Watersound Club in Panama City, Florida, has hired Love Golf Design to design a new eighteen-hole course.
The new layout will be located north of the private resort’s existing golf course, the Greg Norman-designed Shark’s Tooth, and east of the Watersound Origins community. The new golf course will connect to the resort’s existing and future communities.
Love Golf Design aims to blend the layout into the existing natural vegetation of the site. Each hole with have six teeing areas to give the course a playing range from 4,900 to over 7,600 yards.
“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 III, founder of Love Golf Design. “Lead architect Scot Sherman, founder and president Mark Love 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.”
The design is expected to be finalised by the end of spring 2022. In the meantime, the team is also focusing on getting the required permits.
“We’re blessed to have available to us an amount of land and resources that just can’t be found in many other places in the US,” said Mike Jansen, vice president of club operations at Watersound Club. “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.”
Patrick Richardson, director of golf at Watersound Club, said: “This course will be unique, and add variety to the club’s offerings. 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.”
The resort’s clubhouse will be renovated and will serve both courses.