Architect Rankings
The Best Joe Lee Golf Courses in America
Joe Lee never became a brand name, and his work is better than his fame. Our dataset holds 30 of his courses across ten states, but the center of gravity is Florida, where Lee spent a career building the private club golf that the state's boom actually ran on: not the tour stops, but the courses members played three times a week for forty years. His idea of golf, read across the list, is consistent. Water is a constant presence but rarely a forced carry for its own sake. The courses are long enough to respect, walkable, honest about their difficulty, and built to be played daily rather than photographed once. He designed from the member's tee, in an era when most architects designed from the developer's brochure.
The range is real: a PGA Championship course in Palm Beach Gardens, a state park course in Tennessee that Golf Digest put among America's best public places to play, an island course he called the most unique design of his career. Here are his best, ranked. Florida dominates, because Florida is where Lee worked, and the Southeast's golfers can tour his career through the Jupiter ranking, the Boca Raton ranking and the Crossville ranking.
1BallenIsles Country Club East Course, Palm Beach Gardens, Florida
The East Course carries the heaviest history in Lee's portfolio. Built in 1964 for the PGA National predecessor era at what is now BallenIsles, with Dick Wilson's hand in its origins and Lee's in its development, it hosted the 1971 PGA Championship, plus World Cup and PGA seniors history through the 1960s and 1970s. Keith Foster led a major renovation in 2020. A course that hosted a major and still anchors a three-course private club nearly sixty years later is the strongest evidence that Lee's generation built to last.
2Deer Island Country Club, Tavares, Florida
Lee's own verdict puts Deer Island here: he called it the most unique design of his career. The 1994 course sits on Deer Island in Lake Harris, reached by bridge, private with limited public play, and water views on most holes. It plays par 72 at 6,885 yards from the gold tees, rated 74.0 with a 144 slope, and the signature par-3 13th has a putting surface that is virtually an island. Designers rarely pick their favorite honestly. Lee picked the island, and the slope says the island bites.
3Stonehenge Golf Club, Crossville, Tennessee
Stonehenge, opened in 1984 at Fairfield Glade, is Lee outside Florida and arguably Lee at his most distinctive. The name comes from walls of native stone and natural rock outcroppings throughout the layout. Par 72 at 6,549 yards with bent grass tees, fairways and greens, unusual for Tennessee. The signature par-3 14th drops steeply downhill to a green by Lake Dartmoor guarded by a 15-foot layered stone retaining wall. It hosts the Tennessee Senior State Open and the Tennessee Women's Open, Golfweek ranked it No. 2 among the best courses you can play in Tennessee for 2024, and it is the flagship of Fairfield Glade's five courses and 90 holes on the Cumberland Plateau.
4Fall Creek Falls State Park Golf Course, Spencer, Tennessee
A state park hired Joe Lee in 1972, and the result still embarrasses private clubs. Fall Creek Falls is carved from dense Cumberland Plateau forest with almost no parallel holes, 71 bunkers and few water hazards, the premium placed squarely on course management. Par 72 at 6,669 yards from the championship tees. Golf Digest has named it one of the country's top 100 public places to play, the state calls it one of America's top 25 public courses, the greens were rebuilt in 1998 to Lee's original plans, and the course is a Certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary. Public golf at this standard, from a parks department budget, is Lee's most democratic achievement.
5Abacoa Golf Club, Jupiter, Florida
Abacoa was Lee's last design, opened in 1999 in Jupiter, a public course in a new community with spring training baseball as a neighbor. Par 72 at 7,200 yards from the back tees, water in play on 14 of 18 holes. Late work by any architect tests whether the ideas survived the decades. Abacoa says Lee's did: a full-length, water-threaded Florida test that the public can simply book, designed at the end of a career that began when Florida golf was young.
6Feather Sound Country Club, Clearwater, Florida
Lee's 1976 private design in Clearwater, renovated by Bobby Weed and again by Kipp Schulties in 2022. It plays par 71 and can stretch to 7,215 yards, and in December 2025 the club hosted the Skechers World Champions Cup with all competition played on the back nine. A member course durable enough to keep earning renovations, and now televised senior team golf, half a century after Lee drew it.
7Interlachen Country Club, Winter Park, Florida
Lee's 1985 private design in Winter Park, renovated by Stephen Kay, par 72 at 7,213 yards from the back tees with the par-5 10th running 562 yards as its longest hole. It has hosted local USGA qualifying, which is the quiet compliment Florida golf pays its fair tests: the association trusts the course to sort out good players without trickery.
The honest concession about Lee: much of his Florida work is residential club golf of its era, and some of it has needed rescuing by later architects, Weed and Schulties at Feather Sound, Rees Jones's 2024 renovation at Boca Woods, Straka's 2024 work at Quail Ridge. A defender would say that needing a renovation at fifty is what surviving looks like. Fair. But it does mean Lee's legacy rests less on any single masterpiece than on a standard: dozens of courses, across three decades, that their members never wanted to leave. In a state that built golf faster than anywhere on earth, Joe Lee was the man who built it to be played every day. The members are still playing.