Best golf courses near Southern Pines, NC

Pine Needles used to lurk quietly in the Pinehurst background before the USGA chose to put it in their regular women’s championship rotation. It got another big boost in 2017 after Kyle Franz reworked portions of the course, putting the Pinehurst touch on the borders, cross hazards and bunkers. Though it lacks the intimacy and connectivity of its sister course, Mid Pines, with the holes wandering far afield due to a being part of a 1920s residential development, it’s grown into a big, championship worthy course (most recently hosting the 2019 Senior Women’s Open and 2022 U.S. Women’s Open) with arguably the best set of greens after No. 2.

What began as a private retreat called Knollwood, funded by Roaring Twenties millionaires like James Barber, Horace Rackham and Henry Ford, is now a charming public Donald Ross design, revitalized by young first-time designer Kyle Franz in the style of Pinehurst No. 2, where Franz had worked on the restoration. Mid Pines is pure elegance and beauty. The routing is spellbinding, with holes that stretch out into corners at the property’s high points, then fall back down to intersect at junctions across the calmer interior. Franz’s 2013 work expanding greens and restoring the perimeter sandscapes has greatly enhanced one of Pinehurst’s most refined golf presentations.

Mid South Club can play a lot longer than its yardage from the back tees with the significant amount of elevation present on this Arnold Palmer design. The rolling terrain and mounding provide options for the player to use the slopes to work the ball, though six green complexes require forced carries over water.

In 2010, a team lead by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw killed and ripped out all the Bermudagrass rough on Pinehurst No. 2 that had been foolishly planted in the 1970s. Between fairways and tree lines, they established vast bands of native hardpan sand dotted with clumps of wiregrass and scattered pine needles. They reduced the irrigation to mere single rows in fairways to prevent grass from ever returning to the new sandy wastelands. Playing firm and fast, it was wildly successful as the site of the 2014 Men’s and Women’s U.S. Opens, played on consecutive weeks. Because of its water reduction, the course was named a Green Star environmental award-winner by Golf Digest that year. In 2019, Pinehurst No. 2 and No. 4 hosted another U.S. Amateur Championship, and the USGA announced Pinehurst No. 2—in addition to hosting the 2024 U.S. Open—will also have the 2029, 2035, 2041 and 2047 U.S. Opens.

Like a football team searching for the right coach, the resort could never settle on the right identity for the No. 4 course despite a series of major alterations by different architects. It found its match when it hired Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner to carry out a full-scale blow-up and rebuild in 2018 that brought back the sweeping sand-and-pine character we identify with Pinehurst, while initiating a style of shaping in the greens and bunkers that’s confident and distinctly its own.

Tom Fazio did the first 18 at Pinehurst’s ultra-private Forest Creek G.C., the South Course, in 1996, carving it from a rolling pine forest, with most tee shots playing downhill and most greens amenable to low, running shots. When he returned nearly a decade later to add the North Course, he and his team decided on a different approach, a more organic, lay-of-the-land 18. So the North has more uphill holes and semi-blind tee shots. The sandy base of the pine forest is exposed on many holes, incorporated not just to frame holes but also as carry hazards on certain shots. Formal bunkers are edged with clumps of bushy wiregrass or dwarf pampas. The only water hazard is encountered late in the round, on long lake around which the 15th, 16th and 17th play. This course wasn’t inspired by sand-scarred neighboring courses like Pinehurst No. 2, Mid-Pines and Dormie Club.

The Dormie Club is a minimalist Coore and Crenshaw design just north of Pinehurst that follows the popular design theme of the Sandhills region: little traditional rough, sandy waste areas lining the fairways and greens busy with humps and hollows. The course is a second-shot layout, with forgiving fairways allowing players to get off the tee without too much trouble. The greens, however, have plenty of movement, placing an importance on proper shot placement on approaches.

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Cut from a nature preserve about a mile north of the resort, Pinehurst No. 8 is one of Tom Fazio's most versatile designs, as each hole plays differently from the previous. The front nine is mostly tree-lined, the back more open, with both touching ponds, marsh and Pine Valley-like sandy wastelands. For putting surfaces, Fazio built crowned greens with greenside swales, intended as a salute to Donald Ross and Pinehurst No. 2. No. 8 is also the most secluded of the resort's nine courses (for now--Tom Doak's Pinehurst No. 10 is due to open in 2024), which no homes or development touching it. Fazio retrurned in late 2022 to touch up elements of the course that needed burnishing, and the course plays as fast and firm as its older brethren.

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Differing in style from the eight other Pinehurst courses, No. 9 is a Jack Nicklaus signature design featuring bentgrass greens, forgiving fairways and five sets of tees. Several holes favor left to right shot shaping, and the putting surfaces are often multi-tiered.

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Southern Pines used to be a course that only locals and architectural bookworms played. Designed in the early 1900s by Donald Ross, the affordable public course occupied a wonderful, bucolic piece of land and seemed to have buried treasure underneath. After a change in ownership, Kyle Franz completed a major 2021 renovation that added plenty of razzle dazzle to the design in the form of new greens and painting the layout with the kind of scruffy sandscapes indigenous to the Pinehurst region (and to Pine Needles and Mid Pines where he’s previously wielded his art). The work has elevated this formerly modest public course to the level of its more prestigious neighbors.

The No. 6 is not likely to ever be an architectural darling. It was designed and built in the dark ages of the 1970s by George Fazio and is one of the sleepier courses in the area. But don’t be too judgmental—with all the sandy pyrotechnics being added around the neighborhood, No. 6 chugs along with quiet grace, presenting traditional hole after traditional hole of smart, effective bunkering through a property that rolls high and low through lovely pine corridors. There’s a lot to be said for this kind of confident maturity. In 2022, Pinehurst No. 6 hosted the USGA’s inaugural U.S. Adaptive Open.

Don’t overlook little No. 3, which is easy to do at a first glance at the scorecard with a maximum yardage of less than 5,200 yards. You’d never know it. This is serious golf, pound for pound the toughest course on property and a scaled-down version of No. 2. The greens are dazzling with the same crowned edges as big brother, with the bunkers and perimeter barrens revived by Kye Goalby (designer of The Tree Farm with Zac Blair) that match. It’s also the resort’s best walk. Will you come away thinking No. 3 is in the same league at No. 2? No. But you will get a full serving of what makes Pinehurst so mesmerizing and a lesson in not judging a course by its cover, or its length.