# The Best Golf Courses in Verona

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

Verona is a small town in the middle of New York farmland, and its golf exists for one reason: the Oneida Indian Nation built Turning Stone, a casino resort with three full size golf courses by three different architects, in a place where the drive in gives you cows, silos and no hint of what is coming. It is one of the stranger golf destinations in the Northeast and one of the most complete. Nobody stumbles onto these courses. You go on purpose, and the resort knows it.

Because all three courses sit on the same resort and answer the same question, how much golf can one property hold, the ranking turns on taste more than usual. Fazio polish, Rick Smith naturalism, or Robert Trent Jones Jr. severity. We score the golf first, then the day, and the order below will annoy a loyal minority. Good. Turning Stone regulars have opinions and the courses were built different enough to deserve them.

## 1Atunyote Golf Course

Atunyote is Tom Fazio's course, the resort's flagship, kept a short drive from the casino floor so it feels like a private club the resort lends you. It hosted the PGA Tour's fall event here, the Turning Stone Resort Championship, and it plays like a course built for professionals and priced for a special occasion: long, broad, immaculate, water placed where your eye wants to go anyway. Nothing is out of place. That is both the praise and, for some golfers, the problem.

The concession: Shenendoah regulars call Atunyote manufactured, a beautiful course with the soul of a very expensive photograph. There is something in it. But manufactured this well is its own kind of achievement, and when Atunyote is firm and the wind is up it asks the most complete set of questions of any course in Verona. First place, with the price tag noted and the premium, on this evidence, justified.

## 2Shenendoah Golf Course

Rick Smith built Shenendoah as the naturalist of the three, working with the wetlands and meadows on the main resort property instead of over them. It is the course the staff play, which is the kind of fact that tells you more than a brochure. The golf is strategic rather than severe: angles into greens, options off tees, trouble that you choose to flirt with instead of trouble installed across your only line. On a trip with mixed handicaps, this is the round everyone enjoys, including the good player, which is harder to design than a hard course.

It gives up Atunyote's polish and tournament record, and on conditioning at peak season it can look like the middle child. It is second. It might also be the course you would pick for your own Saturday game for the rest of your life, and a rankings page can admit that while still putting the flagship first.

## 3Kaluhyat Golf Course

Robert Trent Jones Jr. built Kaluhyat to be the hard one, and he succeeded completely. Marsh carries, tight corridors, elevation changes that feel larger than central New York should allow, and a closing stretch that has ended a lot of good rounds in the last three holes. Low handicappers who get bored at resort courses love it here. Everyone else should bring extra balls and a sense of humor, because Kaluhyat is not interested in your feelings.

The honest concession cuts the other way from the usual one: this might be the most memorable course at Turning Stone, and memorability is a ranking input we usually reward. It finishes third because too much of the field cannot play it. A course that a fifteen handicap cannot finish with the ball he started with has narrowed its own claim. Among scratch players polled at the bar, Kaluhyat wins this list. Among golfers, it takes third, proudly, like a warning sign with great views.

Book the three across two days, not one. Thirty six holes here, with a casino's worth of dinner waiting at the end of it, is a fine plan. Fifty four is a survival exercise that will cost you the Kaluhyat back nine and possibly your dignity.

Play Atunyote on the good day, Shenendoah on the fun day, and Kaluhyat on the day you feel brave. Verona, improbably, has a course for each.

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