Town Rankings / North Carolina
The Best Golf Courses in Southern Pines
Midland Road is the best street in American golf that nobody puts on a poster. On one side sits Mid Pines, Donald Ross from 1921. Directly across sits Pine Needles, Donald Ross from 1928, with a lodge and a century of women's golf history attached. Golfers cross that road on foot, in season, the way people in other towns cross a street to a second bar, except the choice here is between two of the finest walks in the Sandhills.
Southern Pines is Pinehurst's quieter neighbor and, for a certain kind of golfer, its better one. The resort across town sells scale. Southern Pines sells three Ross courses, a beloved municipal among them, plus one modern resort course for range. This ranking scores the golf first, then the day, then access, and it produces the local argument in print: the intimate Ross across the road edges the championship Ross, because on an ordinary day, the ordinary day is what counts.
1Mid Pines Inn and Golf Club
Ross opened Mid Pines in 1921, and the first thing to know is how little has been done to it, and how well. The routing is largely untouched, a time capsule of 1920s Sandhills golf, and when Kyle Franz restored Ross's bunkers and waste areas in 2013, the work was received the way careful restoration should be: as a recovery, not a renovation. The Bell family, who also run Pine Needles, keep Mid Pines as the more intimate of the two properties, an inn and a golf course at a scale a person can take in whole.
That intimacy is the case for No. 1. Mid Pines asks Ross questions at a volume you can think over. The greens, the bunkering, the wiregrass edges: everything is in proportion, and the round has a rhythm that bigger, harder courses spend on difficulty. It is consistently ranked among North Carolina's top classic courses, and the golfers who know the Sandhills best are often the ones who pick it first for their own money.
The concession is obvious and we will not dodge it. Pine Needles has hosted the U.S. Women's Open four times across its history and Mid Pines has hosted nothing like that. If championships are your currency, flip the top two and we will not call you wrong.
We rank the course you play over the course you watch, most days. Most days, that is Mid Pines, with the light coming through the longleaf pines the way it has since 1921.
2Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Club
Pine Needles opened in 1928, Ross again, and its championship record is the strongest in Southern Pines by a long way. Annika Sorenstam won the U.S. Women's Open here in 1996. Karrie Webb won in 2001. Cristie Kerr won in 2007. The U.S. Senior Women's Open came in 2019, and the Women's Open returned in 2022, won by Minjee Lee. Five national championships is a résumé most famous courses in America cannot match.
Then there is Peggy Kirk Bell, the LPGA pioneer who owned and taught at Pine Needles for decades. Generations of women learned the game here, at a place that treated women's golf as the main event long before the calendar did. John Fought restored Ross features in 2004 and Kyle Franz followed in 2017, so the course those Opens were won on is cared for at the level its history deserves.
Why second? Because at its championship length and setup it can play as the sterner, more demanding sibling, and the resort machinery around a four time Open venue hums louder than the inn across the road. It is a magnificent course. It is also, by a whisker, the second best day in Southern Pines.
3Southern Pines Golf Club
The third Ross in town is a municipal, and it might be the best value story in American golf right now. Southern Pines Golf Club dates to 1923, an Elks Club course in its lineage, and the Town of Southern Pines acquired it in 2020. Kyle Franz led a restoration that reopened in 2021, recovering Ross holes including land from the lost Little Nine, which is the kind of sentence that makes architecture people put down their coffee.
National reviews have called it one of the best municipal values in the country, and the ingredients explain why: a genuine Ross, restored by the region's best Ross hand, owned by the town, priced at Sandhills value rather than resort premium, playing through longleaf pines next to the Mid Pines and Pine Needles corridor.
It sits third on pure golf, a step below its two resort siblings in conditioning ambition and championship weight. On access and value it laps the field, and a visitor with one day and no resort booking should start here and feel no shame about it at all.
4Talamore Golf Resort
Talamore is the modern entry, a Rees Jones design from 1991, resort golf in the Sandhills with public access and a footnote in golf trivia it will never escape: in the 1990s it was famous for llama caddies. Real llamas, carrying bags. The llamas are history now and the course is a solid, contemporary test that gives a Southern Pines trip a fourth round of a different flavor.
Jones builds in a bigger, bolder register than Ross, and as a change of pace after three days of 1920s greens, that contrast has genuine value in a trip.
Fourth is fourth, though. Against three restored Ross courses, one of them a four time Open host and one of them the town's own muni miracle, a good 1991 resort course is outgunned on history, architecture, and story at once. Play it last, enjoy it properly, and then cross Midland Road one more time before you leave, just to look at both doorways.