The most comprehensive list of golf courses in New Hampshire
After hours and hours of research over the course of multiple years, I’m finally feeling confident that I have the most comprehensive and accurate list of golf courses in New Hampshire. This public spreadsheet lists out all 97 golf courses across the state. The list of New Hampshire golf courses can be downloaded as a csv or xlsx file, allowing other people to easily reuse the data, or track progress in their own way.
To be clear, the total count of golf courses counts the total number of golf properties, rather than distinct courses. Some courses, like Atkinson Country Club, have an 18 hole course and a 9 hole par 3 course. I’ve counted this as a single course / property, but noted that there are 27 playable holes. This is mostly a distinction I’m making to allow the map of all courses to look neat when it’s complete. Two overlapping courses are tough to depict on a visual, and I’m envisioning a feature where people can actively track which courses they’ve played across the state and it will update live on a map.
Of the 97 golf courses I’ve found an included in the list, 19 of them are private, members-only courses. Now, you could play some of those courses if you knew a friend that was a member and was willing to invite you as a guest. But if you’re only counting publicly playable courses, there are 78, according to my research. Some of these “publicly" playable courses may included resort courses, where you can only play if you’re a guest of the resort. This is obviously a bit of a barrier in itself, also, so the list of fully public courses is probably a bit smaller still.
Where most lists of golf courses fall short
There are a few challenges that I’ve run into when looking at different data sources to build this comprehensive list of golf courses in NH.
Outdated information displays closed courses - This is often found on sites that scrape the web, create “profiles” for golf courses, and leave them up indefinitely. There were many courses I found on Google that were marked as permanently closed, and no longer had websites, but they still had profiles on other golf-related course aggregators. For example, courses like The Balsams Grand Resort, Bramber Valley, Hanover Country Club and Ragged Mountain Golf Club have all closed in recent years but are included on my lists still.
Lacking online presence means courses are missing - Many of the courses that I added to list most recently don’t have established profiles online. Oftentimes this is due to the course being a small part of a larger establishment like the Twin Lake Village Golf Course. Some courses, generally the 9 hole, or par three courses are just additional amenities in a list of many other amenities. This means they’re not indexed well on Google, so searching for “golf courses near me” won’t surface them, and they’re certainly not on course booking websites like Golfnow.
Unstructured data displayed - while the NHGA member directory was a helpful source of information, the data was not presented in a way that I could easily convert it into a spreadsheet. I’m sure they have their own internal spreadsheet, but the data displayed on the website was just text, not easily copied and pasted into a structure format. This meant a lot of manual review of looking through the list, checking it against my list, and making updates by hand as needed.
Clearly built by bots - You can never be sure what information to trust online. Bots and crawlers are making web pages, optimizing them for search engines, then posting what can be totally made up content. Most lists are not built by hand, or with any care at all.
What is enabled by having an accurate, open list of all golf courses?
The data can be remixed and reused by anyone, without having to spend hours reconciling different data sources. It’s all pre-structured and can be downloaded in a variety of formats.
You can do arbitrary computation on the data. For example, if you were to ask “how many golf holes are there in all of New Hampshire?” to answer that question all you need to do is sum up a column and you learn that there are 1557 golf holes in New Hampshire.
You can track whatever you want by copying the spreadsheet. You could track how many unique golf holes you’ve played in the state. You could track how many courses you’ve played, what percentage of public courses you’ve played, and much more.
