The 15 Best Golf Courses in Wisconsin

The No. 1 course in Wisconsin on every panel that matters, and a fixture in our national top 10. Pete Dye took a flat former airfield on Lake Michigan and conjured an Irish linksland from it - roughly a thousand bunkers, fescue-covered dunes, sheep on the property, and eight holes hard against the shoreline. Three PGA Championships (2004, 2010 and 2015) and the 2021 Ryder Cup have all been staged on this walking-only masterpiece, and the whole theatrical production is bookable through Destination Kohler. This is the Midwest's bucket-list round, full stop. Read our full course review.

The course that proved Bandon was not a one-off. Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw opened Sand Valley in 2017 on a sea of prehistoric sand in central Wisconsin - towering dunes, vast rumpled fairways, and greens that reward the ground game - and it was named Golf Digest's Best New Course of the year. Golfweek's panel puts it second among the state's playable courses once a private club is set aside (see How we ranked), and the resort Mike Keiser's sons built around it has become the inland pilgrimage of American golf.

Kidd answered Coore and Crenshaw a year later with scale: the biggest fairways, the biggest greens, and the biggest sand formations in Wisconsin golf, draped over dunes so large the course named itself. Mammoth Dunes is generous off the tee and endlessly inventive around the greens - the rare championship-scale course that makes every handicap smile. Golfweek and Golf Digest both keep it in the national top 25 public courses, and as the second round of a Sand Valley trip it is pure joy.

A U.S. Open course that anyone can book - that sentence alone earns Erin Hills its place. Hurdzan, Fry and Whitten draped the course over glacier-carved Kettle Moraine hills in 2006, moving almost no earth, and the USGA came calling: the 2017 U.S. Open, the 2011 U.S. Amateur, and the 2025 U.S. Women's Open. Walking-only, fescue-framed, and set in a bowl of green hills with not a house in sight, it is championship golf in its purest public form. Golf Digest ranks it the 10th best public course in America.

The Golden Age treasure of the list. Langford and Moreau built Lawsonia in 1930 with steam shovels and total conviction: soaring plateau greens, deep bunkering, and template-inspired holes across open farmland above Green Lake. It is widely considered their masterpiece, it has been lovingly restored to its original boldness, and it remains one of the great value rounds in America - a top-100 public course at municipal-style prices. Every architecture lover's Wisconsin trip bends toward Green Lake.

Tom Doak's 2024 heathland jewel is the delightful rebel of the Sand Valley family: a par-68 course of around 5,800 yards inspired by the great English heathland layouts, where a string of brilliant short par 4s and five par 3s ask for precision and imagination instead of brute length. Golfweek's panel ranks it seventh among the state's public-access courses in just its second full season - sixth here once the private club above it is set aside. Proof that fun is a design philosophy.

Before Whistling Straits, Herb Kohler and Pete Dye made their first masterpiece here: Blackwolf Run opened in 1988 in a hardwood river valley, and its River Course is Dye at his most scenic and strategic - holes that climb, dive, and cross the Sheboygan River, with water in play all day. A composite of its holes hosted the U.S. Women's Open in 1998 and 2012. Golf Digest keeps it in America's top 20 public courses, and many Kohler regulars quietly call it their favorite Dye of the four.

The Straits' inland sibling, opened in 2000: Dye shaped another dunescape just west of the lake, with meandering streams, towering grassland dunes, and lake views saved for the high points - including the shoreline 12th pictured here. The Irish plays a touch friendlier than the Straits while keeping every bit of its drama, which is why the classic Kohler trip plays it second and argues about the order on the drive home. A top-100 public course in its own right on Golf Digest's list.

Wisconsin's original upscale public course, and still one of its finest days out. Robert Trent Jones Jr. opened SentryWorld in 1982 - he called it his Mona Lisa - and the parkland course around its lake has only grown in stature: renovated with Jones and Jay Blasi, and host of the 2023 U.S. Senior Open and the 2019 U.S. Girls' Junior. The conditioning is famously immaculate, the flower-ringed signature par 3 is unlike anything else in golf, and the all-inclusive presentation makes the round feel like a private club day.

The home course of the Wisconsin Badgers is a public treasure: Robert Trent Jones Jr. built University Ridge in 1991 on a terminal moraine southwest of Madison - an open, links-flavored front nine and a wooded, tumbling back nine. It hosted the PGA Tour Champions' American Family Insurance Championship from 2016, plus NCAA regionals and the state high school championships every year since 1994. College golf's home crowds, championship conditioning, and a public tee sheet: Madison's gift to this list.