Town Rankings / Washington
The Best Golf Courses in Tacoma
Tacoma golf is older than Tacoma golfers tend to realize, and older than almost anything on the West Coast. When a town's country club dates to 1894, it is not borrowing history for the brochure. It was there, playing golf on the Sound, while Seattle was still figuring out what it was going to be. That age shapes this entire list: two established private clubs with genuine roots, and then the hardworking public courses that carry the city's everyday game.
One note on addresses, because Tacoma golfers will make it if we do not. The top course plays out of Lakewood, just south of the city, and has carried the Tacoma name since before Lakewood was a city at all. We follow the golfers, not the map. This is the Tacoma list.
The ranking goes golf first, then the day, then access. The private clubs take the top two spots and the munis take the bottom two, which makes the list look tidy. The real argument lives inside each pair.
1Tacoma Country and Golf Club (Lakewood)
A club dating to 1894, among the oldest in the West, playing on ground by American Lake that it has occupied for the bulk of that history. Longevity like that is not a trivia point. It means the course has been walked, argued over, and improved by generations of serious golfers, and that kind of accumulated attention produces a coherence modern courses spend millions trying to fake.
The golf is traditional in the best sense: a members' test that rewards placement and patience, kept to private-club standards, on a site with water in the wider picture and old trees doing the framing. It is the strongest combination of test, conditioning, and setting available under the Tacoma name, and it has been for a very long time.
The concession is access, and here it bites harder than usual because the name promises the whole city. Tacoma Country and Golf Club belongs to its members. Estimates for clubs of this standing put the cost of entry far beyond a casual decision, and the public golfer in Tacoma gets the history secondhand. First on the golf. Closed to most of the town that shares its name. Both facts go in the record.
2Fircrest Golf Club
Fircrest is the in-town private answer, a compact, established club in its own small city within Tacoma's orbit, built around the kind of golf a member plays twice a week for thirty years. Shorter and tighter than the Lakewood course by reputation, Fircrest makes its stand on precision and on greens that punish careless approaches.
It finishes second because Tacoma Country and Golf Club beats it on depth, site, and sheer historical weight, not because Fircrest fails at anything in particular. As a daily members' course it may be the more playable of the two, and its partisans make that case with some justice.
The concession for Fircrest is scale. It is a neighborhood-scale club being ranked against one of the oldest clubs in the West. Second place in Tacoma, with a loyal membership that would not trade places, is a fair landing spot.
3Meadow Park Golf Course
Meadow Park is the busy Pierce County muni, and busy is the operative word. This is where Tacoma's public golf actually happens: leagues, lessons, junior programs, twilight rounds, the full democracy of the game on a county budget. If Tacoma Country and Golf Club is the city's golf history, Meadow Park is its golf present.
The course itself is straightforward municipal golf, well used and honestly maintained, with enough variety to hold a regular's interest across a season. It will not win an architecture argument against either club above it and it does not try to.
Third place, then, with the standard muni concession and one upgrade: throughput is a virtue. A ranking of a city's golf that ignores the course serving the most golfers would be a ranking of a city that does not exist.
4Fort Lewis Golf Course
The military course at the base south of the city finishes fourth, and its ranking comes with an asterisk the other courses do not carry. Fort Lewis golf exists first for the service members stationed there, and access for the general public has always run through the base's rules rather than a normal tee sheet. For the soldiers it serves, it is affordable golf on post, and that mission matters more than its position here.
As a test, it is the lightest of the four, a serviceable layout without the conditioning of the clubs or the civic weight of Meadow Park. Golfers who have played it remember a pleasant round and a unique setting inside an active base, not a course they would rank against the town's best.
Fourth, then, and content with it. Fort Lewis was never trying to win this list. It was trying to give a young soldier a place to play, and at that job it has no competition on this page.