Town Rankings / Iowa

The Best Golf Courses in Spirit Lake

Summer in the Iowa Great Lakes has a scheduling problem, and golf is not at the top of the schedule. The lakes come first. Boats go in the water in the morning, the beaches fill by noon, and golf gets the hours that are left, which is why the tee sheets around Spirit Lake and Okoboji behave like a resort market in miniature: jammed on holiday weekends, wide open on a Tuesday.

That shapes this ranking more than architecture does. There is no famous designer name on this list and no course here that a golfer would cross the state to play on its own. What the lakes area has is three public options at different sizes, and the ranking rewards the one that gives you the most golf, then the ones that fit the way a lake week actually works. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and access is nearly even here, since everything on the list will take your money and hand you a cart key.

1Brooks Golf Club

Brooks is the anchor because it is 27 holes, and in a town where the tee sheet is a weather and weekend lottery, 27 holes is a competitive advantage all by itself. Three nines mean more starting times, more ways to route around a league or an outing, and a better chance that the round you planned on the drive up actually happens. Size is not a glamorous argument. In a summer colony, it is the argument that matters most.

The golf itself is resort golf in the plain sense: playable, open enough to keep a vacation round moving, demanding enough in spots to remind you that you are keeping score. The concession is that Brooks will never be the story of anybody's golf trip. Nobody frames a scorecard from a 27 hole public facility by the lakes. It wins this list the way it wins its summers, by being the biggest, most available version of the thing everybody came to do second.

2Okoboji View Golf Course

Okoboji View is the second round of the trip, and it knows it. Where Brooks is the planned round, this is the one that happens because the morning opened up, the lake is rough, or the group wants golf without committing the whole day to it. Every resort area has a course in this role, and the good ones lean into it: get you out, get you around, get you back to the water.

Ranked second on usefulness as much as on golf. Head to head on a quiet weekday with unlimited time, the gap between Okoboji View and the course below it is small, and a local who plays all three all summer might order the bottom two differently. Across a season of actual lake weeks, the View's place in the rotation is the steadier one. The concession is that steadiness is a modest crown. This is a course that serves a vacation well, not one that anchors it.

3Emerald Hills Golf Course (Arnolds Park)

Emerald Hills, down in Arnolds Park, is the smallest claim on this list and the shortest argument. It is the neighborhood option, the round for golfers staying on that end of the lakes, the game you play when driving anywhere feels like too much vacation administration. There is a real virtue in that. Golf that requires no planning at all gets played, and golf that gets played beats golf that gets talked about at dinner.

Third, then, without much fight. Emerald Hills does not have Brooks' 27 holes or its tee sheet depth, and it does not sit in the middle of the Okoboji rotation the way the View does. What it has is proximity and ease, which in Arnolds Park in July is a currency of its own.

The lakes will always win the morning. Golf here is the afternoon you spend while the water settles, and on that honest scale, 27 holes at Brooks and two easy publics behind it is a better setup than most summer towns manage.