Streamsong

Some big-name Florida courses open, others wait for water to recede in wake of Hurricane Milton

Which top courses are open, which are still closed after Hurricane Milton?

Hurricane Milton had different impacts on various golf courses along its path across the Florida Peninsula last Wednesday and Thursday, and some courses have reopened fully while others are waiting for water to drain before welcoming players.

Many people are still suffering mightily after the storm, with more than 400,000 Florida residents still without power. Food and water are in short supply in the worst-hit areas, lines are out of hand at some gas stations and federal agencies are trying to help as thousands of electric crews race to turn back on the lights, refrigerators and air conditioners.

It can seem like a weird time to think about a game, but golf is big business in Florida, and many people’s livelihoods depend on golf as the state begins its recovery. The National Golf Foundation reports there are more than 1,200 courses in Florida that serve nearly 1.6 million players, with an economic impact of $8.2 billion in 2022. More than 132,000 people work in Florida’s golf industry.

The biggest problem for most golf courses wasn’t Milton’s winds so much as its water. Some places in Florida received nearly two feet of rainfall overnight, and several courses are still under water in places. It can take weeks for that much water to recede from a low-lying course. It was especially damaging as Milton struck just two weeks in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which inundated Florida’s western coast with storm surge and dumped huge volumes of rain across the peninsula before hammering into Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Forest Lake Ocoee flood — Flooding waters from Hurricane Milton surround the par-3 16th green at Forest Lake in Ocoee, Florida, near Orlando. (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)

As an example of water damage, this author received a close-up look at storm water Sunday on a round at the daily-fee Forest Lake Golf Club in Ocoee near Orlando. The course had standing water on many holes, deep enough to resemble ponds more than puddling. Course operators had cobbled together a new layout, playing one par 4 and one par 5 as par 3s to avoid saturated areas in fairways while they clean up after the storm and await water to recede. One par 3 across a pond was closed entirely as water had risen to surround the green like a moat and covered two-thirds of the putting surface. Players should expect to find such conditions at many courses across Florida as grounds crews work to restore normal playing conditions.

Hundreds of courses stretch along the path of Hurricane Milton. For a sampling of how those courses are doing after the storm, we checked on the layouts that appear in Golfweek’s Best rankings of public-access courses. These vary from daily-fee operations to huge resorts. Some have reopened with negligible effects from the storm, while others remain closed. At the bottom of this story is an update on several highly ranked private clubs, too.

Home to three highly ranked courses – the Red by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, the Blue by Tom Doak, and the Black by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner – Streamsong received no major damage in the storm. The resort will reopen Tuesday after having been closed for several days as power was restored. The three courses on a former mining site feature very few trees to have blown down, and they were built atop huge piles of sand that expedited drainage. The Red is ranked by Golfweek’s Best as the No. 2 public-access course in Florida and ties for No. 37 among all modern courses in the U.S. The Blue is No. 3 in Florida and ties for No. 53 among modern courses, and the Black is No. 4 in Florida and ties for No. 67 among modern courses.

Bay Hill Club and Lodge

Longtime home to the PGA Tour’s Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard, Bay Hill in Orlando is still closed as it deals with flooding after Hurricane Milton. The club is waiting for water to recede – notably on the around-the-pond par-5 sixth hole and the downhill over-the-pond 17th – before announcing a reopening plan. The facility also suffered tree damage. Bay Hill ranks No. 6 among public-access courses in Florida. Bay Hill hopes to have its 9-hole course, The Challenger, opened in the next several days.

Innisbrook

The home of the Copperhead Course – longtime site of the PGA Tour’s Valspar Championship – is in Palm Harbor, just west of Tampa and closer to the Gulf of Mexico. The resort has posted on its website that limited dining options have reopened. The resort features four golf courses: Copperhead, Island, North and South. Of those four, nine holes reopened Monday. Those nine are a compilation of holes on the North and South courses. The Copperhead – ranked No. 9 among all public-access courses in Florida – has not reopened, and a timeframe is not mentioned on the resort’s website.

Southern Dunes

The Steve Smyers layout southwest of Orlando in Haines City lost a few trees, but the course reopened Saturday with minimal damage. Southern Dunes sits on rolling sand dunes, which helps tremendously with drainage. Southern Dunes ranks No. 14 among all public-access courses in Florida.

PGA Golf Club

PGA Golf Club in Port St. Lucie on Florida’s eastern coast – home to three courses ranked among the top 30 public-access layouts in the state – has reopened two of those courses, Dye (ranked No. 17) and Ryder (No. 30). The resort’s Wannamaker course (ranked No. 18) was closed well before the storm for a renovation, and it is scheduled to reopen in November as planned. A handful of holes on the two open courses are cart-path-only as the facility continues to dry out.

Orange County National

Home to two courses among the top 30 in the state, Panther Lake (No. 23) and Crooked Cat (tied for No. 27), this Winter Garden facility just west of Orlando reopened Friday after the storm. The property’s massive circular driving range was humming with business Saturday, as usual.

Celebration

Ranked No. 29 among public-access courses in Florida, this course southwest of Orlando is still closed after Milton. The club has posted on social media that it hopes to reopen Wednesday, as water continues to drain. Golfers can check the club’s Facebook page for more information and updates.

Grand Cypress

A longtime Central Florida golf icon, Grand Cypress is home to two courses – the Cypress and the Links – at the new Evermore resort southwest of Orlando next to Disney World. The Cypress is open for play now, while the Links is slated to reopen Tuesday as stormwater recedes. Formerly known as the New Course, the renamed Links ties for No. 30 among all public-access courses in Florida.

Private clubs

Belleair near Tampa shortly after a restoration of the Donald Ross-designed course by Jason Straka (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)

Calls to several top-rated private courses in especially hard-hit areas, such as Mountain Lake in Lake Wales and The Concession in Bradenton, went unanswered. Belleair, just west of Tampa along the Intracoastal Waterway, lost dozens of trees on its two courses, and its recently restored West Course reopened Monday while its East Course will take a few more days. Nearby, Pelican Golf Club – home to the LPGA’s The Annika Driven by Gainbridge scheduled for Nov. 14-17 – plans to reopen Wednesday.

Photos: The Chain short course, designed by Coore and Crenshaw, opens soon at Streamsong

Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw turn up the volume with The Chain at Streamsong.

BOWLING GREEN, Fla. – There are expectations for architects as they design a golf hole. Length, width, severity of contours, difficulty, placement of the green – there’s room for creativity, sure, but stray too far from tradition and a few eyebrows certainly will be raised.

Except for short par 3s. Great architects have long let their imaginations wander with the most miniature of holes on many acclaimed courses.

“It seems that’s there a theme that every wonderful, great course I’ve ever seen always includes a little short par 3 somewhere,” said Ben Crenshaw, the two-time Masters champion, golf historian and design partner with Bill Coore. “Short par 3s are pretty tantalizing for a lot of people. There’s so many brilliant examples of that. It just adds spice.”

Golfweek’s Best short, par-3 and non-traditional courses

Coore and Crenshaw have included many such holes on the dozens of golf courses they have designed together. Often not much over 120 yards or even shorter, these pint-sized par 3s are famed for offering intrigue as players plan for birdies but often pencil in bogeys or worse on their scorecards.

Soon comes a new chance to play a string of such holes as Streamsong opens all of its newest short course, The Chain, to preview play March 31. Until then, the resort is allowing limited preview play on less than the full course as it continues to grow in. The Chain is expected to fully open to resort play later this year.

The new par-3 course, The Chain, at Streamsong in Florida (Courtesy of Streamsong/Matt Hahn)

Built by Coore and Crenshaw, The Chain will offer 19 holes ranging from 41 to 293 yards, each offering a vast teeing area that allows players to pick a length. Want to play No. 8 with a driver? Step back to the huge metal chain link sunk into the ground and swing away. Want to play the same hole at 170? Go for it. It’s totally up to each group, or even each player. No. 1 can be 57 yards or 110, all the way to No. 19 at that ranges from 115 to 145.

Where to play golf in Orlando and Central Florida

The resort never refers to par for any hole, though the vast majority of them will require just one full shot for most players. Call them par 3s, or call them whatever you like – the resort’s operators don’t really care as long as players are having a blast.

The course was laid out in such a way that players can take a six-hole or a 13-hole loop, but resort operators expect most to play all 19. The Chain is a short walk from The Lodge at Streamsong, so late-afternoon tee times will be at a premium after many players tackle one of the resort’s highly acclaimed full-size courses – Red, Blue and Black – in the mornings. The Chain should prove especially popular during Streamsong’s peak winter season, when curtailed daylight might prevent a second 18-hole loop, and among players arriving to the resort mid-afternoon or simply those who just don’t want to stretch their golf to 36 traditional holes a day.

Streamsong Chain — Nos. 18 and 19 of the new short course, The Chain, at Streamsong in Florida (Courtesy of Streamsong/Matt Hahn)

Also expect to encounter plenty of fun shots on The Chain. Coore and Crenshaw were granted a feast of freedom in designing the layout that maxes out at 3,026 yards, and they dreamed up plenty of internal contours and ground features that will only improve as the greens and their sandy surrounds continue to mature and become even more firm and bouncy.

“We can do things with a shorter course, where players are hitting shorter shots and you can be a bit more aggressive with the greens and some of the things,” Coore said recently after a tour of the layout alongside Crenshaw. “Things are in more of a reduced scale, and you can take more liberties and a few more risks to do greens and surrounds with interesting things that you might not be able to do with a regulation course. …

“For years, people have said (about full-size courses), ‘You can’t do that, it won’t be accepted, that’s too radical.’ With a par-3 course, you can kind of dispense with that a little and say, ‘It’s a par-3 course; we can do that.’ If you’re in our profession, it gives you freedom to work.”

The Chain includes a bunker in the middle of a green at No. 6, the aforementioned No. 8 that can play for many as a short par 4, and several trips across water and quarries at the former phosphate mining site. There are plenty of slopes that will help feed golf balls onto the putting surfaces and more devious contours that can sweep a ball off a green.

The tee markers at The Chain at Streamsong are huge chain links left over from mining. But instead of markers on each side of the tee, these links mark the front and back positions for each tee, which can stretch for dozens of yards, allowing players to select the yardage they will play each hole. (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)

The hole most likely to be relived over post-round beverages is the 209-yard (max) 11^th, where a punchbowl green awaits on the opposite side of a pond, just a thin slit in the nearly vertical bank showing the putting surface from the tee. Players can try to just crest the forward mounds with their tee shots, or they can intentionally take it deep past the flag and trust that the ball will roll backward onto the green – this might be the safest route, and it’s a blast to watch balls scamper back toward the putting surface as if pulled by a string.

“Probably most people would point to that hole,” Coore said when asked what he anticipates will be the biggest talker among the 19 holes. “You play over the beautiful lake. It used to be a flat piece of ground out there, and we just mined a bunch of sand out of it and made a big hole.”

But don’t expect No. 11 to be a pushover, even with slopes on all sides of the green to feed the ball toward the hole – especially for players who flirt with the water short or right in trying to play a shot to the yardage instead of just hitting it long. Streamsong Black, the 18-hole design by Gil Hanse, already offers a famous punchbowl green, but The Chain’s variation is much smaller and tighter in scope, fitting with Coore and Crenshaw’s focus on right-sized targets for the par-3 course.

“I think the long punchbowl hole, in this little family of holes, will probably be maybe the toughest hole because it’s a long carry,” Crenshaw said. “It’s basically an old idea if you have a long shot across something, that you have a gathering green, a punchbowl. That may be one at the top of the list” that players remember.

The new Bucket putting course at Streamsong in Florida (Courtesy of Streamsong/Scott Powers)

Before or after a loop around The Chain, players can tackle The Bucket, the 2.6-acre putting course that sits within the par-3 course. Drinks and snacks also will be available onsite with the resort planning to add a clubhouse later, surely making the new complex a preferred hangout for resort guests.

Coore and Crenshaw also designed the Red Course at Streamsong, which opened in 2012 and ranks as the No. 2 Golfweek’s Best public-access layout in Florida and ties for No. 16 among all resort courses in the United States. The resort’s Blue Course by Tom Doak also opened in 2012 and ranks No. 3 among Florida’s public layouts and No. 20 among all U.S. resort courses, while the Black by Hanse opened in 2017 to become No. 4 in Florida and No. 23 on Golfweek’s Best resort list.

Coore said he’s always loved the allure of the site, where sand was piled high for decades as part of phosphate mining operations. The name of The Chain references the dragline chains used by miners, and The Bucket is so named because of the massive scoops once used to move earth at the mining site, one of which has been placed at the new putting course.

“People love it when they get here,” he said. “It’s a little mysterious the first time, but when they see it, they say ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in Florida.’ It has been so much fun to be a part of it.”

Crenshaw summed it up: “We do believe the Chain will be a positive extension of the journey.”

Check out photos of each hole below.

Golfweek’s Best 2024: Top 200 resort courses in the U.S.

From Hawaii to Florida, we offer the Golfweek’s Best ranking of top resort courses in the U.S.

Welcome to Golfweek’s Best 2024 list of top resort golf courses in the United States.

The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged to produce a final, cumulative rating. Then each course is ranked against other courses in the region.

This list focuses on the golf courses themselves, not the resorts as a whole or other amenities. Each golf course included is listed with its average rating from 1 to 10, its location, architect(s) and the year it opened.

* New to or returning to the list

Other popular Golfweek’s Best lists include:

Where to play golf around Orlando and Central Florida: Golfweek’s Best 2023 public-access courses

Thanks to Golfweek’s Best rankings, we break out the top courses around Orlando and Central Florida.

Looking for a break from the theme parks around Orlando? Whether you want to stay close or you’re willing to drive a bit, there are several courses available that appear on the Golfweek’s Best rankings of top public-access layouts in Florida.

But it’s not as easy as pulling up our state-by-state rankings, which lists Florida courses that might be a full day’s drive away from Central Florida. We wanted to focus on the eight top-ranked courses that, while they might require golfers spend up to 90 minutes in the car, are within reasonable driving distance.

For the purpose of this exercise, we limited driving time to within 90 minutes of Disney World. Why 90 minutes? Because it can take a while to get anywhere around Orlando, especially if you’re stuck on Interstate 4, so 90 minutes seemed like a reasonable amount of time in a car to reach great golf.

And why Walt Disney World Resort? Because chances are if you’re visiting Orlando, you will be bunking up not far from that entertainment giant’s theme parks or Universal Orlando nearby.

We used Google Maps for its drive times, keying in Walt Disney World Resort at a time with no significant traffic slowdowns. Take all drive times around Orlando and Central Florida with a grain of salt, of course, as backups frequently happen.

None of this is to say there aren’t plenty of other worthy places to play around Orlando. As a nearby resident, this author will attest to the simple pleasures to be found at Winter Park Golf Course – frequently called WP9 – just north of downtown Orlando. The short nine-holer is one of the most fun two hours you’re likely to spend on a golf course.

Included with this list is a general map of where to find all these courses. Each one on the list below is represented with a number on the map – keep scrolling to see the numbers.

Included with each course is its position in Florida on the Golfweek’s Best public-access list. For any course that appears on our other popular rankings lists, those positions are included as well.

More: Where to play public golf around Chicago, New York City and the Phoenix/Scottsdale area

A little background: The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them on 10 criteria on a points basis of 1 through 10. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings are averaged to produce all our Golfweek’s Best course rankings.

Orlando map where to play 2023 — (Google Earth/Golfweek)

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10 U.S. destinations with three or more top-ranked resort courses

10 destinations have three or more highly ranked courses on Golfweek’s Best Top 200 Resort Courses list.

What do you really want in a golf trip? If your answer is golf, golf, then more golf in one spot, sometimes followed by a wee bit of extra golf, we have you covered.

Golfweek’s Best ranks courses around the world by various categories, ranging from modern courses to the best in each state. One of our most popular rankings is the top 200 resort courses in the U.S.

Any of the layouts on the list would make for a great getaway. More than three dozen resorts have two courses on the list, always begging for a comparison between layouts over a nice cold drink and dinner after a full day of golf.

But if you’re looking for more, keep reading. Because 10 resorts are home to three or more courses on Golfweek’s Best ranking of top resorts in the U.S. From coastal Oregon to inland Florida, these destinations have the holes — and the pedigrees — to keep golfers swinging for days.

Pinehurst No. 4 (Courtesy of Pinehurst Resort)

Six of these resorts have three courses ranked among the top 200. They are Big Cedar Lodge in Missouri, Firestone Country Club in Ohio, Pebble Beach Resorts in California, the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Alabama, Sea Pines in South Carolina and Streamsong in Florida.

Two of these are not traditional resorts. The first is Firestone, which for the most part is a private members club. But Firestone offers stay-and-play packages open to the public. That qualifies it as a resort based on Golfweek’s Best standards in which any course that offers tee times to the public, even if the club is mostly a private facility, is deemed to be public-access.

The other in question is the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, which offers golf at 11 sites around the state. Because all the facilities are managed under one umbrella and offer great opportunities to bounce from one site to another with relative ease, we opted to include the Trail on this list.

Next up are the resorts with four courses ranked among the top 200 — rarefied air. They are Destination Kohler in Wisconsin (Whistling Straits and Blackwolf Run are two clubs, each with two courses, that are part of one resort) and Reynolds Lake Oconee in Georgia, which is a sprawling resort and residential community.

Only two resorts in the U.S. have five courses among the top 200 in the U.S.: Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon and Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina. Both of them are bucket-list destinations that every golfer should see, hopefully more than once. They offer all the golf most players would ever want on one vacation — playing one round on each course would take days, and one round on each course is never enough.

The resorts with three or more ranked courses have gone about their development in multiple ways. Some were established more than a century ago and have added courses through the decades — these resorts often feature courses designed by multiple architects, offering an array of styles and architectural features. Others feature several courses by one designer, with the resorts sticking with the architects who proved to work best for them.

Either way, you can’t go wrong with a trip to any of these locations listed on the following pages. Included for each resort are its top-200 courses listed with their average rating on a scale of 1 to 10 as assigned by Golfweek’s Best rater program, their designers, the years they opened and their rankings on various Golfweek’s Best lists. We hope you enjoy perusing these elite resorts, both on these pages and in real life.

And it’s worth noting, there is one more resort destination that is very likely to join this list of 10 in the coming years. Pine Needles in North Carolina, not far from Pinehurst Resort, operates three courses, two of which are on the 2023 list of top 200 resorts: Pine Needles (No. 47) and Mid Pines (T-35). The company’s third course, the recently renovated Southern Pines, didn’t have the requisite number of votes to qualify for this year’s list but is almost a lock to appear on the list in upcoming years.

Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play 2023: Top 100 U.S. public-access courses ranked

Check out Golfweek’s top 100 U.S. public-access golf courses in 2023.

Welcome to the Golfweek’s Best 2023 list of the Top 100 Best Courses You Can Play in the U.S. Each year, we publish many lists, with this selection of public-access layouts among the premium offerings.

The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on 10 criteria on a points basis of 1 through 10. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings are averaged to produce these rankings. The top handful of courses in the world have an average rating of above 9, while many excellent layouts fall into the high-6 to 8 range.

All the courses on this list allow public access in some fashion, be it standard daily green fees, through a resort, or by staying at an affiliated hotel. If there’s a will, there’s a tee time.

Each course is listed with its 2022 ranking in parenthesis in the title line, its average rating next to the name, the location, the year it opened and the designers.

KEY: (m) modern, built in 1960 or after; (c) classic, built before 1960. For courses with a number preceding the (m) or (c), that is where the course ranks on Golfweek’s Best lists for top 200 modern or classic courses in the U.S.

* Indicates new to or returning to this list.

More Golfweek’s Best

Golfweek’s Best 2023: Top 200 Modern Courses in the U.S.

Golfweek’s experts have ranked the Top 200 courses built since 1960, such as Bandon Dunes, Whistling Straits and more.

Want to play the great modern golf courses in the U.S.? From Hawaii to Boston, we have you covered. So welcome to the Golfweek’s Best 2023 list of the Top 200 Modern Courses built in or after 1960 in the United States.

Each year we publish many lists, with this Top 200 Modern Courses list among the premium offerings. Also extremely popular and significant are the lists for Top 200 Classic Courses 2023, the public-access Best Courses You Can Play in each state and Best Private Courses in each state.

To ensure these lists are up-to-date, Golfweek’s Best in recent years has altered how the individual ratings are compiled into the rankings. Only ratings from rounds played in the past 10 years are included in the compilations. This helps ensure that any course in the rankings still measures up.

Courses also must have a minimum of 25 votes to qualify for the Top 200 Modern or the Top 200 Classic. Other Golfweek’s Best lists, such as Best Courses You Can Play or Best Private, do not require as many votes. This makes it possible that a course can show up on other lists but not on the premium Top 200 lists.

There’s one course of particular note this year. Landmand Golf Club in Homer, Nebraska, debuts the highest of the courses new to this list, climbing into a tie for 26th. Designed by Tad King and Rob Collins, Landmand opened in 2022. It and the Sheep Ranch at Bandon Dunes are the only courses to have opened since 2020 to rank among the top 200.

Each course is listed with its average rating next to the name, then the location, the year it opened and the designers. The list notes in parenthesis next to the name of each course where that course ranked in 2022.

After the designers are several designations that note what type of facility it is:

p: private
d: daily fee
r: resort course
t: tour course
u: university
m: municipal
re: real estate
c: casino

* Indicates new to or returning to this list.

More Golfweek’s Best for 2023:

Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play 2023: State-by-state rankings for public-access layouts

State-by-state rankings of the best public courses you can play in all 50 states.

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Want to play the best public-access golf courses in each state? Keep reading.

Fresh for 2023, we present the Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list for the top public-access layouts in each state, as judged by our nationwide network of raters.

The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them on 10 criteria on a points basis of 1 through 10. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings are averaged to produce all our Golfweek’s Best course rankings.

The courses on this list allow public access in some fashion, be it standard daily green fees, through a resort or by staying at an affiliated hotel. If there’s a will, there’s a tee time – no membership required. (There are a handful of courses on this list that some players might consider to be private, but they do allow non-hosted, non-member guest play in some limited form, normally through a local hotel or similar arrangement.)

There’s one course of particular note this year. Of the dozens of courses new to this list, only Landmand Golf Club in Homer, Nebraska, debuts in the No. 1 spot in its state. Designed by Tad King and Rob Collins, Landmand opened in 2022.

KEY: (m) modern, built in 1960 or after; (c) classic, built before 1960. For courses with a number preceding the (m) or (c), that is where the course ranks on Golfweek’s Best lists for top 200 modern and classic courses in the U.S.

* indicates new or returning to the rankings

Editor’s note: The Golfweek’s Best 2023 rankings of top private courses in each state will be published Monday, June 12. More lists, such as the top 200 Modern and top 200 Classic Courses lists for 2023, will be published in the following weeks.

More Golfweek’s Best for 2023:

Streamsong in Florida to begin construction on The Chain, a non-traditional short course, in March

The Chain by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw will feature holes ranging in length from 90 to 275 yards when it opens this year.

Streamsong Resort in Florida – already home to three highly regarded courses – will begin construction on its short course, The Chain, in early March this year, with a few recent tweaks and a new routing that has been extended to 19 holes.

Plans for The Chain were announced in 2022, with the architecture team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw designing what was going to be 18 holes that could be divided into a six-hole loop, a 12-hole loop or the full 18. Streamsong officials expect to open The Chain this fall.

Environmental considerations led Coore to tweak the original routing, slightly moving a few sites of tees and greens. The new routing also provided room for another hole, with the six-hole loop the same and the changes coming to the freshly altered 13-hole loop. The Chain also will feature a two-acre putting green and its own clubhouse, plus food and drink options.

Streamsong Chain Bucket — The Bucket putting course for The Chain short course at Streamsong in Florida was named for the dragline buckets used in former mining operations at the site. A 22,000-pound namesake bucket was recently installed at the site and will be a feature of the 2-acre putting course. (Courtesy of Streamsong)

Holes on The Chain will range from 90 to more than 275 yards. The entire layout will be about 3,000 yards.

The Chain will sit on roughly 100 acres directly across from Streamsong’s Lodge, allowing players to stroll over for more golf either before or after a round on one of the resort’s full-size courses. Streamsong’s Red Course ranks No. 2 in Florida on Golfweek’s Best list of public-access courses, with the Black No. 3 on that list and the Blue in the No. 4 spot. Each of those courses also rank inside the top 60 on Golfweek’s Best list of top modern courses in the U.S.

Streamsong Resort was founded just over a decade ago by mining company Mosaic, and the resort was purchased earlier this month by KemperSports, a nationwide owner and operator of 140 courses.

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KemperSports buys Streamsong in Florida; Could a fourth full-size course be on the way?

In a wide-ranging Q&A, the CEO of KemperSports discusses the sale and the possibility of a fourth course.

Streamsong Resort in Florida opened in 2012, and aside from its original two golf courses and the addition of a lodge and a third course, a major talking point has always been its owner, Mosaic Company.

One of the world’s largest phosphate producers, Mosaic had for decades mined the remote Central Florida site where Streamsong was constructed, about an hour’s drive southeast of Tampa and 90 minutes southwest of Orlando. Those past mining activities defined the land, leaving huge piles of sand that over time had turned into surreal dunes. The landscape makes the three courses at Streamsong very different than just about anything else in Florida.

But Mosaic was still first and foremost a mining company. It hired golf management company KemperSports of Illinois to operate the golf courses from the start, and two years ago KemperSports took over management of the entire resort, including hospitality. For several years there was speculation that Mosaic would sell the resort at some time.

That time has come, as Mosaic has sold Streamsong Resort to its longtime management partner, KemperSports. As first reported by the Fire Pit Collective, the sale price was $160 million, confirmed by Mosaic in a news release Friday. The acquisition included three golf courses, two clubhouses, the Streamsong Lodge and other amenities, all on 7,000 acres as part of the deal. Just over 2,000 of those acres are in use now as part of the resort.

The Lodge at Streamsong in Florida (Courtesy of Streamsong)

Each of Streamsong’s three courses – the Red by designers Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, the Blue by Tom Doak and the Black by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner – ranks in the top 60 on Golfweek’s Best list of top modern courses in the United States. The Red ranks No. 2 on Golfweek’s Best list of public-access layouts in Florida, with the Black No. 3 and the Blue No. 4 on that list. Streamsong is one of just a handful of resorts to have so many highly ranked courses.

“We’re very excited,” Steve Skinner, the CEO of KemperSports, told Golfweek on Friday. “As you know, we’ve been involved with this property since almost Day 1, for over 10 years. It’s such a special project and such a special property, we’re just really excited. It’s a rare place in golf and just really iconic.”

Skinner – a trained lawyer who has worked at KemperSports since 1998 – described the acquisition as having been competitive with several other potential buyers looking to take advantage of golf’s resurgent popularity since the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. He said there aren’t many properties like Streamsong with its three courses, and interest was high.

KemperSports has 140 properties in its management stable, Skinner said, including 15 courses it owns and another dozen it leases. Those properties under management include both private clubs and public-access layouts, and the company also operates a division focused on youth and recreational sports venues. KemperSports was founded in 1978 by Steve Lesnick, who still serves as its chairman, and in 2022 the company took on several new investors who provided capital for expansion, including the Streamsong acquisition.

Having managed Streamsong’s golf for a decade and the entire resort in recent years, there isn’t a tremendous learning curve for KemperSports as it takes over the resort. KemperSports doesn’t plan any changes to the staff, and Skinner said he has faith in the people working at the resort to keep a focus on customers and continuous improvements. Skinner spoke to Golfweek of several plans for the resort, both in the short and long-term.

The biggest change coming soon will be the development of The Chain, a non-traditional, short, 18-hole course by the team of Coore and Crenshaw to be built directly across from the resort’s 228-room hotel. Streamsong announced the plans to build The Chain a year ago.

Is even more golf on the horizon for Streamsong? Read on for that and more from Skinner. This discussion has been edited for length.