Best Michigan private golf courses ranked: Alister MacKenzie gem still No. 1
Michigan has dozens of excellent private golf courses and country clubs.
Some are among the best in the United States and the world.
Golfweek (part of the USA TODAY Network like the Detroit Free Press) has released its highly anticipated 2025 rankings of each state's best private golf courses, including the top 15 in Michigan.
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And the names at the top are among the most celebrated in all of golf.
Crystal Downs retains the title as No. 1 golf course in Michigan. Finished in 1933, it is a top-50 golf course in the world, according to Golf.com.
According to Crystal Downs, the owners convinced the world's most renowned architect, Alister MacKenzie, to detour his train trip from the West — after finishing work on Cypress Point Golf Club in California — to the East Coast on his way home to England. MacKenzie, traveling with his associate Perry Maxwell, wasn't all that enthused and perhaps more annoyed than anything, but his demeanor changed when he saw the dunesland in Frankfort overlooking Lake Michigan.
Dr. Alister MacKenzie, Scottish golf course designer in the sport's Golden Age of architecture.
"For roughly 10 days, he worked feverishly with Mr. Maxwell, selecting the course routing, painting green complexes and creating the eighteen-hole design that remains essentially unchanged today," the club's website says. "Mr. Maxwell returned in the spring to supervise the commencement of the course construction, and subsequently returned each summer, living in a farm house aside what is now the 8th fairway, until 1933 when the back nine was finally completed."
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TRENDING: World-class designer bringing talent to metro Detroit for golf course rebrand
Crystal Downs remains unaltered from its original design, according to the club. It is one of two MacKenzie course designs in Michigan; the other is at the University of Michigan, ranked in 2022 by the Detroit Free Press as the No. 1 course in metro Detroit.
The top five private golf courses in Michigan, according to Golfweek, stayed the same as 2024. The restored Oakland Hills (South) in Bloomfield Township is No. 2, Kingsley Club in Kingsley is third, Dunes Club (nine holes) in New Buffalo fourth and Franklin Hills in Franklin fifth.
See the entire top 15 below.
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Golfweek's rankings come from a rating panel of hundreds of everyday golfers, who evaluate courses from 1-10 based across 10 criteria, and file a single, overall rating on each course. Criteria include routing, greens, variety and memorability of par 3s, 4s and 5s, and course conditions. Those overall scores are averaged to produce Golfweek's annual Best Courses lists.
If you're looking for Michigan's best public golf course options — from the more than 650 to choose from — we already covered Golfweek's top 20 in Michigan.
Find the complete list of Michigan's top 15 private golf courses, as ranked by Golfweek.
RANKED: Michigan's best 20 public golf courses for 2025
Michigan best private golf course rankings for 2025 by Golfweek
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T14. Point O'Woods Golf and Country Club, Benton Harbor (14)
T14. LochenHeath Golf Club, Williamsburg (N/A)
Dropped: Country Club of Detroit, Grosse Pointe Farms (13).
Check out Michigan's best 20 public courses, and read more from Golfweek's best private courses.
Stay connected and stay informed. Become a Detroit Free Press subscriber.
Marlowe Alter is an assistant sports editor at the Detroit Free Press and spraying golf aficionado. You can reach him by email: malter@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Best Michigan private golf course rankings for 2025: Top 15
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