ross era private club from 1924 just over the line in Burlington, a century of American golf architecture arguing across a few miles of valley floor.

South Burlington is the commercial half of Vermont's largest metro, which in Vermont terms still means a modest city by a very large lake. The golf here serves a real local population rather than a resort trade, and the bench reflects it: a modern signature private club, an old private club, and Kwiniaska over in Shelburne as the public facing option that valley golfers fold into their rotation. We rank across those town lines openly, the way local golfers play, rather than pretending Shelburne might as well be another state.

The scoring is the golf first, then the day, then access. In a small metro where most golfers know all three of these courses by reputation if not by play, reputation has to be earned locally and is worth trusting.

## 1Vermont National Country Club

Vermont National is No. 1, on the strength of being the only Nicklaus course in the state and the modern championship style test in the valley.

Scarcity is a lazy argument by itself, so let us make the better one. When the biggest name in modern design builds a single course in a state, that course becomes the reference point for what modern golf means there: length that asks modern questions, strategic bunkering at modern scale, greens built for contemporary speeds. Vermont's older courses, lovely as many are, play an earlier version of the game. Vermont National is where a strong player in the Champlain Valley goes to measure a modern game, and a ranking of the area's best has to give that role its weight.

As a private club in South Burlington, it also anchors the metro's serious golf scene, the home course for the players most likely to contest the order of this list, which is usually a sign the order is right.

The concession is that Nicklaus design divides opinion as reliably as any body of work in golf. His courses ask a demanding, aerial, high ball game that rewards the strong and can grind the average member into a long afternoon, and golfers whose taste runs to the ground game and the older school will find Burlington Country Club's century old charms more congenial. Style preference is real. We rank the modern test first for its ambition and its singularity in the state, not because every golfer in the valley would choose it for a Saturday.

## 2Burlington Country Club

Burlington Country Club is second, carrying the old school flag: a Ross era private club from 1924.

Ross era is a phrase worth unpacking rather than worshipping. It places the club in the period when Donald Ross and his contemporaries were defining American golf architecture, building courses meant to be walked, thought through, and played for a lifetime without exhausting their interest in a decade. A club from 1924 that has remained a going concern in the same city for a hundred years has been validated by the hardest jury there is: generations of members who could have left.

Burlington's case is continuity and character against Vermont National's modern muscle. Its members play golf closer to the game's original scale, in the city itself, at a club woven into Burlington life since before most of the metro existed. For a certain kind of golfer, and there are more of them every year as the architecture revival rolls on, that is the superior product, full stop.

Why second? Because a ranking must choose, and the broader measure of a course's test and ambition favors the Nicklaus design, while history and charm favor the older club. The concession owed here is larger than usual. If you prize walkability, history, and a century of local golf over modern examination, Burlington is your No. 1 and the argument is respectable. We have gone the other way, narrowly, and we would rather show the seam than hide it.

## 3Kwiniaska Golf Club (Shelburne)

Kwiniaska, in Shelburne, is third, and it holds the most important job on the list for most readers: it is the one you can simply go and play.

Every metro ranking needs its reality check, a course where access is not a membership conversation. In the Champlain Valley, Kwiniaska fills that role for South Burlington's golfers, a public option in a lake town down the road, absorbed into the area's rotation the way good accessible courses always are. Shelburne's setting does quiet work too. This is the valley at its most pastoral, farm country running toward the lake, and a round there feels like the Vermont of the postcards rather than the Vermont of the suburbs.

The concession is that third is a fair reflection of the test on offer. Against a Nicklaus design and a Ross era club, a public course in Shelburne is not winning an architecture argument, and its conditioning will ride the economics of public golf in a short season state. Its value is availability, and availability, for the golfer without a club to call home, is not a consolation prize. It is the whole game.

South Burlington's list ends with a valley in miniature: one Nicklaus, one century old club, and one public course by the lake road, which between them cover just about every way Vermont plays golf.

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