It’s a fun game to track the risers and fallers in each new America’s 100 Greatest and Second 100 Greatest Courses ranking. How courses move up and down from one cycle to the next provides a glimpse of what’s happening at clubs and on the scorecards of panelists. In the 2023-2024 rankings, for instance, Old Town Club, a Perry Maxwell design in Winston Salem, N.C., surged 38 places, the biggest upward move of the cycle, while Mauna Kea in Hawaii, previously ranked No. 149, effectively fell over 50 spots, all the way off the Second 100 Greatest.

Looking at course performance from one ranking to the next offers a snapshot of what’s hot and what’s not, but the bumps and tumbles can often be aberrations or represent non-lasting fluctuations. A more promising way to gauge a course’s true market value is to look at long term trends and the direction it has tracked over numerous cycles.

Courses move up and down in the rankings for many reasons. The most common is a reassessment following a remodel or renovation. New evaluation ballots come in with higher scores if the work is done well, and if the renovation is transformative enough the club may opt to delete the evaluations it has on file and start over with a clean slate of assessments of the “new” course.

The rankings also reflect changes in architectural outlooks. Thirty and 40 years ago, a long, tough, tournament-ready course was nearly synonymous with great design. It’s what almost all courses and architects aspired toward, and what players of all calibers respected. The rankings reflected that desire.

Different values have emerged over the past 25 years. Few architects now attempt to build difficult courses for the sake of being difficult. The current golf public has responded more favorably to courses that are fun to play and don’t beat them up. Most prefer a natural looking course over one with evidently manufactured qualities. The rankings have ingested that change, too. And there’s a much greater appreciation for historic courses and the skilled preservation of designs built by the greatest architectural artists of the 1920s than at any time in the past.

Rankings are composed of human judgments, so popularity tides and word of mouth can further impact impressions. The dissemination of information over the last decade via the internet and podcasts, along with the visual power of social media, has made golfers smarter and more aware of architecture (and often more opinionated). People (and panelists) who didn’t know who Bill Coore or Gil Hanse were ten years ago, or wouldn’t bother to investigate a course like Moraine on their way from Cincinnati to Columbus, have had their curiosity piqued.

These factors all impact poll movement and help illuminate the state of golf design is at any given moment. But to get a get the fuller picture of how things are changing it’s better to look at long-range trajectories.

The following courses are the streaking comets of our rankings that tell stories beyond simple numbers. Each have tails of continuous ascendence that reach back years, in many cases a decade or more. The only question left to ask is: have they’ve burned up their fuel, or will they continue to rise?

We urge you to click through to each individual course page for bonus photography, drone footage and reviews from our course panelists. Plus, you can now leave your own ratings on the courses you’ve played … to make your case for a destination we might’ve missed on this list, or why your favorite should be ranked higher. 

Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County, N.Y., debuted in the rankings in 2013 at 145th, the first year Golf Digest expanded to the Second 100 Greatest Courses. This was several years after Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner began a major, long-term restoration of the deteriorating C.B. Macdonald architecture, a process completed shortly after that first ranking. Since then, the course has skyrocketed to No. 59, and it will not surprise us if there’s more ground it can still cover.

Like Sleepy Hollow, Cal Club entered the list when the rankings were expanded in 2013, coming in at No. 147. This was six years after a Kyle Phillips remodel altered the fate of the course by reestablishing the Alister MacKenzie bunkering, thinning trees and creating several new holes that initiated a climb that has yet to stop toward its current spot at No. 71.

Yet another member of the class of ’13, Eastward Ho! came into the rankings at a modest 174th. Unlike the previous two courses, it’s rise to No. 102 is not the result of a significant remodel but rather continual exposure and a growing appreciation for shorter, unique designs that are full of quirk and whimsy, which aptly describes Eastward Ho!’s holes that trampoline back and forth along a rolling Cape Cod bay.

Few things illustrate the changing nature of architectural tastes and trends more than Ballyneal finishing sixth in the 2006 Best New Private Course competition, behind five courses that have never come close to breaking into the top 100 (only one of them is in the current Second 100). Perhaps at the moment in opened, panelists did not know what to make of a buoyant, outside the box design through sand dunes in the remote northeast corner of Colorado that resembled an Irish links without the ocean. But as architect Tom Doak’s notoriety and body of work grew, and more and more sandy, dunesy courses were built around the world, Ballyneal’s stock has risen in chunks from 95th in the U.S. to 36th. It will be tough for it to go much higher, but the type of golf experience it helped usher in is being emulated across the country, so anything is possible.

Peachtree is a unique case. It’s one of a handful of courses that have been in the Golf Digest rankings for all of the past 58 years going back to 1966. The Robert Trent Jones Atlanta design, the first great post-World War II course, once rose to 16th in the country before sliding backwards to No. 87 in 2008. From that point, spurred by a Bob Cupp renovation and superior attention to detail with its agronomy, it’s climbed steadily up to No. 25, jumping the last five places between 2022 and 2024. This is probably as high as Peachtree can go.

Rock Creek is Tom Doak’s other streaking course on our list. Western Montana is not a fertile golf destination, so it took the wide-ranging mountain-prairie-river course a while to find traction in the ranking. But the secret is out and after hovering just outside the top 100 for several cycles it’s leapt from 103rd to 81st to 56th. Can it make another big jump next year? We think so, as long as panelist continue to make the trek.

Moraine is a wonderful throwback design originally built by Alex “Nipper” Campbell of The Country Club of Brookline fame and renovated by Keith Foster in 2015. It didn’t appear in the ranking until 2019 when it snuck in at No. 196, and now it’s no longer sneaking but sprinting, all the way to No. 146. The bet here is that it’s not done running and will eventually threaten the top 100 before it slows down.

Maidstone, part of the great quintet of 100 Greatest courses on the eastern end of Long Island (along with Shinnecock Hills, National Golf Links, Friar’s Head and Sebonack), is another course revived significantly by renovation. From 1997 to 2014 it slipped from 34th in the country to 100th. When panelists began visiting again following a 2013 restoration by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, with delectable old-time bunker shaping by Jeff Bradley, they sensed new energy and have been rewarding it each cycle, all the way back to No. 52. It has a chance to overtake No. 43 Sebonack next year as the fourth-best course on the East End.

The year 2013 also saw Coore and Crenshaw work their magic on Old Town Club in North Carolina. Their efforts in polishing Perry Maxwell’s greens and bunkers helped push the course into the same category of appraisal as Maxwell masterpieces like Prairie Dunes and Southern Hills, and then propelled it to a debut ranking of No. 98 in 2019. The course continues to get better with additional design tweaks by Dave Axland and now sits at No. 54.

The rise of The Creek on western Long Island coincides with a renewed appreciation of the architecture of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor, who built this course on the early 1920s. All the pieces were there, but it was a sharp restoration of the architectural features by Hanse and Wagner beginning in 2011 that reset the narrative. From 2013 to 2024, The Creek surged to No. 129 from a debut ranking of 163, and it hasn’t come close to reaching its ceiling.

Inverness Club, host of numerous major championships going back to 1920, rose as high as No. 17 in 2004, then began backsliding, all the way to No. 89 in 2018. A comprehensive Andrew Green remodel that thinned out trees, restored the Donald Ross bunkering and greens and replaced several poorly thought-out holes added in the 1970s brought back the best elements of the design, which has since climbed to No. 58 with the potential to move five or 10 places higher.

The North Course is a tricky one to add to this list. For most of its five-plus decades in the ranking it’s hovered somewhere in the 20s, occasionally popping into the teens and sometimes regressing to the 30s. In 2012, however, it dropped to 47th before the effects of a much-lauded Hanse and Wagner restoration of the George Thomas architecture kicked in. Since then, it’s steady marched forward, to 41st, 26th, 23rd, 19th and now 16th. Incremental, yes, but progressing nonetheless. It will be difficult for LACC to climb much higher given what’s ahead of it, but the progress the past 10 years is notable.

Shooting Star was a surprise when it cracked the top 100 in the latest national ranking. Before that, the lovely Tom Fazio design near Jackson Hole, Wyo., had quietly hovered in the 120s since it first logged on in 2017. But in the last two cycles it’s been a party crasher, leaping from No. 123 all the way to No. 98. We’re curious to see if the ranking is lasting, or if it’s just as the name says, a shooting star that passes quickly.

There’s no good way to explain why Myopia Hunt Club outside Boston didn’t register in our rankings until 2019, when it flew in at No. 76, other than exclusivity. Through 2016, the course only had been seen by roughly 30 panelists, falling well short of the minimum number of evaluations to qualify for the 100 Greatest ranking. But Myopia has been around since the 19th century and is a museum piece of the most fascinating architecture—the more we’ve seen it the more we like it, to the tune of a top 50 ranking (no. 50). We could see it move another five spots next year.

This northern Michigan jewel by architect Mike DeVries has long been a darling of architecture fans for its rugged topography, naturalistic bunkers and wide, multi-option fairways and greens. Golf Digest panelists were slow in getting there after it opened in 2001 and their appreciation of the design didn’t translate into a ranking until 2013 when it popped at no. 114. It slipped the next cycle to no.133 but has since rose consistently toward its highest position yet at no. 110. Kingsley is a dark horse candidate to crack the top 100 in next year’s new ranking.

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