# The Best Golf Courses in Stateline

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-stateline-nv/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Nevada


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

There is exactly one place at Lake Tahoe where your approach shot has the lake behind the green, and it is not a secret. Edgewood Tahoe sits on the water at Stateline, on the Nevada side where the casinos rise a short walk from the fairways, and every July the celebrity championship turns it into the most recognisable summer golf broadcast in America. Actors and quarterbacks duff chips on national television. The lake does not care. It looks perfect anyway.

Stateline is a thin bench and we will not pretend otherwise. This is a two course argument, and really it is a one course argument with a sensible second option down in the Carson Valley. Tahoe golf is a short season, high altitude, high price game. The ranking scores the golf first, then the day, then access, and at Tahoe the day is doing heavy lifting for everyone.

## 1Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course

Edgewood is the only Tahoe lakefront 18, per the basic geography of the place: nobody else has the shoreline. That fact alone would put it first in Stateline, but the golf has to hold up its end, and it does. This is a proper championship length test in tall pines that opens up as it reaches the water, finishing along the beach where the closing holes play with the lake on one side and a gallery's worth of boat traffic watching from the other.

The celebrity championship every July is both its fame and the concession we have to make. The event is television first and golf second, a festival with a scoreboard, and purists roll their eyes at it. Fine. But watch what the course does even in that setting: the par 3s toward the water ask real questions, the altitude and the afternoon breeze punish lazy club selection, and the famous names shoot real scores, good and bad. A course that was only a backdrop would have been exposed decades ago.

The other concession is price and access in the practical sense. Edgewood is public, which matters enormously at Tahoe, but it is premium public, priced like the bucket list stop it knows it is. Estimates and posted rates put it among the most expensive public rounds in the region. We still rank it first, and it is not close. There is one lakefront course at Tahoe. This is it, and the golf earns the postcard.

## 2Genoa Lakes Golf Club Lakes Course

Genoa Lakes is the counterargument, and an honest one. It sits down in Genoa, in the Carson Valley below the lake, which means a drive over or around the range, a longer season than the shoreline, and golf at high desert valley prices instead of Tahoe prices. The Lakes Course plays through wetlands and water features at the foot of the Sierra, with the mountains filling the view that Edgewood gets from the water itself.

For a golfer staying at Stateline for a week, Genoa is the second round that makes the trip make sense: play Edgewood once, for the memory, then go down the hill and play golf that costs less and, on a windy day, asks plenty. Ranch and valley golf is a different test, flatter, more exposed, more about ground and wind management than the tree lined corridors up top.

The concession runs the other way too. Nobody flies to Tahoe to play in the valley. Genoa Lakes is a good course in the wrong argument; in this town's ranking it is second because the town's first course owns the lake. If your budget says one or the other, we understand the valley choice. We just cannot rank it above the only 18 holes that finish on that beach.

Two courses, two altitudes, two price brackets. Stateline's golf is really a choice about what you came for: the photograph that is also a golf course, or the golf that happens to sit under the same mountains.

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