Best golf courses near Alpharetta, GA

The design collaboration by amateur star Bobby Jones and golf architect Robert Trent Jones (no relation) was meant to recapture the magic that the Grand Slam winner had experienced when he teamed with Alister Mackenzie in the design of Augusta National. But Trent was an even more forceful personality than the flamboyant Mackenzie, so Peachtree reflects far more of Trent’s notions of golf than Bobby’s, particularly in designing for future equipment advances. When it opened, Peachtree measured in excess of 7,200 yards, extremely long for that era. It boasted the longest set of tees in America (to provide flexibility on holes) and the country’s most enormous greens (to spread out wear and tear). As it turns out, Trent was a visionary, and decades later other designers followed his lead to address advances in club and ball technology.

No course on our rankings has highlighted the value of new turfgrasses better than the Highlands Course at Atlanta Athletic Club. It sets the standards for quality everyday conditions as well as for major championships at Southern venues. Its tees and fairways are newly-developed Zorro Zoysia, which can withstand Atlanta’s coldest winter days. Greens are state-of-the-art TifEagle Bermuda, smooth and pure. Approaches and surrounds of greens are TifGrand Bermuda, which allows them to be mowed very tight for additional bounce. The rough is Tifway 419 Bermuda, a great old standby. The club also recently upgraded its irrigation system. Because each turf has different water demands, a precise individual-head system was installed, each head controlled by the superintendent with a smart phone app, applying moisture only where needed and thus saving water and money. No longer will an errant shot at AAC land behind an irrigation box. There are none anymore.

Robert Trent Jones built 27 holes for the Atlanta Athletic Club when it moved from East Lake in Atlanta to the northern suburb of Duluth (now called Johns Creek) in the late 1960s. When Joe Finger added a fourth nine on a high section of the property in the early 70s, the holes were broken into two 18-hole courses, the Highlands Course, host of the 1976 U.S. Open and 2001 and 2011 PGA Championships, and the Riverside Course. Riverside was always viewed as the more friendly, non-championship course, though it hosted it's share of prestigious tournaments as well. Rees Jones performed major work on both courses through the years and the style of each came to resemble more his architeture than his father's, or Finger's. In 2022, Tripp Davis remodeled Riverside, rebuilding and reshaping each hole, each green site and the bunkers to tie them better into the landforms, creating new looks and several new holes in the process. Davis divided the par-5 third into a short par 3 and a dogleg left par 4 with the new green pushed back against the Chattahoochee River, then combined the old fourth and fifth into a riverside par 5 that bends gradually right. The twelfth green was pushed back 80 yards to turn it into a par 5, the par-3 17th green was rebuilt with modifeid punchbowl shaping and water hazards near the greens at 14 and 18 were removed. Riverside finished second for the 2023 Best Transformation award, and there are some (including us) who would divide a 10-round split between Highlands and Riverside 5-5, or even 6-4 in favor or the latter.

For over a decade, the most spirited debate in golf was over who really designed the really fine Atlanta Country Club. Both Willard Byrd of Atlanta and Joseph S. Finger of Houston claimed the honor. Both lobbied Golf Digest hard for the architectural credit, but neither provided much supporting documentation. Both architects are deceased now, and from what we can piece together, Byrd landed the original contract in the early 1960s, but was still more land-planner than course architect in those days, so the club brought in Finger to finish the job. We give them both credit for this hilly, strategic design, a solution neither architect would likely have accepted. Atlanta resident and former Jack Nicklaus associate Mike Riley remodeled the course in the early 2000s and his work helped put the course back in the America's 100 Greatest Courses ranking in 2003 after it had fallen off in 1997. Now architect Beau Welling is working with the club, and the results of his renovation will be revealed in late 2023 or early 2024.

The late architect Bob Cupp, an elite golfer in his youth, was extremely talented at building tournament-worthy golf courses. Settindown Creek, the "country" course of the intown Ansley Golf Club located in the suburbs far north of Atlanta, is no exception (see the slope of 150). The club has hosted a number of prominent state and national events, including the 2005 U.S. Women's Amateur won by Morgan Pressel. It's a tough course that requires controlled approaches into greens surrounded by creeks, ponds, penal bunkers and deep rough. Two thirds of the holes play through the flood plain of the Little River, the other third over typically hilly, wooded north Georgia terrain. The original plan for the course had the holes numbered differently. The property straddled the county line, with most of the course on the Cherokee County side. At the time, however, Cherokee was a dry county, so the club moved the location of the clubhouse across the line into the smaller (and wetter) Fulton County section, necessitating a reording of the holes and turning, unfortunately, one of the course's weakest holes into the current 18th.

Dunwoody is an example of the benefits of smart renovation. The club was established in the 1960s in the countryside north of Atlanta as the suburbs were quickly expanding that direction. It was a nice neighborhood country club with a perfectly fine course designed by Willard Byrd, who was one of the top regional architects working in the southeast in the 1960s and 70s. Over time, like all courses, the trees thickened and the golf features dulled, making the golf ordinary. Enter Atlanta-based architect Bill Bergin, who remodeled the course in 2013 by thinning excessive trees, expanding putting surfaces, creating more room in the fairways and giving the bunkering a more distinctive look with vertical grass faces and strong horizontal top lines. Though he couldn't cure the awkwardness of the unfortunate fifth hole, a 6-iron/8-iron par 4 that bends 90-degrees right, his work breathed new life into the wonderful, rolling piece of land with a kind of centralized core routing that later became increasingly rare in the Atlanta market. Once sleepy, Dunwoody Country Club is now a sleeper and well worth seeking out when in the region.