# The Best Golf Courses in Valentine

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-valentine-ne/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Nebraska


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Valentine is a small town in the Nebraska Sandhills, ranch country, and The Prairie Club outside it did something the private clubs down the road at Mullen would not: it opened the Sandhills to the public. Two full courses in the dunes and pines, available to any golfer willing to make the drive, plus a 10-hole horse course for the game's shorter pleasures. And in town, Valentine keeps its own 10-hole course, Frederick Peak, which locals will tell you about with the pride usually reserved for much bigger things.

Three anchors, two of them at the same club, which makes this ranking partly an internal argument at The Prairie Club about which of its courses is better. It is a good argument. Golfers who make the trip tend to take sides by the second day. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and in the Sandhills the wind gets a vote on all three.

## 1The Prairie Club Dunes Course

The Dunes Course is the headline: big, open Sandhills golf, holes moving through grass-covered dunes with the wind as the standing defence and the ground firm enough to make the running shot a real option. This is the landscape Coore and Crenshaw made famous at Sand Hills, presented here without the membership requirement, and the Dunes Course leans into the scale of it. Wide corridors, large movements of land, and the constant question the Sandhills ask: the heroic line is open, if your nerve and the wind agree.

The concession is exposure. On a hard day the Dunes Course can beat a golfer up, and its openness means there is nowhere to hide a loose swing. Some visitors prefer the shelter of its sibling, and on a 30-mile-an-hour afternoon we would not argue with them. Across a full trip, though, this is the course that justifies the drive to Valentine. It takes first.

## 2The Prairie Club Pines Course

The Pines Course is the same club's other answer: golf that moves between open ground and pine trees, trading the Dunes Course's raw exposure for definition, shade, and holes that frame their questions with timber. Golfers who like to see the shot asked clearly often prefer it. The contrast is the club's whole design intelligence. Two courses, one landscape, two genuinely different rounds, so a two-day trip never repeats itself.

Why second? The Dunes Course has the grander land and the bigger moments, and in the Sandhills, grandeur is the currency. The Pines is the connoisseur's pick and the better choice on a windy day, and its partisans include plenty of people who have played both many times. That is about as strong as a second-place case gets. Most clubs in America would trade their flagship for this course and call it an upgrade.

## 3Frederick Peak Golf Course

Frederick Peak is Valentine's own: a 10-hole city course, the town's game rather than the visitors', and described locally as a gem without much argument from anyone who has played it. Small courses live or die on character, on whether the land and the routing give ten holes a personality that eighteen forgettable ones lack. Frederick Peak has the town's affection because it earned it, as the place Valentine golfers actually play, week in and week out.

It ranks third on scale and seriousness, behind two destination courses at a nationally known club, and the comparison is almost unfair in both directions. The Prairie Club cannot be what Frederick Peak is to Valentine, and Frederick Peak was never trying to be a resort. Play the big two for the trip. Play Frederick Peak to see the town itself, standing on a tee in the Sandhills with local golf going on around you, which is its own kind of destination.

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