Course Profiles / Texas

Trinity Forest Golf Club: A Course Profile

The most interesting piece of golf land in Dallas used to be a landfill. Trinity Forest Golf Club opened in 2017 south of downtown, on a former landfill site, and Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw built a links-style course on top of it: firm ground, open sky, no trees to speak of, and a double green the club calls the largest in North America. In a city that expresses itself through scale, the private club that chose a capped landfill and a ground game is making the most Dallas argument of all. It just does not look like one.

The Dallas Morning News ranked Trinity Forest No. 26 in its 2025 Texas Top 100, a strong debut-era position in a state with serious depth, and the ranking understates the course's importance to how Texas golf thinks about itself. Texas golf, Dallas golf especially, grew up on tree-lined parkland: Colonial, Dallas National's generation of big-budget private clubs, water in play, shade as a luxury good. Trinity Forest is the deliberate opposite. Par 72, 7,450 yards, and the defense is not length or trees. It is the bounce.

Golf on a landfill, and why it works

A landfill cap cannot take deep irrigation lakes or heavy tree planting, and it settles in ways that defeat a bulldozer's idea of flat. Coore and Crenshaw turned those constraints into the design brief. Links golf is the one style that wants exactly what a landfill offers: an open, treeless plain, firm turf, wind with nothing to stop it, and contours that move in broad, unpredictable ways. The double green, billed as the largest in North America, is the signature of the philosophy. Two flags, one enormous surface, and approach shots that can be played along the ground like a course on the North Sea rather than a course in North Texas.

Who it suits: the player who thinks in bounces and angles, who would rather land a 7-iron twenty yards short and watch it release than fly everything to a number. Who it frustrates: the target golfer, the one whose whole game is built on soft greens and exact yardages, because Trinity Forest keeps moving the target after the ball lands. A 7,450-yard course that defends itself with firmness rather than rough is a genuinely different test from everything around it, and it explains why the course drew a PGA Tour event to Dallas in its early years and why tour players either loved the place or wanted to argue with it. There was very little in between.

In our Dallas town ranking, Trinity Forest is the modern counterweight to the city's classic private clubs, and in the Texas state ranking it carries the flag for what Coore and Crenshaw minimalism looks like on manufactured ground.

The concession

Honest limits, then. A landfill site gives you openness, not beauty in the conventional sense; the setting is a wide southern Dallas horizon, and golfers raised on parkland shade may find the exposure more honest than charming, particularly in a Texas August. It is also private, in a city with no shortage of private golf, so the audience for its argument is mostly the membership and its guests. And the links claim deserves one asterisk anywhere it is made in America: this is links style, links influenced, links in intent, played in Dallas heat on Dallas soil, not the original article.

None of that dents the achievement much. Coore and Crenshaw were handed the least promising site in Texas golf, a capped landfill, and produced a top-30 course in the state that plays like nothing else within five hundred miles. Most clubs inherit good land and spend decades protecting it. Trinity Forest started with a garbage dump and a double green, and built the argument from there.