The 10 Best Golf Courses I Played in 2025 (RANKED)

The 10 Best Golf Courses I Played in 2025 (RANKED)

This year, it’s safe to say I played some absolutely unbelievable golf courses. And there were a few that stuck with me for a variety of different reasons. Today, I’m counting down the top 10 best golf courses that I played in [music] 2025. These aren’t necessarily the highest ranked golf courses in the world, but there are certainly some that are in the top 100. Uh, but these are the ones that stuck with me. These are the ones that I found myself thinking about months later, and these are the ones that I would love to go back and visit sometime in the future. And my number one course this year, honestly, I it surprised me. So, keep watching to the end to find out what that is. Right before we hop into number 10, I do want to mention these are like the 10 new golf courses I’ve played with a couple caveats that I’ll address later on. If you follow me, you probably know that I live in Oregon. So, I’m leaving out all of the best Oregon golf courses that I’ve played this year. Uh because I’ve played all of those a bunch. We’ll save that for a different video. And I didn’t go down to Band of Dunes this year, sad. So, uh they wouldn’t have been on this list anyway. So, without further ado, let’s jump in to the 10 best new golf courses that I played in 2025. Number 10 was completely not on my radar this year, and that is Laguna Lango outside Daang, Vietnam. It’s about an hour and 15 minute drive from the Daang airport. And you get out there, and it feels like you are in Jurassic Park. This is such a wild, fun, cool, exotic golf course. And you feel it on every single hole when you are out there. Everything’s kind of building up to hole 7 8 9 9 9a which is a bonus par three that’s right out on the water. It is spectacular. And then it comes back and you can see lush vegetation on cliffs and waterfalls up in the hills. Like it’s a spectacular golf course. When you’re there, there’s two resorts that share the course. Angana Lancco, which is kind of the bigger family oriented resort, as well as the Banyan Tree, which is definitely more of the high-end couples romantic destination. But either way, both resorts were excellent, and the golf course was definitely something to remember. At number nine, we have an entirely different type of golf course, and that is Brasada Canyons outside of Bend, Oregon. So, this is one of the two on the list that I had played before, but I hadn’t played either of these in over a decade, so we’re calling them new to me. But Brrisada is like the epitome of fun high desert golf. So it’s actually at higher elevation than a lot of the courses outside of Bend. So you get these spectacular views of the Three Sisters Mountains, Mount Bachelor from almost every single hole. And more so than the other well-known central Oregon golf courses, Prong Horn, Tethero, Crosswwater, all of those very challenging, very hard championship golf courses. This this is more fun, familyfriendly resort golf. All the bunkers are kind of angled so that if you hit it up towards it, it just kind of spits it back out into the fairway. Fairways are very wide and forgiving. The views are excellent. During my time there, I played the Front Nine with my wife and four-year-old, and they had a blast. So, while there’s some quirkiness to this course, which is probably going to keep it from hitting many top 100 lists, there are few golf courses I have played that are as fun as this one. The drivable par4 15th is one of the coolest golf holes I’ve ever played in my life. And there are at least four or five other holes out there that I legitimately look back on and just say, “Yeah, that was fun.” And really, that’s what golf should be all about. Number eight is one of the most iconic golf courses in the world, and I’m so glad I finally got to play it. And that is Harbortown on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. So, I was down there last month to play it after their recent renovation. And after the renovation, the course is well, very much the same as how it was before. They even said, “If you haven’t played this course a bunch, you probably aren’t going to notice many of these changes. They are all very subtle.” Which I thought was a interesting thing to say after you spent millions of dollars renovating this golf course. But I got to say, even for my first time, I enjoyed it so much more than I thought I was going to. When you hear about Harbortown, you usually hear about the small greens and the narrow fairways with lots of trees. The fact you’ve got to bend it around many trees in order to hit the green. And that just, as someone who doesn’t hit the ball super straight, that didn’t sound like a whole lot of fun to me. But what I found was that the plane corridors were a lot more friendly than I expected them to be. Those areas where you do have to bend it around the tree, like the tree that sticks over the green on the fifth hole or the seventh hole, par three, where there’s trees kind of like coming in on top of the green. I found them to be done in such a way that it just forced you to hit a more creative shot. And it didn’t bother me in the way that trees normally do when they encroach on the plain areas of a golf course. Once you get to 13, it’s one of the coolest green complexes I’ve ever seen. and 13 through 18 is just a simply phenomenal stretch of golf. This is one of those courses if you are someone who travels to play golf frequently. It’s a bucket list course. You should play it at least once in your life. And my guess is whenever I make it back to go see it again, I’m going to like it more and more the more I get to play it. Number seven then takes us to Nova Scotia where we have Cabbat Links. There is so much that has been said about this course and honestly all of it is pretty deadon. This is such a special place. Just like building Bandon Dunes in 1999 put the small town of Bandon on the map and created this massive mecca of a golf resort. When Cabat Links opened in 2011, I believe it was, it did the exact same thing for the tiny town of Iness. This has now become one of those must visit golf resorts across the world and it’s easy to see why. Cabat Links was the first course on property and was also the first true Lynx course in the entire country of Canada. It is definitely more subtle than the other course there, Cabbat Cliffs. But one thing I heard over and over again is that Cabbat Cliffs had the views, but Cabbat Lynx is the better golf course. And this course is so good from an architecture standpoint. You’ve got long holes, short holes, scenic holes, plane up, plane down. It is just such a compelling round of golf. And it’s the type of place where you go out and you play and all you want to do is go back to the first te, tee it up again, and start over. All that to say, this is one of those rare places that definitely lived up to the hype. At number six, we’re going with a course that just got a little extra press because it hosted the revamped version of the Skins game, and that is Panther National outside of West Palm Beach, Florida. I got a chance to visit this course, and wow, like th this is one of those places when this very, very high-end residential community is done, it is going to be something very, very special because already the course is very, very special. Panther National was designed in tandem between Justin Thomas and Jack Nicholas. And I expected this to just be kind of a brutal long hard championship golf course. And while it can be a brutal long hard championship golf course if you play it from the correct TE’s, it is also wildly fun. There’s a great variety in holes from ultra long parfs to really short par 3es and everything in between. But I think the thing that stood out to me the most is just how it didn’t feel like you were in Florida. There was more elevation change than I was expecting to see and everything about it just felt like such a special experience. And considering this is an ultra private, very expensive club, it well is a special experience anytime you get to play a course like that. And for the cherry on top, their par 3 course is one of the most enjoyable par 3s I have played. All right, at number five, we have what was undoubtedly my biggest surprise of the year, and that is the North Course at Windsong Farm. Wingsong Farm is a private golf club outside of Minneapolis that has been open since the 90s. Their first course is the South Course, which was designed by John Fote, which uh if you know anything about his courses, they are usually very long, very hard championship golf courses that are also generally pretty scenic as well. He worked on Crosswwater. He worked on my home course, Pumpkin Ridge, and I’ve typically been a very big fan of his work. So, while the south course is excellent, it is his brand new north course that just like captivated me. So, they had a very small piece of property to work with. I believe it was about 125 acres. They brought him back to do the work and he built a course that looks and feels like a Seth Rener out of the 1920s. You would have no idea. Like I could give you 20 guesses on who built this course from a golf architecture standpoint. And my guess is you would not guess John F. I can never remember how to pronounce his name. But this place is cool. You have a bunch of template holes like an Eden, a Redan, a Dell, a Cape, and then you have one of the most spectacular beer holes I have ever seen. As you go from the main clubhouse, you come under the tunnel and one of the first things you see is this massive green with a big five- foot swale in the middle of it. They can play anywhere from 145 yards to like 250 yards depending on which tea you are playing from. And I’ve played quite a few beer holes over the years, but this one is certainly one of my all-time favorites. The way this course is routed and the way they use the land was very smart, but everything is very cohesive and everything flows from hole to hole very well where they really make the most of their small piece of property. So despite the fact this is a private club, if you get the opportunity to play it, this is one you probably haven’t been familiar with, but I promise you it is worth the trip. Number four is the round that almost didn’t happen, but I am so glad it did, and that is the ocean course at Kioa Island. So I was down at Sea Pines to cover the opening of Harbortown. I played a few other courses there, but on the last day, at the last minute, I was able to get a single tea time for one person at 7:50 in the morning. So I drove out the night before. I stayed at the sanctuary, which that hotel that is like that’s a whole different video. That’s a whole another conversation. But got my tea time at the Ocean Course and then headed back to the Savannah airport that afternoon. And this place is so cool. I’m not sure what I was expecting with the Ocean Course, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to have to drive like 15 minutes through the island through these like spectacular neighborhoods to get to this championship course. I can’t imagine if I was an owner on the island during the Riter Cup or PGA Championship. Like, that sounds like a nightmare. But the course itself is truly a wonderful test of golf and one of the most demanding and challenging golf courses I’ve ever played. Despite being demanding and challenging, I actually had a very good time considering I think I only hit two greens in regulation the entire day. And we had a very benign day. Uh there was not a whole lot of wind. We had clear blue skies. It was the perfect golf day, but it is a really, really challenging course tea to green. Uh, the greens were a little more subdued than I expected to be. The greens honestly weren’t all that crazy, which is fair because I imagine a lot of the time there the winds are going to be significant. Um, and so if the wind is up, I cannot imagine playing this course from 7,400 yards in tournament conditions in 25°ree winds. Just such a challenging golf course, but one that I really found myself enjoying more than I expected to. It’s got a unique figure8 routing. So, the front nine kind of goes up like this and then it comes back and then the back nine kind of goes down like this before you end back up at the clubhouse. I just wasn’t expecting that, but I really enjoyed the fact that every hole felt unique. It was very easy to remember every single hole that was on the course. So, despite the fact I got totally beat up, I really enjoyed the round. At number three, we are going back over to Asia to Hoyana Shores Golf Club also outside Daang, Vietnam. This place is like Bandon Dunes of Asia. And so often you hear it’s the Bandoned Dunes of the East, it’s the Bandon Dunes of the South. This place, maybe not the resort itself, but the golf course really felt like true modern links and was so much fun. I think one of the biggest surprises for me is the fact it was built by Robert Trent Jones Jr., which similar to Windong Farm and the John Folk course, like this was another one I never would have expected him to build. It doesn’t feel like any other RTJ Jr. course that I’ve played and it was cool to see kind of that variety in his skill set in designing this course. I thought the par 3es in the course were one of the strengths. They were all very different from one another and all very fun to play. But when you hit the stretch of 15, 161 17, you’re right along the ocean. I mean, that is without a doubt one of the best stretches of golf in Vietnam, if not all of Asia. This is one of those places that’s not easy to get to, but it truly is worth the trip because it is one of the best golf courses I not only played this year, it was one of the best golf courses I’ve ever played. And number two, this brings us to another course that I’ve played once before, but it was in like 2014, so it really felt like an all-new experience, and that is Bali. Bal is in the middle of nowhere, Colorado. It was built by Tom Do. And it is truly one of the best destination private clubs in the entire world. When you are out there, it’s like you are out there. There is nothing else around you, and it’s like there is nothing else that matters. And so to be able to go out there for a few days with the 80 club, we had 16 guys out there. We got to play the course four different times. And the first time I played it, I was like, “Yeah, I like it. It’s pretty good.” Um, but I’m not sure it lived up to expectations for me. Now going back a decade later, having a lot more golf experience and knowledge under my belt, as well as being able to play it like four times back toback, it gave me a real appreciation for just how good this golf course is and how special it is. I think one of the best parts about it is the fact there are no tea boxes. So typically if you’re going out there, whoever wins the previous hole, they get to select where you play the next hole. And so when you’re playing multiple rounds back to back, it means that no hole is playing the same from one round to the next. Not to mention, when you’re out there in the middle of like God’s country, every round is going to have very different wind, very different weather, and so the golf course just felt completely different from round to round. The highlight for me was hitting the best golf shot I hit all year. On the drivable par4 seventh hole, I hit it to the blind green, hit it to two feet, made eagle in route to shooting a 78, which was the first time I had broken 80 in 2 years. And to do that at an 80 club event, well, that was pretty special. And finally, that brings us to the number one golf course I played all year, or at least my favorite golf course I played all year, and that is Cabbat Cliffs. You might have saw that coming if you saw that I played Cabbat Links, and we’re kind of waiting for this one. But even though a lot of people say Kat Lynx is the better golf course, I fell in love with Cabbat Cliffs. Again, this is just a true modern interpretation of Lynx golf. You see it on the first hole when you come up to this infinity green and you just kind of start thinking to yourself, “Oh, we’re we’re in for something special here.” The stretch of 15 through 18 is quite simply one of the most fun stretches of golf I’ve ever played. I’m not going to say it was the most architecturally stunning. I think that 16 is a little bit of a quirky hole. 17 is an even quirkier hole, but the shots you get to hit on those holes are just so wildly fun. And the best par I made all year, came on 16 when I hit a four iron as a monsoon is coming into us off the ocean. I hit it into the bunker, which I couldn’t see, and I can’t hit out of the bunker to save my life. I get it up to about 4 feet, knock it in for par, and uh let’s just say that one felt pretty good. And while that last stretch of holes is the one that gets all the attention throughout this entire round, every single hole that was another one of like, “Oh, I wasn’t expecting this. Oh, this is cool. Oh, look at this green.” Like you’re just constantly kind of in awe. It’s basically in my mind kind of if you took Bandon Trails and the Sheep Ranch where you took all the like great incredible elements of Bandoned Trails and the things I love about that course and the views of the Sheep Ranch considering you can see the ocean from almost every hole. You put them together and you have what I consider one of the very best and most fun golf courses I’ve ever played. So with that, those are my favorite golf courses I played in 2025. Every year I publish my list of my favorite 100 golf courses of all time. I have just recently updated that list. So you can go find that at the link below if you uh want my take on more golf courses. Again, these are the ones that are my favorite, not the ones I think are the best. Those are two very different lists because I always get a lot of comments about uh how I’m wrong. But go take a look at the list and you can let me know for yourself what you think. If you’re trying to figure out what to watch next, I would go watch my recap of my Vietnam trip if you have not seen it. I think that was my favorite thing that I created all year. And uh I got to do it [music] with my dad, so it made it a little bit extra special. But I did videos of most of the golf courses I mentioned here. So I’ll link to all of those below if you want to go uh hear more about some of these locations that I [music] visited. Hope you have an excellent day. Thank you for watching. We’ll see you on the next video. Peace.

My full top 100 list of my favorite courses for 2025: https://breakingeighty.com/top-100

RELATED:
Here are more in-depth recaps of some of these courses:

Laguna Lang Co: https://youtu.be/eiyUAz41K4Q?si=DCgNCRnJApPRSuA9
Brasada Canyons: https://breakingeighty.com/brasada
Harbour Town: https://breakingeighty.com/harbour-town
Cabot Links: https://youtu.be/aXg06hC_QTw
Panther National: https://youtu.be/3a3r5G04CcM
Windsong Farm: https://youtu.be/QWO8jHdEZ8M
Hoiana Shores: https://youtu.be/NWKupg7PvY4
Ballyneal: https://breakingeighty.com/ballyneal
Cabot Cliffs: https://youtu.be/aXg06hC_QTw

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
0:00 I played some incredible golf courses this year. Here are my top 10.
0:36 Before we get started…
1:01 Course #10.
1:57 Course #9.
3:10 Course #8.
4:41 Course #7.
5:48 Course #6.
7:02 Course #5.
8:45 Course #4.
10:43 Course #3.
11:47 Course #2.
13:22 Course #1.
15:03 Wrap up.
15:31 Close.