# The Best Golf Courses in Youngstown

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Ohio


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

The Mahoning Valley built its golf the way it built everything else, for the people who lived there. So the best golf in Youngstown is not behind a gate. It is a metropark course in Boardman, 36 holes of Donald Ross that anyone can play, sitting in a region that has had some hard decades and kept its public golf intact through all of them. That is not a small thing. Plenty of wealthier cities let their municipal Ross courses rot.

This ranking scores the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and Youngstown is one of the few towns where the public option wins on the golf alone before value even enters the argument.

## 1Mill Creek Golf Course

Thirty-six holes of Ross, run by a metropark, open to anyone with a tee time. Sit with that for a second, because the combination barely exists anymore. Ross's public work was golf for the whole town by design, small greens, honest angles, trouble placed where a thinking player can see it and a careless one will find it. Mill Creek gives Youngstown two full loops of that, which means variety most single-course towns cannot offer and a depth of Ross golf that private clubs in bigger cities quietly envy.

The concession is conditioning money. A metropark budget is not a country club budget, and on a wet spring week the difference shows. But architecture outlasts maintenance cycles. The bones here are the best in the valley, the price is the most democratic, and No. 1 is not close.

## 2Tippecanoe Country Club

Tippecanoe is Youngstown's traditional private answer, the members' club for golfers who want the full club life with their golf: conditioning that a public course cannot match week to week, a calendar, a dining room, the works. On the quality of an ordinary Tuesday, its presentation will beat the metropark's.

It finishes second because the golf itself is chasing a Ross pair, and chasing 36 holes of it means the variety argument is lost before it starts. Tippecanoe's members are not suffering. They have the best private option in town. They just do not have the best course, and in Youngstown that distinction belongs to the public.

## 3Avalon Lakes Golf Course (Warren)

Avalon Lakes comes in from Warren, up the road, and its inclusion is the honest admission that Youngstown's bench thins out fast after two. It is the resort-flavored option in the area, the course you book for an outing or a weekend group that wants a bigger, more polished presentation than the everyday local game.

That polish is also the concession. Avalon Lakes is selling an experience, and experiences date faster than architecture. Against a Ross metropark and the town's established private club, it is the third choice for a serious golfer based here, even if it might be the first choice for a visiting group with one free afternoon.

One more thing belongs on the record. The Mahoning Valley has lost a great deal over fifty years, and regions that lose industry usually lose their golf with it, course by course, to housing and neglect. Youngstown kept a 36-hole Ross metropark in public hands through all of that. However you rank the three courses here, that act of keeping is the valley's real golf achievement, and it is why this list reads the way it does.

Youngstown's list, then, is a public course on top, a proud private club behind it, and a reminder that in the Mahoning Valley the best golf was always meant to belong to everybody.

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