With the upswing in the popularity of golf with our Members, Watersound Club is excited to announce it is planning another world-class golf course for its Membership! The Club, in partnership with Love Golf Design, will be working closely with founders Davis Love III, Mark Love, and Scot Sherman to bring the new course to life as an additional amenity for Watersound Club Members. The new golf course will provide many more rounds of capacity for our Members and their guests.
The new course is being designed to comfortably span acreage just north of Watersound Club’s Shark’s Tooth Golf Course and east of the Watersound Origins community – the acreage allows the design team the ability to develop a championship golf course. The plan is to connect the new golf course to the Watersound Origins community, the Wild Heron community, and other future communities that are being planned.
“We’re blessed to have available to us an amount of land and resources that just can’t be found many other places in the U.S.,” says St. Joe Company Vice President of Club Operations Mike Jansen. “We’re committed to using that to our advantage and we will continue to add world-class amenities for our Watersound Club Members as we grow.”
After working through 5 separate design phases, or routings, the Watersound Club and Love Golf Design teams selected a unique 18-hole, Par 72 design with 6 sets of tees, allowing golfers to adjust the course distance to play from 4,900 yards to over 7,600 yards on a firm, fast-playing course. The flexibility of play will offer a challenge to experienced golfers, and accessibility for those new to the game. Once complete, the golf course will share the existing clubhouse with Shark’s Tooth Golf Course. The existing clubhouse, parking area, and driving range will undergo renovations to accommodate the new course.
Leading the Love Golf Design team is Davis Love III. He is perhaps best known as a World Golf Hall of Fame Inductee who was twice picked to lead America’s Ryder Cup Team. Just as impressive, though, are the 27 completed projects in Love Golf Design’s portfolio, including both new designs and renovations. Working to naturally incorporate the mix of upland vegetation and undisturbed wetland areas into the course layout offers an opportunity to top even those previous designs.
“After exploring the property on our first few visits, we found so many options it was hard to narrow the new course down to just 18 holes,” said Davis Love. “Lead architect Scot Sherman, Mark and I believe the variety of the site lends itself to building a course with a timeless character. We’re pleased to be working with a routing that flows across white sandy dunes, with diverse native plant materials, along with beautiful pockets of old growth cypress and pine trees to frame the golf holes. We are really thrilled with how the routing of the golf course is coming along at this point.”
With the routing work well underway, the Love team expects the new design to be finalized by spring of 2022, while the team continues to work through the permitting.
“This course will be unique to our existing golf courses, and add variety to our Club’s offerings,” said Patrick Richardson, Watersound Club’s Director of Golf. “We want to provide a natural ‘wow’ factor, so that anyone from a casual golfer to a tour pro will be able to have a truly enjoyable experience in a naturally beautiful setting, with just the right amount of challenge for your level of play.”