Our 7 favorite courses we played in 2025

A US Open host.

A course played backwards.

And a hole in a prison.

The writers of GOLF enjoyed golf in various locations in 2025. Recently, seven GOLF employees wrote about their favorite places, and below are excerpts from those stories.

2 greens on 1 hole?! Why this famous US Open site added a surprising quirk

Here’s a nice wrinkle, though: Balty membership doesn’t lean toward the higher-ranked and more storied of the two courses (the Lower), but instead toward the “other” option: the Upper. This isn’t to say that the club’s members aren’t proud of their better-known offerings or that they don’t still enjoy testing their games; it’s just that if they want to go outside after work or play a nice Saturday morning four-ball, most members prefer to do so on the less blue Upper.

That’s more true today than ever thanks to a recent restoration by restorers Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, who also helped return the Lower Course to its Tilly-rich roots through a restoration job they completed in 2021. “The Lower had undergone a lot of architectural changes in the name of hosting championships,” Hanse said at an Upper reopening event I attended earlier this year. “The Upper was kind of a sleepy little golf course out there.”

Sleepy but deeply loved! While the Lower dazzles you with length and imposing hazards (such as the Sahara bunker complex on the par-5 17th), the Upper delights you with more variety in hole settings and designs, due to its home in the side of a mountainside. (I was certainly happy with it; my summer round at the Upper was my favorite round of 2025.) Hanse and Wagner worked on a wealth of archival photography and maps, expanding green spaces to their original dimensions and removing trees to open sightlines, but never straying from Tillinghast’s original intent. Read Alan Bastable’s full story here.

Why the best course I played in 2025 was the course I played backwards

One of the fun parts of letting go of your childhood is learning the little lessons you’ve managed to retain.

I don’t know how old I was when my father first dropped his favorite pearl of wisdom. I don’t remember why he said it. But I can still hear the sentence in my head, spoken in Dad’s playful intonation, as if to emphasize its inherent truth. I suspect I always will.

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

It took me a while to realize the meaning of those words, and even longer to realize that they referred to me. But the answer came when I least expected it: on a golf course that was going the wrong way. Read James Colgan’s full story here.

This pristine public 9-holer in New York’s first capital was at the top of my list for 2025

There are many benefits to having a cheap, convenient public course close to home. Quick laps at dawn, or to beat the darkness before sunset. Spontaneous speed laps when an unexpected window opens. Familiarity. Community. No dress code.

With everything you have to offer, you don’t have to ask much from the course itself. With relatively smooth greens and some grass on the fairways, you are good to go.

But Green Acres Golf Course in Kingston, NY, offers so much more than that. For the price of a goat course, every golfer who arrives at Green Acres is treated to near-impeccable conditions, friendly and accommodating staff, a short but varied layout and, at least as autumn has unfolded this year, the fastest and smoothest greens I have ever laid. Read Kevin Cunningham’s full story here.

Why this announced PNW Muni was my favorite course I played in 2025

I was fortunate enough to play many courses that were new to me in 2025, but my visit to Chambers Bay, the muni darling of the Pacific Northwest and site of the 2015 US Open, was by far my favorite for one simple reason:

I didn’t know what to expect and it completely exceeded any expectations I had in the end.

You see, three factors had shaped my view of Chambers Bay:

1) That 2015 US Open, won by Jordan Spieth, where pros and fans alike complained about bumpy greens, a weird setup with a changing par and a sketchy Dustin Johnson three-putt to cap it off;

2) My own father’s experience with the course and he told me he didn’t like the course – hard way to start for the ole muni;

3) The recent praise for the course (championed by GOLF’s own Seattleite, Dylan Dethier), which has had its greens redone and has since hosted the 2022 US Women’s Amateur.

But it’s golf, and when I planned a trip to Bend, Oregon and then Seattle last November, I knew I had to drive to University Place to check out the course for myself. Read Jack Hirsh’s full story here.

My favorite course of the year offers an incredible summer deal

One of the great ironies of living in a winter paradise like Phoenix is ​​that just when the weather turns beautiful, prices become exorbitantly high.

That’s a very unwelcome development for someone like me, who is quite price sensitive when it comes to paying for golf. With two young children at home, it hurts my wallet and my conscience to spend more than $100 for a routine round at a local golf course.

That’s why summer in Arizona is truly my time to shine – at least, in a golf sense. Because the deals available on courses that routinely charge a lot of money for rounds during peak season drop to rock bottom prices. The only caveat? You have to play in 100 degree heat. But remember: it’s a dry heat. Really, it’s not bad!

This year my mother and I purchased summer passes to Starfire Golf Club in Scottsdale – an original Arnold Palmer design that once included three nines, but has since been renovated to include a short nine-hole course (the Mulligan – a great option for families) and a full-size 18-hole option, the King. Read Jessica Marksbury’s full story here.

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My favorite course played in 2025? It’s in a prison

You don’t fully understand the pressure, I now believe, until they stood in a prison yard, bordered by 15-foot-high barbed wire fences, in front of a dozen inmates, an officer and a chief inspector, and had to drop a rubbery ball onto a green carpet, about 80 feet away, with a 56-degree wedge.

Make a piece?

Trash talk.

Dilute it?

Trash talk.

Land the ball on the putting surface? Somehow I did that at the end of a pitching game – and still heard about it.

Of course the golf writer wins. I mean, he writes about golf. He better win!

I can’t argue that. And a golf story was the reason I was in Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a minimum-security prison outside Olympia, Washington, in late July. Tim Trasher, the aforementioned superintendent, had started what is called the Cedar Creek Golf Club in the hopes that its members would be rehabilitated by what golf romantics like Thrasher believe is good golf. Whether that is possible will not be known for a while, as CCGC is only a few years old and the process is certainly not linear. Read Nick Piastowski’s full story here.

My favorite course from 2025 made me want to do D1

One of my worst rounds of 2025 took place on a course I immediately fell in love with: the Warren Course on the campus of Notre Dame.

It was the Friday morning of Labor Day weekend, the last day of welcome week, so the campus was still quiet when we arrived in South Bend, Indiana. But therein lies one of my favorite aspects of the Warren: it’s as close to campus as college education can be. The layout is located across the street from Notre Dame’s recreational fields, and just a few hundred yards from Dunne Hall, a student residence named after American golf baron Jimmy and his wife Susan. Before I even hit a tee shot, I was envious of that closeness. I went to UW-Madison, which has an equally great college, University Ridge, but it is ten miles from any other college.

We checked in at the pro shop, right in front of the husband of Notre Dame coaching legend Muffet McGraw, who enjoys her own time on the court here and there. During my 15 minutes inside, the phone rang constantly, and for good reason. Tee times can be made two weeks in advance, and we were two weeks away from Texas A&M’s football visit to Notre Dame Stadium. There was another nice aspect: the course is open on home game days, but with an all-in deal of $135. Instead of forcing the course staff to show up early, work all day and close late, the course schedules a morning start and closes in the afternoon. Customers can reserve a spot, play their 18 holes and then go straight to the stadium. Read Sean Zak’s full story here.

And some thoughts on just playing – period

One of the reasons behind this story is to create options for you, but that assumes you can make time to play, so we thought we’d put an end to this: Dylan Dethier’s article entitled “I’ve Played Disappointingly Little Golf This Year. Here Are Five Ways I Want to Change.” You can read it here.