# The Best Golf Courses in Winter Park

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-winter-park-fl/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Florida


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The best golf course in Winter Park has nine holes, no range worth mentioning, and a routing that runs through neighborhoods and past a cemetery in the middle of town. It also gets more genuine love from golfers who know Florida than courses five times its price an hour away. That sounds like a slogan until you watch the place work: walkers out at first light, residents treating the course as a park that happens to have greens, visitors who came to mock a nine hole muni leaving as converts.

Winter Park's list is short, three courses, and it inverts the usual order. The private club with the pedigree sits second. The historic Orlando muni sits third. The nine holer in the middle of town, redesigned into a national case study, sits first, because on the day, on the walk, and on what a round costs you, nothing else in this town touches it. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. The golf at the nine is better than its size has any right to be, and the day is not close.

## 1Winter Park Golf Course

Winter Park Golf Course is a nine hole municipal course in downtown Winter Park, golf dating to 1937 with earlier golf on the site, redesigned by Keith Rhebb and Riley Johns and reopened in 2016 to national acclaim. The redesign is the story the whole country studied: take a tired town nine, rebuild the greens and the interest in every shot, keep it walkable, keep it cheap, and route it through the town itself, neighborhoods on one side, a cemetery along the way, so the course and Winter Park are the same place.

The golf punches up. Rhebb and Johns gave a short course real decisions, greens with enough movement to punish the lazy wedge and reward the played one, and the loop begs to be played twice, which is the nine hole format's secret advantage: the second nine is a rematch, same holes, fresh grudges. It is walking focused, among the cheapest quality golf in Florida, and it hosts the putting and community events that keep the town in its own course.

The concession deserves its sentence. Nine holes is nine holes. A strong player wanting a full championship examination will finish both loops still hungry, and Interlachen, below, is the sterner 18 hole test in this town. If the ranking scored only the sternness of the test, the private club wins. It does not, and on everything else, the walk, the town, the price, the sheer pleasure per dollar and per hour, the muni runs away with it. This is the rare case where the beloved option is also the right one.

## 2Interlachen Country Club

Interlachen is Winter Park's private club, a Joe Lee design renovated by Stephen Kay, 18 holes, and the home of local USGA qualifying, which tells you the course can be set up to examine good players properly. Lee built the kind of Florida course that era did well: water in play, defined shots, a members' test that holds up across decades, and Kay's renovation kept it current.

Second place here is a compliment in context, because Interlachen is the best conventional golf course in Winter Park and would top most town lists in Florida. It loses this one on the terms the nine wins: access is private, so the reader's chance of playing it runs through a member, and estimates put the cost of that world in the usual private tier, while the course across town charges municipal money to anyone who walks up. The day at Interlachen, club, lunch, a full 18 in a groomed setting, is the more complete country club day. The day in Winter Park belongs to the course in the middle of it. Members who prefer their golf private, walkable in a different way, and free of the muni's crowds have a real case, and they make it every weekend, from inside the gate, where the argument is easy to win and impossible to check.

## 3Dubsdread Golf Course

Dubsdread is Orlando's historic municipal course, opened in 1924, just over the line from Winter Park and close enough that Winter Park golfers have treated it as theirs for a century. It hosted the Orlando Open on the early PGA Tour, back when the professional game barnstormed through Florida munis in the winter, and its Tap Room restaurant is a local institution, which matters more to a course's real life than most design credits.

The golf today is honest municipal golf with a century of history under it, played by the full cross section of Orlando, and third on this list is the correct spot for it: behind a nine that became a national model and a private club with qualifying pedigree, ahead of nothing, because this list has only three names and Dubsdread would make most of them. What it has that neither course above it can claim is 1924, the Tour in its traveling years, and a barstool at the Tap Room where the round gets retold. History that specific is not filler. It is the reason the place still fills its tee sheet.

Nine holes in the middle of town, residents walking out with pushcarts as the light comes up over the cemetery and the rooftops. Winter Park looked at every model Florida golf offers and chose the smallest one. The rest of the state is still catching up to that decision.

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