# The Best Golf Courses in University Place

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-university-place-wa/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Washington


A leading golf course in Washington. Photo: Atomic Taco from Seattle, WA, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One course is enough. That is the hook on this town's record and it is correct. University Place is a small suburb west of Tacoma that happens to contain a county-owned course on an old gravel pit, a course that hosted the 2015 U.S. Open and walks like Scotland. Most suburbs have a grocery store as their claim on the world. University Place has a U.S. Open venue, owned by the county, open to anybody who books a tee time.

Which raises the question this list has to answer honestly. A ranking needs a bench, and University Place has one course, so the second and third spots here are borrowed from Tacoma, the nearest real golf: its old country club in Lakewood and Fircrest. We are not pretending those clubs sit inside University Place. We are saying that if you stand on the first tee at Chambers Bay and ask what else there is to play nearby, this is the answer, in order.

## 1Chambers Bay Golf Course

Chambers Bay hosted the 2015 U.S. Open, won by Jordan Spieth, on a former gravel pit above Puget Sound, and the strangest part of that sentence is still the ownership: Pierce County built it, Pierce County owns it, and the public can play it. A walking-only links, fescue underfoot, one tree, huge dunes formed from the pit's old workings, trains running along the shore below. Nothing else in American public golf is quite like it.

The design asks links questions on American ground. Run the ball or fly it. Play away from the flag and use the slope, or go at it and accept the punishment. The 2015 Open made the course famous and also made it a target; the greens that week took heavy criticism, and the concession belongs right here. Chambers Bay's surfaces were the story of that championship for the wrong reasons, and a course that wants to be judged as a major venue has to own the week its greens were not ready.

The other honest knock is the walk. It is a serious hike, up and down the pit's contours, and golfers who treat walking-only as a charming detail learn otherwise by the fourteenth hole.

Neither point dents the ranking. Chambers Bay is a top-tier American public course sitting in a suburb most golfers could not find on a map before 2015. It is No. 1 here, No. 1 in the Tacoma area, and the rare famous course that any reader of this list can simply go and play. Book it, walk it, and bring more golf balls than your pride suggests.

## 2Tacoma Country and Golf Club

The borrowed bench starts with the oldest name in the region. Tacoma Country and Golf Club, down in Lakewood, dates to 1894, among the oldest clubs in the West, and it offers the perfect contrast to the course above it: private, traditional, tree-lined parkland golf where Chambers Bay is public, modern, and bare to the sky.

As golf, it is the second-best test in the area and a strong one, members' golf refined over more than a century. As a recommendation to a University Place visitor, it comes with the usual condition. You need a member. The ranking reflects the golf; your itinerary will reflect the gate.

## 3Fircrest Golf Club

Fircrest, the compact Tacoma club, takes third as the second borrowed option: established private golf, tighter and more intimate than the Lakewood course, the kind of place built around members' weekly games rather than events.

It loses to Tacoma Country and Golf Club on depth and history, and it loses to Chambers Bay on everything except shade. That reads harshly. It should not. Third here means a good private course standing next to a U.S. Open venue and a club from 1894, which is company most courses never keep.

The honest summary of University Place golf fits in one line, and it is the line this town deserves. Play Chambers Bay. If you know somebody, play the other two as well. The gravel pit on the Sound is the whole trip, and it is enough.

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