Bethpage State Park (Black Course) has been named as the "Best Municipal Golf Facility" of 2009 by Golfweek magazine.
The newest addition to the magazine's extensive collection of rankings, the 2009 Golfweek's Best Municipal Courses list, features the nation's top 50 government-owned layouts that have raised the bar for public golf in the United States.
The top three tracks on the Golfweek's Best Municipal Courses list are all U.S. Open sites: No. 1 Bethpage State Park (Black), which will stage next month's U.S. Open in Farmingdale, N.Y.; No. 2 Chambers Bay, home of the 2015 national championship; and No. 3 Torrey Pines (South), which played host to Tiger Woods' dramatic Open victory last summer.
"We're in the middle of an unprecedented two-year run of municipal courses hosting the U.S. Open," said Bradley S. Klein, national director of Golfweek's Best Courses ratings program. "All told, 25 states are represented on our list, California leads with eight courses, followed by Arizona and Utah with four each, thus proving that municipal golf is thriving across the country."
To produce the Golfweek's Best Municipal Courses list, a nationwide team of more than 475 evaluators rated the layouts on the basis of 10 criteria, including routing, conditioning, variety and memorability of holes. The result is an average of scores, which then dictates a course's overall ranking.
"So many golfers have roots in municipal golf, so it was fun for us to aggregate a list of the best munis in the country," said Jeff Babineau, vice president and editor of Golfweek. "To most, the term 'muni' once conjured images of playing in some scruffy dustbowl track - but to look down this list of top courses, the overall quality is really phenomenal."