The greatest trend in golf development over the past decade has been the introduction of short courses at so many resorts and private clubs. These par-3 and other non-traditional layouts are nothing new, of course, but there’s been increased focus and capital allocation on providing guests and members a fun and fast loop that doesn’t focus on traditional length.
To acknowledge the rapid rise for short courses, Golfweek’s Best introduced a ranking of these layouts in 2023. This year we go a step further, breaking the category into two divisions with the top public-access and private lists of short, par-3 or other non-traditional courses. This is the ranking for the public-access layouts, which can include resorts, municipal courses and daily-fee operations.
Click here for the private list
Basically, they all fit the bill of not being a traditional-length, traditional-par course. And just like the best short courses, we threw out some of the rules used for rating traditional courses and asked the raters to submit one overall score for each course based on how much they enjoyed the design and the environment. Those individual ratings were then combined to form one average rating, which is listed for each course. Each course had to receive a minimum number of 10 votes. We have received thousands of votes over the past 18 months.
As for how we decided which courses fit the bill: All of these would be shorter than 2,700 yards if they were nine holes, compared to a traditional course typically being made up of nines measuring 3,100 to 3,800 yards.
For this list, we included each course’s average rating on a points scale of 1 to 10. We also included their locations, the designers, the year they opened, the number of holes, the total length and the par.