Golf in Texas: A Region by Region Guide to the Courses Worth Playing

Texas is not a golf destination. It is five or six golf destinations that happen to share a state government. Driving El Paso to Beaumont takes longer than driving Chicago to New York, and the golf at either end has nothing in common. West Texas golf is played on wind-scoured high desert. Houston golf is played on flat coastal clay in air you can chew. The Hill Country sits on fractured limestone that gives architects elevation change the rest of the state cannot offer. East Texas is piney woods that feel closer to Mississippi than to Midland.

Most Texas golf lists ignore all of that and hand you a flat top 25 mixing a private club near Trinity with a resort course near Fredericksburg, as if you could play both in a weekend. You cannot. This guide is organized by region, and it is blunt about what you can book versus what you cannot. Much of the state's best golf sits behind memberships you are not getting, so the vocabulary matters:

• Public. Book, pay, play. Municipal and daily fee. No connection needed.
• Resort. Play is tied to a room reservation or a stay and play package.
• Private. Member or member's guest only. Some of these clubs are effectively invisible.

Texas is also one of the few states where the best course in a major metro is a municipal facility. That is not a consolation prize. It is the most interesting thing happening in Texas golf.

Houston: The Best Municipal Story in American Golf

Memorial Park Golf Course (Public)

Memorial Park is the reason to fly to Houston with clubs. City-owned muni, three miles from downtown, hosts a PGA Tour event, and a Houston resident can play it for less than the cost of dinner.

The history is real. The land was part of Camp Logan, a World War I army training facility, and golf started there as a rough nine holes for recovering soldiers. In the mid 1930s John Bredemus, the architect behind much of early Texas golf, redesigned it into a full 18. Memorial Park hosted the Houston Open in 1947 and again from 1951 through 1963, then settled into decades of being a busy, tired, heavily played city course.

What changed it was money and ambition. The Astros Golf Foundation, driven by Astros owner Jim Crane, funded a full rebuild and hired Tom Doak, with then world number one Brooks Koepka as player consultant. That pairing is the underrated part. Doak is a minimalist known for wide, sandy, ground-game courses on great land, and Memorial Park is flat urban clay in a floodplain. Koepka's job was making sure the result could still test the best players alive. The project ran more than $18 million and the course reopened in late 2019.

It is not a Doak greatest hit in the mold of his dunes work and was never going to be. It is a clinic in making a flat, wet, urban site interesting: enormous contoured greens that create different holes depending on pin position, wide fairways that punish the wrong angle rather than the wrong club, native grass edges that swallow the wild shot, and a routing that gives an ordinary golfer a path around while leaving the Tour a par 70 past 7,400 yards. The Houston Open returned in 2020 and has stayed. In 2026 it was played there in late March and Gary Woodland won with the lowest 72-hole score in tournament history, 21 under par. From the members' tees with normal pins, though, Memorial Park is fair and fun. It becomes a monster only when the greens get baked for the Tour.

The economics are the punchline. In 2026, Houston resident rates ran from roughly $21 for weekday twilight up to the high thirties on weekends and holidays. Non-residents topped out near $140 at peak weekend times and started around $90 for weekday twilight, plus about $20 for a cart. Even the non-resident ceiling is a bargain for a Tour venue. Tee times release online and go fast.

Champions Golf Club (Private)

Twenty-some miles north sits Houston's most decorated private club, founded in 1957 by Jack Burke Jr. and Jimmy Demaret. The Cypress Creek course, a Ralph Plummer design opened in 1959, is the tournament course; Jackrabbit, originally George Fazio and later worked on by Tom Fazio, is the second 18. Cypress Creek's record is rare for a Texas club: the 1967 Ryder Cup, the 1969 U.S. Open, four Tour Championships (the last in 2003), and the 2020 U.S. Women's Open. Old-school parkland with enormous greens that hide a hundred hole locations and force you to control iron distance rather than just find the surface.

Whispering Pines and the Rest of the Houston Market

A hundred miles north of Houston, in the East Texas piney woods near Trinity, is Whispering Pines Golf Club, a Chet Williams design under the Nicklaus Design banner that opened in the early 2000s. It has finished first in the Dallas Morning News ranking of Texas courses more often than any other course in the state and hosts the Spirit International Amateur. It is also functionally unavailable: no green fee, no stay and play, no back door. When people say "the best course in Texas," this is usually what they mean, and best and playable are different questions. For everyone else the practical Houston market is the northern suburbs, where the Woodlands and Spring corridor holds resort and semi-private options on pine-shaded terrain.

Dallas and Fort Worth: The Deepest Private Bench in the State

Colonial Country Club, Fort Worth (Private)

Colonial is the most historically significant golf course in Texas and it is not close. Marvin Leonard opened it in 1936. It hosted the 1941 U.S. Open. It has hosted a PGA Tour event, now the Charles Schwab Challenge, every year since 1946, by a wide margin the longest running Tour event at the same golf course. Ben Hogan won there five times and treated it as home ground, which is where the Hogan's Alley nickname comes from. The course is classic parkland along the Trinity River: tree-lined, tight, built around accuracy rather than power. Players still rank it a favorite stop precisely because brute force does not work.

Colonial recently completed the most significant work in its history. Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner led a renovation reported north of $20 million, compressed into about eleven months so it could be revealed at the 2025 tournament. The reference point was the 1941 U.S. Open: restore lost width and bunker character, rebuild the infrastructure underneath, pull the course back toward its original shape rather than modernize further. The 13th and 18th greens were rebuilt outright. If your mental image of Colonial is a broadcast from a decade ago, it is a different course now.

TPC Craig Ranch, McKinney (Private)

Opened in 2004 north of Dallas, TPC Craig Ranch has hosted the Tour's Byron Nelson event since 2021, now branded THE CJ CUP Byron Nelson. It plays as a par 71 of roughly 7,385 yards and earned a birdie-track reputation fast: Scottie Scheffler won there in 2025 at 31 under. The club responded with a redesign ahead of the 2026 event, rebuilding bunkers, resurfacing greens, and lengthening holes to slow scoring. One correction, because plenty of golf writing gets it wrong: TPC Craig Ranch is not a public resort course. It is private, with a capped membership and no daily fee path in.

Trinity Forest and Maridoe (Private)

Trinity Forest Golf Club is a Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw design that opened in 2016 in south Dallas, built on a capped former landfill inside the Great Trinity Forest. The name is a joke on the course itself: there are essentially no trees in the playing corridors. Wide, treeless, firm, and more Scottish in intent than anything else in North Texas, it hosted the AT&T Byron Nelson from 2018 through 2020. Reaction has always been split, which usually means a course is doing something rather than nothing.

Maridoe Golf Club in Carrollton is the opposite temperament. Steve Smyers, with Patrick Andrews, rebuilt the old Columbian Club site into a brutal 212-acre course on Blackland prairie that opened in 2017 and placed third in Golf Digest's Best New rankings the following year. Long, exposed, and unapologetically hard.

What the Public Can Actually Play in DFW

The Metroplex has the deepest quality public inventory in Texas, and none of it requires a connection.

• Texas Rangers Golf Club, Arlington. The former Chester W. Ditto muni, torn to dirt and rebuilt by Arlington native John Colligan in partnership with the Rangers, reopened 2019. Roughly 7,000 yards, public seven days a week, Best New Course from the Dallas Morning News in 2020. The best public value in DFW.
• The Tribute and Old American, The Colony. Two links-style layouts on Lewisville Lake. The Tribute recreates famous Scottish holes; Old American is the more original and strategic of the pair. Both public, both different animals when the wind is up.
• Cowboys Golf Club, Grapevine. A Jeffrey Brauer design from 2001 next to DFW Airport, themed around the Dallas Cowboys, greens since rebuilt by Beau Welling. Gimmicky premise, legitimately good course.
• Pecan Valley, Fort Worth. Two municipal 18s split by the Trinity River. The River course is one of the better city-run layouts in the state and costs almost nothing.

Austin and the Hill Country: Limestone, Elevation, and Live Oaks

Hill Country golf is a different game from North Texas or coastal golf, and the reason is geology. The Balcones Escarpment gives central Texas fractured limestone, sudden canyons, and 100 feet of elevation change inside a single hole: blind shots, forced carries over rock, greens perched above drop-offs. Thin soil also means these courses play firm and fast in a way flat Houston clay never will.

Austin Country Club (Private)

Austin Country Club sits on the Colorado River below the Pennybacker Bridge, a Pete Dye routing around 7,100 yards at par 72. Its Tour moment was the WGC Dell Technologies Match Play, held there from 2016 through 2023 (skipping 2020 due to the pandemic). The 2023 edition was the final playing of the event, ending a 24-year run of the World Golf Championships match play format. It was a great match play venue: risk-reward par 4s, water in play late, and a closing stretch along the river built to produce swings. The club's deeper significance is Harvey Penick, who spent decades as its professional and taught Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite there.

Omni Barton Creek Resort (Resort)

Barton Creek, west of Austin, is the most complete resort package in Texas: four 18-hole courses by three acclaimed architects.

• Fazio Canyons is the one to play. Tom Fazio's 1999 design, two and a half miles from the resort center, uses the canyon terrain hardest and rates as the best of the four.
• Fazio Foothills (1986) sits at the resort center, with waterfalls, cliffs, and cave features that photograph better than they play.
• Coore Crenshaw (also called Crenshaw Cliffside, 1991) is the shortest and most thoughtful, a wide ground-game layout.
• Palmer Lakeside, a 1986 Arnold Palmer design on Lake Travis 26 miles northwest, is the one to skip on a short trip.

Access runs through a hotel stay or a member.

Lost Pines Golf Club, formerly Wolfdancer (Public)

Thirty minutes east of Austin at the Hyatt Regency Lost Pines in Bastrop County, this Arthur Hills design opened in 2006 and was renamed Lost Pines Golf Club after a 2023 renovation that added four new holes. It runs about 7,200 yards at par 72 through three distinct landscapes: open rolling prairie, a wooded ridgeline with real elevation, and the Colorado River bottom under native pecans two and three hundred years old. Crucially for a course this good, it is open to the public, not just resort guests. If you have one day near Austin and no member connection, this is the answer.

Horseshoe Bay Resort (Resort)

An hour northwest of Austin on Lake LBJ, Horseshoe Bay holds three Robert Trent Jones Sr. courses, the only resort in the continental United States with three RTJ Sr. designs on one property. Slick Rock is the original and friendliest, tree-lined parkland. Apple Rock, which opened in 1985 and was named Best New Resort Course in America by Golf Digest, has the best views. Ram Rock is the beast; Ben Crenshaw has called it the hardest test of golf in Texas, and playing it from the wrong tees is miserable. Resort guests and members only.

San Antonio: Hill Country Golf with a Tour Pedigree

TPC San Antonio (Resort)

TPC San Antonio opened in February 2010 with two courses on Cibolo Canyons terrain north of the city. The Oaks Course, designed by Greg Norman with Sergio Garcia as player consultant, hosts the Valero Texas Open, which returned there in 2026 for its 17th consecutive year at the venue in early April. It is narrower and more tree-framed than a typical modern Tour course, with a deliberately natural look instead of the usual spectator mounding. The Canyons Course is Pete Dye and the more dramatic of the two: bigger elevation change, wilder greens, views into a 700-plus acre nature preserve. It hosted a PGA Tour Champions event from 2011 to 2015.

Note the access rule, since guides get this wrong. TPC San Antonio is a private resort facility: members, their guests, and guests of the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort. The upside is that tee sheets run far more open than at a daily fee course this good.

La Cantera (Resort)

The Course at La Cantera, by Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish, opened in 1995 as Golf Digest's Best New Public Course and went on to host 15 editions of the Texas Open. It sits on a former quarry site at one of the highest points in the San Antonio area, with wild elevation and some of the best long views in Texas golf. One update: the Arnold Palmer course that opened on property in 2001 closed in 2021. Any guide still telling you to play the Palmer Course at La Cantera is out of date.

West Texas and the Panhandle: The Golf Nobody Writes About

Far West Texas gets skipped by golf media because nobody drives eight hours to get there. That is a mistake, because two of the best courses in the state are out here and both are public.

Butterfield Trail Golf Club in El Paso is a Tom Fazio design that opened in 2007 and is owned by El Paso International Airport, which makes it technically municipal. Fazio moved an enormous volume of sand to build dunes, arroyos, and 55 feet of elevation change into flat desert, and Golfweek has ranked it among the top municipal courses in America. About 7,300 yards at par 72, the desert air makes the ball fly, and the green fee is a fraction of what a Fazio design costs anywhere else.

The Rawls Course at Texas Tech in Lubbock is a Tom Doak design from 2003 built on a dead flat cotton field. Doak and Jim Urbina moved more earth here than on ten previous Renaissance Golf projects combined, shaping it to imitate the canyons of the Caprock escarpment. It has ranked among the best collegiate courses in the country and, some years, the number two course in Texas outright. Public.

The rest of the region runs through unpretentious clubs in Midland, Odessa, and Amarillo, mostly private and all built around the same reality: constant wind, hard turf, and members who play in it anyway.

The Heat, and When to Actually Go

Most Texas golf guides handle this badly. Summer here is not "warm." It is a real constraint on whether golf is enjoyable or even safe. July averages run near or above 95 degrees across Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Houston pairs that with humidity around seventy-five percent, producing heat index values well past anything you would voluntarily walk 18 holes in. El Paso and Amarillo hit similar air temperatures with dramatically lower humidity, which is why West Texas summer golf is merely hot rather than dangerous.

• October through April is the window. Fall beats spring: courses have recovered from summer stress and crowds thin after Labor Day.
• March and April are peak for conditioning and atmosphere, which is why they are priciest and hardest to book. Not a coincidence that the Houston Open, the Valero Texas Open, and the Byron Nelson all sit in this stretch.
• May through September, play at dawn or do not play. First tee times off the sheet are the entire strategy. Twilight is the other option and the cheapest golf in Texas, but you are racing darkness.
• Winter is underrated, especially Houston, San Antonio, and the coastal bend. Hard freezes are brief. Expect 60-degree January rounds on empty courses at rates nobody advertises.
• Hydration is not optional. Two bottles per nine in summer is a floor. Cart path only rules after summer storms add real walking distance in the heat.

Three Trips That Actually Make Sense

• Houston, two days, public only. Memorial Park twice at different times of day. Fly into Hobby, stay near the park.
• Austin and the Hill Country, three days, resort based. Barton Creek for Fazio Canyons and Coore Crenshaw, Lost Pines for a public day, Horseshoe Bay if you want the Ram Rock beating.
• San Antonio plus Austin, three days. Stay at the JW Marriott for the Oaks and the Canyons, add La Cantera. Roughly 80 miles apart, the one pairing where two metros in one trip works.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best public golf course in Texas?

Memorial Park in Houston. A city-owned muni rebuilt by Tom Doak with Brooks Koepka as player consultant, it hosts the PGA Tour's Houston Open and anyone can book it. Butterfield Trail in El Paso (Fazio) and The Rawls Course in Lubbock (Doak) are the most underrated public options.

What is the best golf course in Texas overall?

Whispering Pines near Trinity has finished first in the Dallas Morning News state ranking more often than any other course, and it is unplayable without a member relationship. The honest answer depends on whether you mean quality or golf you can experience. Colonial is the most historically important; Champions Cypress Creek has the deepest championship record.

Can I play Colonial, Austin Country Club, or TPC Craig Ranch?

Not without a member. All three are private. TPC Craig Ranch is frequently miscategorized as a public resort course; it is private with a capped membership. TPC San Antonio is the closest thing to a playable Tour venue outside Memorial Park, and it requires a stay at the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort.

When is the best time to play golf in Texas?

October through April for most of the state. March and April deliver the best conditions and the highest prices. Fall is the smart-money window, since courses have recovered from summer and the crowds are gone. June through September, play at first light or twilight and expect midday to be unplayable in Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio.

How different is Hill Country golf from the rest of Texas?

Completely different. Limestone gives Hill Country architects canyons, ridgelines, and elevation change that flat North Texas prairie and coastal Houston clay cannot produce. Expect blind shots, forced carries over rock, elevated tees, and firmer turf. North Texas is parkland and prairie golf played into wind, Houston is soft and flat, West Texas is desert and wind.

Does Texas have links golf?

Not in the coastal Scottish sense, but there are two serious attempts. Trinity Forest in Dallas, by Coore and Crenshaw, is treeless, wide, and firm, built on links principles, though private. The Tribute in The Colony is public and built around recreations of famous links holes. Gulf Coast courses deal with sustained wind in a way that shares some character with links play, even though the turf does not.

How much does it cost to play the good public courses?

Less than you would expect. Memorial Park in 2026 ran roughly $21 to $38 for Houston residents and roughly $90 to $140 for non-residents, plus about $20 for a cart. Municipals like Pecan Valley in Fort Worth and Butterfield Trail in El Paso cost a fraction of what comparable design quality goes for elsewhere. Resort golf is usually bundled into a stay and play package.

What should I pack for a Texas golf trip?

In summer: more water than you think, a long-sleeve UV shirt (covering skin is cooler than exposing it), and a second glove, because the first will be soaked by the sixth hole. In winter and early spring: wind layers, because 55 degrees into a 25 mph North Texas wind plays far colder than the number suggests.