Hot Springs

Most groups planning a golf trip to Hot Springs make the same mistake: they research the courses at Hot Springs Village, book four rounds in the Ouachita hills, and drive past the national park without discovering that two of the most historically significant publicly bookable courses in the region are sitting 30 minutes in the other direction. Hot Springs is a two-venue destination, and understanding which venue does which job is the difference between a solid trip and an exceptional one.

Hot Springs Country Club's Park course dates to 1898, laid out by Willie Park Jr. on terrain at the edge of what would later become Hot Springs National Park. William Diddel renovated the routing in 1932; Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw restored it again in 2001, stripping later accretions to bring the course back toward its original character -- tighter corridors, restored natural contours, and a routing that works with the Ouachita hill topography rather than flattening it. The result is a par-72 layout that plays 6,852 yards and asks for precision rather than power. The club is semi-private, but public tee times are consistently available and bookable in advance, and most captains researching from out of state never think to look.

The Arlington course at the same club is Diddel's own design from 1930, restored by Coore and Crenshaw in 1994 -- six years before they returned for the Park. At 6,713 yards with narrower Bermuda fairways, it's the tighter and more penalizing of the two. Playing both courses back-to-back gives a group two distinctly characterized Coore/Crenshaw-touched layouts on the same property, a proposition that few comparably priced destinations in the American South can match.

Hot Springs Village sits 30 minutes west of the city: a 26,000-acre planned residential community whose property owners association operates nine golf courses through Ouachita hill country. Every layout was designed by the same firm -- Ault, Clark & Associates -- across a 35-year span from 1972 to 2004. The architectural uniformity is unusual, but the courses themselves are not interchangeable. Early layouts play flatter and more forgiving; later designs pushed into steeper terrain with longer carries, more elevation change, and higher slope ratings.

Ponce de Leon is the course a competitive group schedules first. Co-designed by Ault, Clark and Arkansas native John Daly in 1991, it plays 7,045 yards with a slope of 141 and a rating of 74.9 -- the hardest test in the village by a meaningful margin. The terrain is demanding in ways that yardage alone doesn't capture; the routing exploits ridge-and-valley topography that adds carries where flat maps wouldn't suggest them. Granada, the newest and longest course at 7,037 yards (slope 137, opened 2004), has the best views and most severe elevation changes of any layout in the village. A four-round group that books Ponce de Leon and Granada has covered the competitive rotation.

The Isabella Golf Club offers 27 holes across three nines -- Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria -- that held Golf Digest's number-one ranking in Arkansas from 2002 to 2006. The 27-hole configuration has a logistical advantage for larger groups: a captain can split 12 or more players across two nine-hole combinations simultaneously rather than stacking foursomes on a single course. Balboa, the 1988 Ault, Clark design (slope 139), completed a full bunker and irrigation renovation in 2024-2025; if the renovation is finished before the trip, it earns a slot ahead of the older layouts on current conditions alone.

The lodging decision is effectively a trip-character decision. A city base -- downtown Hot Springs or the historic Arlington Hotel -- puts the group 10 minutes from Hot Springs Country Club and 30 minutes from the village, within walking distance of Bathhouse Row, and close to Oaklawn Park when racing is in season. A village base compresses the golf commute to zero and makes a 36-hole day logistically effortless, but removes most of the city's non-golf programming. Groups where golf is the primary purpose should base in the village; groups where non-golfers need their own schedule should base in the city.

Hot Springs is an hour south of Little Rock via US-70 -- a straightforward drive from Clinton National Airport. The season runs nearly year-round, but Ouachita Mountain summers run hot and humid enough that late spring and early fall are the preferred windows. A three-day trip covers the HSCC two-course experience plus two HSV rounds. Four days handles the full competitive rotation without forcing the group through weaker fillers.