Courses
Best golf courses near Columbia, MD
Below, you’ll find a list of courses near Columbia, MD. There are 38 courses within a 15-mile radius of Columbia, 18 of which are public courses and 20 are private courses. There are 33 18-hole courses and 5 nine-hole layouts.
The above has been curated through Golf Digest’s Places to Play course database, where we have collected star ratings and reviews from our 1,900 course-ranking panelists. Join our community by signing up for Golf Digest+ and rate the courses you’ve visited recently.
![Baltimore Country Club: East](http://golfdigest.sports.sndimg.com/content/dam/images/golfdigest/fullset/2019/01/06/5c325f6f2fa4575949207bfe_116%20-%20Baltimore%20CC%20(East)%20--%2014th%20hole%20-%20Larry%20Lambrecht.jpg.rend.hgtvcom.406.229.suffix/1573162562511.jpeg)
The East Course at Baltimore Country Club, also known as the Five Farms Course, was one of many outstanding A.W. Tillinghast designs nationally ranked for decades by Golf Digest. Still, even jewels need polishing now and then. The club brought in Keith Foster, perhaps the most modest of modern-day course architect. He chooses to work solely on restorations, no more than two at one time, and declines to self-promote. He won’t even nominate any of his courses for any of Golf Digest’s course awards, preferring to let others handle that. At Baltimore C.C., Foster removed trees (which nearly everyone is doing these days), rebuilt greens to make them manageable with today’s green speeds, re-established Tillinghast’s bunkering, regrassed everything and brought back sparkle to the East Course. Par 3s rank among the best Tillinghast buiilt, as does the stretch run from the par-5 14th to the strong par-3 17th.
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![Caves Valley Golf Club](http://golfdigest.sports.sndimg.com/content/dam/images/golfdigest/fullset/2021/9/Caves%20valley%20No%202.jpg.rend.hgtvcom.406.229.suffix/1631301810032.jpeg)
To compare the present Caves Valley against that which was originally built in the early 1990s is to recognize how much Tom Fazio has felt obligated to adjust his courses to today’s club and ball technology. Back in 1991, the opening hole was a dogleg-left with a trap at the turn. Today it has four bunkers framing the landing area. The par-5 third had just two “buffer bunkers” along a lake to the right to stop high-handicap slices from landing in the drink. Those buffers are still there, but so too are three enormous bunkers down the left, stretching over 300 yards from the back tee. And so it is all the way around Caves Valley. There are now target bunkers mainly in play for big hitters and frontal bunkers at several greens to force pin-seekers to throw it in the air. Caves Valley is a players’ club, and one remains a player only by being constantly challenged during a round.
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![Mount Pleasant Golf Course](http://golfdigest.sports.sndimg.com/content/dam/images/golfdigest/fullset/course-photos-for-places-to-play/placeholder-images/Placeholder_1.png.rend.hgtvcom.406.229.suffix/1652210514118.png)
Mount Pleasant was the site of Arnold Palmer’s third PGA Tour win at the 1956 Eastern Open. The event was played at Mount Pleasant from 1950-1958, with other winners including Sam Snead, Cary Middlecoff and Bob Toski. The public parkland track just north of downtown Baltimore also hosted the 1939 U.S. Amateur Public Links.
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