Town Rankings / Mississippi
The Best Golf Courses in Starkville
Starkville is Mississippi State's town, cowbells and all, and its golf ranking has a structural quirk worth admitting in the first paragraph: the best course in the Starkville orbit is not in Starkville. It is in West Point, and it has hosted two USGA championships. Everything else on this list is playing for second, and the honest ranking says so rather than manufacturing suspense the facts do not support.
That quirk aside, the shape of golf here is a familiar college town shape. A private club with a national file, a university course that belongs to the Bulldogs, and a country club that holds the local membership game together. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and on the golf this one is not close.
1Old Waverly Golf Club (West Point)
Old Waverly hosted the 1999 U.S. Women's Amateur and the 2019 U.S. Women's Mid-Amateur. Two USGA championships, twenty years apart, is not an accident of scheduling. The USGA comes back to courses that test fairly, present well, and handle the machinery of a national championship, and it does not come back to courses that embarrassed it the first time.
That record puts Old Waverly in a different category from everything else in this part of Mississippi. This is a course with a national reputation earned in public, in match play, under championship setups. Golfers who know the Southeast's private clubs know the name. Golfers who do not are usually quieter after the round than before it.
The concession is the usual private one, doubled. It is private, and it is in West Point, so the No. 1 course in Starkville's ranking asks a Starkville golfer for both an invitation and a drive. Neither fact dents the golf. If the ranking were about convenience, the university course would win and the list would be useless. Old Waverly is the best course in this orbit by a margin that does not need padding.
2Mississippi State University Golf Course
The Mississippi State course is the Bulldogs' home, and it does the job a university course should do. It gives the teams a place to play and practice, gives students and faculty an affordable regular game, and gives alumni a round to fold into a football weekend. College courses live on that triple duty, and the ones that do it well become part of the school's furniture.
Its case for second is partly access. Of the three courses here, this is the one a visitor can most plausibly arrange, and on a game weekend in Starkville that makes it the round most readers of this list will actually take. The golf is honest college golf, maintained to university standards, and nobody leaves feeling cheated.
What it is not is a championship venue of Old Waverly's standing, and the ranking should not blur that line out of school loyalty. Second in Starkville, and the first course most people will play, is a fair description of the same course.
3Starkville Country Club
Starkville Country Club is the local members' course, the standing game, the place where Starkville's own golfers belong. Country clubs like this one are the unglamorous backbone of golf in towns this size. No USGA file, no university budget, just a membership that has kept a course going season after season because the town's golf life runs through it.
We rank it third because the other two courses have credentials it does not claim for itself. That is the whole argument, and the club's members, who get to play their course whenever they like while the rest of us arrange invitations and alumni weekends, may feel they have the better of the deal anyway. On the days that count locally, they probably do.
The drive back from West Point at dusk, past the fields toward a town lit up for a home game, is the correct way to understand Starkville golf: the best of it sits a few miles off, and the rest keeps the home fires burning.