# The Best Golf Courses in Virginia Beach

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-virginia-beach-va/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Virginia


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A beach town's golf usually gets treated as filler. Something to do on the cloudy day, between the oceanfront and dinner, booked at the last minute and forgotten by the drive home. Virginia Beach complicates that laziness with one fact worth leading with: its headline public course is a Pete Dye and Curtis Strange design, owned by the city.

Sit with that combination. Dye, the most willful American architect of his generation, and Strange, a Virginia golfer with two U.S. Open titles on his record, built a course that a city owns and the public can play. That is not beach filler. That is a municipal course with a pedigree most private clubs would happily borrow.

The rest of the bench is honest Hampton Roads golf. Heron Ridge as the other modern public option golfers here weigh against the headliner. Red Wing Lake as the old muni, by the oceanfront's back door, carrying the city's everyday game. Virginia Beach is flat, sandy, and spread out, and its golf reflects that geography without apology. No elevation changes are coming to rescue a weak hole here. The golf has to stand on design and conditioning alone, which is a fairer test than mountain courses get.

We rank the golf first, then the day, then value. In a city owned golf town, value is not a rounding error.

## 1Virginia Beach National Golf Club

Virginia Beach National is No. 1 by a distance that makes the rest of this ranking a fight for second, and the architect line is the reason.

Pete Dye courses divide golfers in a useful way. His work asks questions, sometimes rudely: angles that punish the passive line, trouble placed exactly where a bailout wants to land, greens that reward the player who took on the harder shot. Putting that design language into a city owned course is a gift to the local golfer who will play it fifty times and keep finding the questions, and a bracing surprise for the visitor who expected a flat beach muni to nap through.

Curtis Strange's involvement ties it to Virginia rather than to a traveling design brand. Strange is a state golf figure in a way that matters locally, and his partnership on a course in Hampton Roads gives the place a lineage that resonates beyond architecture nerd circles. This is home ground design, not a franchise.

The concession is Dye himself. Some golfers are done with his style, tired of being interrogated for four hours on vacation, and for them the best course in Virginia Beach will feel like homework at the beach. There is also the flatness. No design fully escapes a flat coastal site, and if your eye needs elevation to stay interested, this course has to win you with detail rather than drama.

That is a fight it wins often enough to hold its place on best in state public conversations, let alone best in its own city. A city owned Dye is the ranking. Everything below it is context.

## 2Heron Ridge Golf Club

Heron Ridge takes second as the modern public alternative, the course local golfers reach for when they want a full round in the same general mold without making the day about the headliner.

That role sounds faintly damning and is not. In a city with one clear No. 1, the second public option absorbs the overflow, the regular games, the golfers who have played the top course often enough to want variety. Heron Ridge's value to Virginia Beach is depth. A one course town is a fragile golf town, hostage to one maintenance budget and one tee sheet. A credible second option makes the whole scene healthier.

The concession is that Heron Ridge labors under the comparison every time. Played cold, without National as the reference point, it is a perfectly respectable day of Hampton Roads golf. Played the day after the Dye course, it gets judged on questions it never claimed to ask. Rankings traffic in exactly that kind of comparison, so second with a shrug from the architecture crowd is where it lands, even though week to week it may serve more local golfers well than the gap suggests.

Take the round here on its own terms and it does its job. Take it as an argument against National and it loses, quickly.

## 3Red Wing Lake Golf Course

Red Wing Lake is third, and its description in local shorthand, the old muni by the oceanfront's back door, contains both its charm and its ceiling.

Old munis are the load bearing walls of American golf. They are where a beach city plays when the visitors go home, where rates and expectations stay grounded, where the game belongs to residents first. Red Wing Lake's location does quiet work too. Near the oceanfront but through its back door, away from the strip's noise, it feels like the locals' version of a town that tourists think they understand.

The concession is straightforward. An old municipal course cannot match a Dye design for architecture or a newer public course for polish, and no loyalty to the muni ideal should pretend otherwise. Conditioning budgets and design ambition live on different planets here.

But third in Virginia Beach still means a round with a real place in the city's life. If National is the course you plan a trip around, Red Wing Lake is the course that explains how Virginia Beach golfers actually live with the game, week in, week out, long after the summer crowds leave.

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