1 MD Golf Course Among Nation's Top 100: Golf Digest

MARYLAND — While Maryland has plenty of golf courses, quantity doesn't always mean quality. But, one of the nation's best golf courses is in the state, according to the eminent golf publication.

Golf Digest recently published "America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses."

The list looked at six pieces of criteria: shot options, challenge, layout variety, aesthetics, conditioning, and character.

Some of the courses making the top 10 are legendary, such as Augusta National Golf Course in Georgia, home of the Masters Tournament, and Cypress Point Club in Pebble Beach California. The one Maryland course among those premier links is Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach.

"We are proud to say this year's edition is the most scientific ever — with our 1,800 panelists submitting more than 85,000 evaluations over our 10-year scoring criteria," Derek Duncan and Stephen Hennessey wrote for the publication.

Here's what Golf Digest has to say about Maryland's top golf course:

No. 73. Congressional Country Club: Blue, Bethesda

Congressional's Blue Course had been an icon of traditional American parkland golf since the 1964 U.S. Open. Prior to that event, Robert Trent Jones combined nine remodeled Devereux Emmet holes with nine new ones of his own to create the modern Blue, and those holes were remodeled and reshaped several times by son Rees Jones for the 1997 and 2011 Opens. All the while, the trees around them matured, creating dense, shadowy corridors of wood. Drainage issues and declining course conditions motivated the membership to consider a major overhaul in 2020, and that's what they received when architect Andrew Green reimagined the course as something that Emmet might have originally designed, denuding the property of its forests and creating broad, rollicking fairways that tumble through meadows of long fescue punctuated by fearsome bunkers and bold, segmented greens. Parkland golf Congressional is no more, and the remodel, which included a new, drop-shot par-3 10th hole, earned the course our Best Transformation award for 2021 and a jump of 18 spots in the 100 Greatest ranking.

See the full list from Golf Digest here.