# The Best Golf Courses in Syracuse

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-syracuse-ny/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / New York


A leading golf course in New York. Photo: Michael O'Connor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Syracuse winters are a genuine argument against living in Syracuse, and the golfers there will tell you so themselves, usually in April, on a tee box, in a jacket. What the short season produces is intensity. People here play when they can, they play fast, and they defend their courses with the energy of a fan base that has four months of golf to protect. The courses deserve some of that loyalty. This is a better bench than the city's national reputation suggests.

The character of Syracuse golf is old bones at fair prices. A traditional private club east of the city, a Robert Trent Jones state park course from 1936 wrapped around two glacial lakes, and the university's own club. No resorts, no real estate plays. The ranking scores the golf first, but access counts here more than it does in richer towns, and it nearly changes the order.

## 1Onondaga Golf and Country Club

Onondaga, out in Fayetteville, is the area's established private test: rolling ground, mature trees, and the kind of understated upkeep that comes from a membership playing the same course for a century rather than a marketing department selling it. The golf asks for shot shape both ways and a short game that works from tight lies around old fashioned greens. It is the strongest all around examination in the Syracuse area, which is what first place on this list is for.

The concession is the obvious one, and it stings more here than in Westchester: a ranking topped by a course most local golfers cannot play is a ranking with a hole in it. Onondaga wins on the golf. It loses the argument about who Syracuse golf is for, and the course at No. 2 wins that argument walking away. Hold both thoughts. The members here have a fine, serious golf course, and they know exactly what they have.

## 2Green Lakes State Park Golf Course

Green Lakes is the Syracuse course people picture. Robert Trent Jones built it in 1936 inside the state park, around two glacial lakes so improbably green they look dyed, on fairways that climb and fall through old forest. It is a state park round at state park money with a famous name on the routing and a setting no private club in the area can buy. Holes run along the ridges above the water, the trees close in, and the whole round feels like a hike you get to play golf through.

Where does it concede? Conditioning, inevitably, in a wet spring, and length against the modern game. A wet April at Green Lakes is a mud study. But on a dry September morning, with the lakes that impossible color and the leaves starting, plenty of golfers would call this the best round in the area and accept no follow up questions. It is second on examination and first on the day, and in a public ranking on another site it would probably lead. Here, the golf comes first, so it stands where it stands.

## 3Drumlins Golf Club

Drumlins is Syracuse University's club, which gives it a flavor neither of the others has: students, professors, alumni back for football weekends, a membership with orange in it. The club runs two courses, the East for the members' game and the West open to the public, both on drumlin country south of the city, those long glacial hills the whole region is built on. The golf is solid, hilly, walkable parkland, better than its reputation as the university's backyard and weaker, honestly, than the two courses above it.

That is the concession and it is the whole story: Drumlins is third because the competition is a top private club and a Jones state park course in a ridiculous setting. As a piece of a college town's life it may matter more week to week than either. A ranking measures golf, though, and on golf it takes the bronze without disgrace.

Play Green Lakes on the first clear morning after the leaves turn, when the water is at its greenest and the fairways are finally firm. That is Syracuse golf arguing its case, and it argues well.

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