# The Best Golf Courses in Washington

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Washington DC


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

Every famous course in the Washington area is technically not in Washington. Congressional, Burning Tree, Chevy Chase, all of them sit across the line in Maryland or Virginia, behind gates. Inside the District itself, the golf is three public courses on federal parkland, and one of them carries a piece of American history that no suburban club can match. Langston opened in 1939, in a segregated city, as a course where Black golfers could play. That fact is not decoration on this ranking. It is close to the whole argument.

The District's golf is public golf in the truest sense: cheap, busy, imperfectly kept, and played by everybody. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and in a town where every option is open to anyone with the green fee, the ordering comes down to which course gives a round meaning beyond the holes themselves.

## 1Langston Golf Course

Langston is named for John Mercer Langston, the first Black congressman from Virginia, and from 1939 it was the home course of Black Washington: the place where the city's Black golf community built its own institutions when the other public courses were closed to them. Generations of players learned the game here, along the Anacostia River in the northeast corner of the District. A course can be a landmark for its architecture. Langston is a landmark for who got to play it, and what they built around it.

The golf itself is honest municipal golf, flat in stretches, tougher than it looks when the river wind gets up, and kept better than its budget has any right to expect. The concession is conditioning and pace on a crowded weekend, the standard tax on beloved city golf everywhere. But no other course in the District asks you to think about anything larger than your scorecard, and the recent investment in the city's public golf has treated Langston like the landmark it is. It is No. 1 here, and it is not particularly close.

## 2East Potomac Park Golf Course

East Potomac's Blue Course plays on a narrow island between the Potomac River and the Washington Channel, under the flight path of the jets climbing out of National Airport, with the monuments on the skyline across the water. As a setting for an inexpensive round of golf, it has no equal in the District, and few anywhere. You putt with the Jefferson Memorial in your eyeline and a 737 overhead, and the whole thing costs less than lunch in the neighborhoods the course serves.

As architecture, it makes fewer claims. The Blue is flat, largely straight, and more about the walk and the water on both sides than about decisions. That is the concession, and it is a real one: shot by shot, Langston asks more of a golfer. East Potomac wins the day and loses the golf, in a ranking that puts golf first. Second place, and the easiest recommendation in the city for a visitor with one afternoon and no connections.

## 3Rock Creek Park Golf Course

Rock Creek is the District's third public option, tucked into the woods of the big park in the northwest, and it plays like a different sport from the two river courses. Where Langston and East Potomac are flat, Rock Creek rolls through trees and over real hills, and a round there feels like an escape from the city in a way the island courses, for all their views, never quite manage.

It finishes third because the golf has historically been the roughest kept of the three, with the park setting doing more work than the holes. The city's public golf revival has plans for Rock Creek too, and its terrain gives it the highest ceiling of the District courses if the money lands well. For now it is the quiet, shaggy, pleasant third choice.

Play Langston in the morning, and the foursomes around you will include men who have been playing there for fifty years and kids holding a club for the first time. That is what a city course is supposed to look like. Washington's suburbs took the fame. The District kept the soul of the thing.

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