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The post Inside David McLay Kidd’s plans for new Streamsong course | InsideGOLF appeared first on Golf.

Streamsong Resort announced last week it has a fifth 18-hole course on the way. Calling the shots for the new design is David McLay Kidd, whose credits include Bandon Dunes, Gamble Sands and Mammoth Dunes.

If you’ve been to Streamsong, you might have played the Roundabout, a short course near the Black course’s practice range. McLay Kidd is building over that land, meaning The Chain, a Coore and Crenshaw design which opened last year, will now become the resort’s sole short course.

The site upon which McLay Kidd’s course (currently unnamed) will come to life is a former mine that McLay Kidd feels he can manipulate however he sees fit. (Some sand was already removed from this plot during the building of Gil Hanse’s Black course.)

In the exclusive InsideGOLF video below, McLay Kidd detail the challenges his latest project poses but also why the site has so much potential.

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Want more from McLay Kidd? Before the site tour, GOLF Magazine senior writer and Destination GOLF podcast host Josh Sens sat down with McLay Kidd to discuss the Streamsong project, the architect’s affinity for flying and other stories from his decades in the industry. InsideGOLF members can watch the full version of the interview here:

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We hope you enjoy these two looks at one of the game’s hottest designers, available only to our InsideGOLF members. As we continue to build up our newest podcast, Destination GOLF, we’ll be bringing our members more exclusive interviews with architects, developers and key figures in the travel space.

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The post Streamsong announces plans for David McLay Kidd-designed fifth course appeared first on Golf.

In 2012, the golf course architect David McLay Kidd attended the grand opening of two 18-hole layouts, neither of which he designed. Streamsong Blue and Red — dreamed up, respectively, by Tom Doak, and Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw — were the anchor attractions at Streamsong Resort, a new destination in out-of-the-way Florida, roughly equidistant from Tampa and Orlando. 

McLay Kidd was no stranger to remote golf. As the architect of Bandon Dunes, in southern Oregon, he was an OG of the genre. At the Streamsong ribbon cuttings, though, he felt a mix of admiration and envy. He not only loved the courses. He also coveted the landscape around them, a vast canvas of dramatic humps and hollows left behind by a mining operation.

“I just thought, Someday, I’ve got to get the opportunity to build a course here,” McLay Kidd said. “So I then went to considerable lengths seeing if I could interject myself at Streamsong and be part of it.”

Time passed. In 2017, Streamsong opened a third 18-holer, the Black course by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, which, like the Blue and Red, debuted on GOLF’s ranking of Top 100 Courses in the U.S. Six years later, another Coore/Crenshaw design at Streamsong was unveiled: a 19-hole short course called The Chain. 

All the while, McLay Kidd hardly lacked for work. Among his many projects during this period were Gamble Sands, in eastern Washington, and Mammoth Dunes, in central Wisconsin, both Top 100 fixtures. Still, Streamsong remained high on his wish list. But he can check it off now.

On Wednesday, the news became official. Streamsong is building a fifth course, and McLay Kidd has been hired to design it. When it is completed, the resort will become the only property in the world with courses designed by Coore/Crenshaw, Doak, Hanse/Wagner and Kidd.

“In my career, now spanning 30 years, I’ve always considered my peer group to be Bill and Ben and Tom and Gil,” McLay Kidd said. “So, for me to be part of that group, that group would all have to be in the same spot.”

As he spoke, on an unseasonably cold Florida afternoon early this week, McLay Kidd was leading a tour of his course-in-the-making. It does not have a name yet (Gray? Yellow? White? Green?) but it does have a routing, which McLay Kidd and his team had marked with tall stakes in the ground.

The layout will sit between the Red and Black courses and share a clubhouse with the Black. Coming up with a configuration that would start and finish at that clubhouse was complicated, in part, by protected wetlands. But McLay Kidd found a solution that involved cannibalizing a little-used pitch-and-putt practice facility called the Roundabout, whose footprint will give way to the course’s opening two holes.

At more than 7,300 yards from the back tees, the new course will be the longest at the resort, with twists and turns that take it through all points of the compass on a site with frequently shifting winds. Though its bones are in place, its defining features, McLay Kidd said, will take shape in the field, as he and his team fine tune the bends and folds of the fairways and the contours of the greens while taking advantage of terrain marked by striking dunes, brows, dips and ridges. Some portions of the course will need to be built up and others will call for excavating, McLay Kidd said, the better to bring out the ground-game options that are central to his designs.

“I’m not going to be shy about moving dirt when it’s called for,” McLay Kidd said. “This is a great site for golf, but it was shaped by mining, so it’s not as if I’ll be imposing myself on nature.”

In 2023, the mining company that owned Streamsong sold it to Lone Windmill LLC, a stakeholder in KemperSports, which manages the resort. The new course marks the new ownership’s first major investment in the property, but more is coming, a KemperSports representative said, including additional accommodations that will expand the resort’s overnight offerings beyond its 228-room main lodge. 

Work on the new course, already underway, will continue through the winter and spring, and though a completion date has not been announced, McLay Kidd said he hopes it will be ready for play by the fall of 2026. Timeline aside, his goal, he said, is to create a compelling playground that complements Streamsong’s existing courses, sharing DNA with its siblings but standing out on its own. If his expectations were high, so was the pressure, the architectural equivalent of first-tee jitters.

“I’m so glad to be working here,” he said. “But I’m also nervous because the bar has been set so high.”

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The post Why you won’t want to miss Streamsong’s new 19-hole short course appeared first on Golf.

The post Why you won’t want to miss Streamsong’s new 19-hole short course appeared first on Golf.

While the idea of a shorter course is hardly unique to Streamsong Resort, this won’t be one you want to pass up.

The Chain, which now has all 19 holes open and first allowed players to tee off from the grown-in grassy areas this month, is a must-play for those visiting Streamsong, or this particular corner of Florida. It complements what’s already on-site — Streamsong Red (Coore & Crenshaw), Blue (Tom Doak) and Black (Gil Hanse) — and is accessible via a smooth gravel path from the hotel to the starter’s shack, about a 3-wood away from the hotel’s front door.

While the three big courses are 18 holes of championship (and highly-rated) golf, The Chain is 19 holes of fun, competition, drinks, snacks and camaraderie.

The first six holes are in a loop — a Chain, so to speak — and stay near the starting hole. Those six are played through moss-covered trees and return golfers to their starting location, so those in a hurry can play six and walk back to the hotel all within an hour.

There’s no par and no defined teeing areas at this Coore & Crenshaw design. Holes range from 57 to 261 yards with loads of undulation, so a tee ball looking woeful in the air can end up wonderful as soon as it stops rolling. It’s set up for match play, as the winner of the previous hole picks the teeing area for the next.

“There are all sorts of holes that are very unusual of shorter length, and the really good players will really enjoy it and say this is not like a pitch-and-putt, there’s some real golf there,” Crenshaw said. “We think it’s going to be a great amenity.”

The Chain takes up about 36 acres of the 7,000-acre resort. And, after building other highly acclaimed short courses at Bandon Dunes (Brandon Preserve) and Sand Valley (The Sand Box), the architects admitted they wanted to push the creativity scale. They did.

Once you pass the six-hole loop, the number of trees lessen, but the challenges increase.

The ninth hole features a tee box tee set deep into the brushy surroundings, forcing a tight tee shot to a wider fairway. The 11th hole has a 150-yard carry over water to a punchbowl green, a feature Crenshaw said will be one of the most popular. The 12th hole, 158 yards from the back teeing area, forces you to hit over a large natural swale to a pitched green with a huge single tree guarding the left side. There is a blowout area with a sizable bunker on the 14th and a Biarritz green on the 16th.

Between the loops is “The Bucket,” a two-acre putting course marked by a 22,000-pound dragline bucket in the middle, a call back to its foundation as a mining pit for the Mosaic firm.

Ask almost anybody who has played at Streamsong for a favorite course of the three, and you’ll likely get a different answer. Maybe it depends on how they played each. But it will be The Chain that no one leaves disgruntled.

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Welcome to Clubhouse Eats, where we celebrate the game’s most delectable food and drink. Hope you brought your appetite.

***

A visit to Streamsong Resort, which this year is celebrating its 10th anniversary, not only introduces discerning travelers to a world of classic golf course architecture with a modern spin, it can also pair those rounds with classic cocktails embellished with a modern approach. In the words of Courtney Depianta, a beverage coordinator at the resort (and frequent bartender at Streamsong’s Leaf Lounge), “Bartending is the art of turning ordinary ingredients into extraordinary sips, and all artists start somewhere.”

An ideal place to start is with the Old Fashioned. We’ve already shared with you our guide to crafting amazing Old Fashioneds, and at Streamsong, there are usually at least a  few options on the menu — including a smoked variant that’s served at the hotel’s recently reopened (and reimagined) Rooftop 360 bar. We sought Depianta’s advice on the topic, including how to effectively — and easily — smoke these cocktails at home.

You’ll want to pay attention. We can attest that the results are most definitely worth it.

Start with the Specs

When Depianta mixes an Old Fashioned, she always starts with two ounces of the base spirit, then adds half an ounce of a sweetener and finishes with two to three dashes of bitters. The specific measures of sweetener and bitters are important, as Depianta explains that they’ll “either lift, bind, or balance the flavors of the spirit.” Similarly, the volume of the base spirit is also important to the success of the finished cocktail, since at its core, an Old Fashioned is defined by the characteristic flavors of that alcohol. “Using these ratios,” she says, “the cocktail is complex but representative of the spirit.”

The Art of Experimentation

There have been times when Streamsong has emphasized non-traditional Old Fashioneds. A while ago, for example, the rooftop bar featured a menu of Old Fashioneds that included rum, Cognac, Japanese whiskey, and other spirits. “Some people think that an Old Fashioned is just bourbon and sugar and bitters,” Depianta says, “but it can be any variety of spirit, any variety of sweetener, and any variety of bitters.”

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If you’re willing to experiment, a good rule of thumb is to start by simply swapping out the base spirit. If, for example, traditional bourbon Old Fashioneds are your jam but you’re curious about what Cognac can do, don’t change anything about your sweetener or bitters and just replace the bourbon with Cognac. That will provide some clarity as to how Cognac alone changes the drink. From there you can take greater liberties to try new sweeteners and/or bitters along with it.

Just make sure you taste all components of your drink individually first. That’s one of Depianta’s most important pieces of advice. That, and adhering to the idea that flavors that seem complementary are the best combinations to try first. “If it doesn’t sound good,” she acknowledges, “it probably won’t be good.”

Smoke ‘Em If You Can

The flagship Old Fashioned served at Rooftop 360 features the resort’s private barrel selection of Maker’s Mark bourbon, a syrup crafted from the property’s proprietary honey, and it’s built in a smoked glass. Taking nothing away from the whiskey or the honey syrup, but the drink shines best for that deliberate aspect of smoke. And the smoke plays well with most whiskey cocktails for reasons that are rather straightforward, says Depianta.

“When we think about the journey that a whiskey has to go through, interacting with a charred barrel, I think that is why whiskey drinks — and a bourbon Old Fashioned in particular — is such a popular drink to be smoked,” she says. “The smoke just pairs very well with it.”

More specifically, the technique of how the cocktail is smoked is also an important distinction. “Smoking the glass brings a little more smokiness to the cocktail just because when you pour the cocktail in, it’s touching all the surface of the glass,” she says. “You’re getting all of that flavor slowly mixed in. You can taste that throughout your cocktail.”

Experimenting with smoke at home is easier than you think. We tested a cocktail smoking kit produced by Aged & Charred, and found that it was not only easy to impart a pleasing waft of smoke onto — and into — our bourbon Old Fashioned, but how we did it created noticeably different outcomes. Smoking the glass and large ice cube prior to pouring the cocktail produced a rocks glass that offered up a discernible aroma of smoke throughout, though the smokiness didn’t alter the cocktail’s flavor much. Conversely, smoking the finished cocktail in the glass imparted a faint smokiness to the liquid but mitigated much of the lingering aroma. The best scenario — or at least the smokiest — is to combine the two, effectively smoking the cocktail twice.

Whichever outcome sounds more appealing, just know that the act of smoking the cocktail with the kit is not only approachable but remarkably simple. It also might be the thing that you discover your Old Fashioneds have been missing. “Paired with the right spirit,” Depianta says, “that little bit of extra flavor goes a long way.”

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The post The most memorable golf hole I played this year? I couldn’t see it appeared first on Golf.

The post The most memorable golf hole I played this year? I couldn’t see it appeared first on Golf.

On visits to Scotland and Oregon, I’ve played golf in fog so thick that it was difficult to make out the outlines of the holes. But the fog that greeted three of my colleagues and I at Streamsong Resort, in central Florida, earlier this year was on another level. Actually, it made us feel like we were playing on another planet. So soupy was the condensation in the air during three early-morning rounds in March that we couldn’t see much more than about 20 yards in front of us for the first half of each round.

We were in Florida, but if you had told us this was Frankfurt or Florence, we’d have been inclined to believe you. The fairways, the greens, the bunkers, the sandy sprawls, the towering dunes that define this wondrous piece of property — we could see none of it. Streamsong was Streamgone.

Sadly, after two mornings of fog-fighting, it quickly became clear to us that our third and final morning would offer no reprieve. When we hiked up to the first tee at the Tom Doak-designed Blue course, we spotted an arrow that one of our caddies had playfully drawn on the tee box dew.

“Hit it that way,” he said, taking some measure of glee in our mystified states.

That way could have been 180 degrees from the correct line, but we had little choice but to trust our looper’s advice and blindly bang our balls into the great unknown. After hitting our drives, we strolled down the fairway and — if memory serves — found three of our four balls, which felt like a win. And so it went for the first six holes: caddie conference, swing, walk, find, repeat. It wasn’t all bad. Sure, we missed out on the Blue course’s considerable eye candy but not seeing any trouble areas helped block out negative swing thoughts. The fog was surprisingly freeing.

Given this was my first time on the Blue, I didn’t know what I was missing — that is, until we arrived on the tee at the par-3 7th. If you’ve browsed any Streamsong marketing materials or read even just a little bit about the resort — which is home to two other regulation courses, the Red, by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, and the Black, by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, along with an inventive new Coore and Crenshaw short course called The Chain — chances are you’ve seen the 7th hole, which is not only among the most photogenic par-3s in Florida but also in all of golf.

From 200 yards from the tips, the tee shot plays downhill and over water to a sprawling green that sits snugly at the bottom of a dune like a ski village might at the base of a mountain. It’s one of those greens that is so natural in its setting that it feels like it’s been there forever — and one of those holes that if you make only one good swing all round, you want it to come on this tee.

Yet when we clambered up to the tee on this magnificent one-shotter, we saw…nothing. I mean, nothing. No water, no footbridge that connects tee to green and most assuredly no green. With no visibility, it’s one thing to rip driver toward the expanse of a fairway, but quite another to hit such an exacting iron shot over a forced carry. Not that you could tell by my playing partners, all three of whom fearlessly stepped in and hit their balls to where their caddies had directed them: to the right side of a green that pitches hard right to left. Three swings, three nods of approval.

My turn.

Thwack.

“Another good one, right?” said my colleague, Josh.

The phrase was delivered much more as a question than a statement.

“Maybe a little right,” my caddie said, “but it should kick right.”

Right?! I thought. I was convinced I had tugged the ball left of the green.

“Left,” I said, slightly miffed that my caddie’s read could be so far off.

“Left,” another of my colleagues, Darren, corroborated.

“Yeah, but it started right,” Josh shot back.

“Started left, went left,” I said about a shot that I had tracked for all of one second before it disappeared into the abyss.  

“We’ll see,” one of the caddies said.

If you’re going to stop for a foursome photo on the Blue course, on most days the 7th tee is the spot to do so. This was not most days, so we handed our irons back to our caddies and trotted down the slope, over the water and up to green. It didn’t take me long to spot my ball — on the back right of the green. I was stunned. My caddie was not.

Fair to say my ensuing three-putt also came as no surprise to him.

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The post The Streamsong Challenge: 4 contestants, 3 sports, 1 champion | Carry On appeared first on Golf.

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Welcome to “Carry On,” a new GOLF.com travel series in which our experts take you behind the scenes of getting to and experiencing golf’s ultimate destinations.

***

Golf. Fishing. Shooting.

It sounded like a triathlon for Tour pros.

But why should they have all the fun?

And so it was decided that four ordinary duffers would indulge in those diversions, a quartet of GOLF colleagues converging from four different cities. We’d make it a friendly competition: three days to see who could bag the most birdies, land the largest bass and blast the most clay pigeons from the sky.

We’d do it all in one place, a single destination sweetly suited to our purpose.

GPS set for Streamsong Resort.

If you’re into golf, you’ve heard of Streamsong, that most un-Florida-like of Florida resorts, 50 miles from Tampa, 90 miles from Orlando and a world removed from both. The expansive property — 16,000 acres for those keeping score — spreads across the rumpled remains of a phosphate mine, heaving with dunes and kissed by wetlands: a touch of Scotland in the Sunshine State.

When it opened, in 2012, Streamsong had two 18-hole courses, the Blue and the Red, designed, respectively, by Tom Doak, and the duo of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. It has since added a third, the Black, by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, and a fourth offering — a 19-hole short course, The Chain, also by Coore and Crenshaw, is in the works. Accompanying this diverse golf buffet are luxe amenities and enough outdoor activities to keep Boo Weekley busy through retirement.

Where the golf at Streamsong is modern-minimalism — bouncy, rustic, fringed by sandy wastes — the accommodations are modern through and through. On the night of our arrival by rental car from Tampa, lights from the sleek glass-and-steel lodge beckoned in the darkness, the only landmark we could see.

The next morning, we couldn’t see much more. An uncharacteristically thick fog had blanketed the region. Caddies, always recommended on Streamsong’s strategic courses, were more vital than ever as we set out for our first round on the Red.

Like many Coore/Crenshaw designs, the Red allows for wiggle room off the tee, but proper angles are essential; the demands increase as you close in on the greens.

Instructed by our caddies to aim toward the headlights of a mower in the distance, we all found the fairway on the long par-four 1st hole, an improbable feat made possible, we figured, by the fact that we felt freed up. There’s something liberating about swinging when you don’t know where the trouble is.

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As a group, we needed all the help that we could get. Our less-than-Hall-of-Fame contingent included Connor, an expert videographer who has all the shots (pull hooks, slices, blades, you name it); Darren, a multimedia guru and feast-or-famine golfer who alternates between titanic drives and dispiriting toppers; and Alan, our editor and fearless leader (except when he is quaking over three-foot putts) who dips his head so severely in his backswing that he looks like a man bobbing hastily for apples.

In this motley crew, I had the ugliest action but also, perplexingly, the lowest index. As we reached the turn, I somehow had a modest lead as well.

By then, the fog had lifted and the beauty of the landscape had filtered into view: the buckled fairways, the steep-browed bunkers, the waterways patrolled by hawks and osprey. 

Aesthetically, the Red and Blue courses are kindred spirits. They are close in proximity, too, nudging up against each other at several points. One such spot is around Canyon Lake, which serves as a hazard for a pair of par 3s: the 16th of the Red and the 7th of the Blue. The latter might be Streamsong’s most photographed hole, but the former is every bit as striking, with a dramatic Biarritz green defined by a gulley that runs across it. In an instance akin to the stars aligning, all the moving parts in Alan’s swing synced up and his tee shot on the 16th found the putting surface. The hole was his to win, if only he could navigate the Biarritz. He couldn’t. With a three-putt, he let his opponents off the hook.

Maybe he’d be better at a different target game.

“You can use one eye if you want,” said our instructor, Eric. “But I recommend you aim with two.” It was mid-afternoon, and we’d moved on to a different Streamsong routing: a 15-station sporting clay course, stitched through wispy grasslands, a short drive from the lodge. The contest was to see who could hit the most clays in 18 tries. Since this was a first time at the sport for all of us, I assumed that the winner might get lucky and hit one.

But as Bob Rotella said of golf, shooting clays is not a game of perfect. Buckshot dispersion patterns are your friend. So are easygoing guides like Eric, who talked us patiently through technique.

Though Connor and Alan were both quick studies, Darren proved to be the dead-eye in our group, picking off five clays in his first six attempts while wearing an unsettlingly emotionless expression that made me reconsider my fondness for poking fun at him.

He was having a blast, of course. We all were, immersed in the scenery, swept up by the challenge. At each station, the clays winged in at different speeds and from different directions, zipping left, right, and over our shoulders, floating towards us and hovering like Frisbees, bounding sideways along the ground. Contrary to my forecast, we all wound up hitting our fair share of targets, and, when our time was up, we all wanted to keep going. Like flushing a drive, taking true aim at a clay was deeply gratifying, a gateway drug, of sorts, to a new sporting addiction. Now that we’d had our first taste, we might not ever feel as if we’ve had enough.

Not that we were bummed to get back to playing golf. There was plenty more of it on our agenda, including on the Blue, a wide and wildly entertaining design brimming with the nuanced demands Doak’s work is known for: the difficulty isn’t finding your ball, it’s settling on the shot that will work best next. We also had the Black, which sits apart from its two 18-hole siblings and plays distinctively as well — an expansive course with a Big Sky look and feel, and greens as large as any this side of St. Andrews.

“Fourteen holes is as far as I’ve ever seen anyone get without a three putt,” my caddie told me as we got started on the Black.

I made it through 11 before three-jacking, and I was rolling it as well as I ever have.

As tough as some putts were on the Black, they were even trickier on the Gauntlet, a 1.2-acre putting green where we played a late-day game of H-O-G — like H-O-R-S-E, in basketball, but with a hole, not a hoop. A silly game, for sure. No wonder Alan won.

The Gauntlet sits behind the Black clubhouse, a short walk from the practice range and a seven-hole, free-to-play short course called the Roundabout. We played that, too, in the gauzy glow of twilight. At Streamsong, you don’t need a tee time to make your own fun.

You do need to book ahead, though, if you want to go bass fishing. For that outing, easygoing Eric was once again our guide, piloting us out on a motorized boat onto a lake behind the lodge. It was late afternoon as we cast our lines in the placid waters of a tree-sheltered cove. A gator bobbed nearby. An osprey circled overhead. Fishing, like golf, is a flexible pursuit. It can be either solitary or social, or some combination of the two. Our group was mostly silent, except for Darren, who kept shattering the stillness by providing play-by-play on his own performance. 

“Dropped it right on the edge of the lily pads!” 

“Have you ever seen such a perfect cast!”

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, and he brags endlessly about his newly acquired skills, even if he doesn’t catch a thing.

Actually, Darren caught one fish. I did, too, though Moby Dick it wasn’t (the fishing at Streamsong is catch-and-release). Alan and Connor were both shut out, but the mood was so mellow and contented that neither seemed bothered to come up empty. For amateur anglers, one of the many delights of fishing is that it’s nowhere near as frustrating as golf.

That’s another way of saying that as competitions go, our fishing contest was not exactly fierce, and we all agreed that no one deserved to be proclaimed the winner (unless we wanted to give a prize to Eric, who pulled in so many bass that I began to wonder if he’d hired a scuba diver to place them on his line). The consolation was that we’d had a terrifically good time. And, what’s more, there was nothing stopping us from telling stories later about the ones that got away. 

As for the cold, hard facts, this where is where I’ll mention that when the final points were tallied in our three-sport contest, I was named the champ. Reflecting on it now, I’m not sure how that happened. Connor had the better swing. Darren was the better marksman. And Alan did a great job of rarely whining. But the numbers don’t lie, and there are, as they say, no pictures on the scorecard, only a video, in our case, memorializing a trip in which we notched few birdies but made countless memories and had tons of laughs.

Long days outdoors lead to good nights’ sleep. On the morning of our departure from Streamsong, I rose early, well-rested, strolled into the lobby, and wound up crossing paths with a two-time Masters champ. With his design partner, Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw was on site to push forward on The Chain: a 3,000-yard layout, just across from the lodge, with 19 holes, measuring 90 to 275 yards, and an innovative routing that will allow for six- and 13-hole loops. 

After touring The Chain site that afternoon, Alan, Darren, Connor and I all made a pact to make it back to Streamsong in the fall, when the new course, is scheduled to open (with a two-acre putting green to follow ). Maybe then, we’ll compete in yet another activity that Streamsong offers: archery.

Loser has to stand still with an apple on his head.

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The post Florida’s Streamsong Resort sold to familiar owners for $160 million appeared first on Golf.

The post Florida’s Streamsong Resort sold to familiar owners for $160 million appeared first on Golf.

One of the top destination golf resorts in the country is changing hands.

Mosiac, the phosphate mining company that turned one of its former mine sites into the two, and eventually three, golf courses of Streamsong Resort ten years ago, announced Friday it’s selling the resort for $160 million to Lone Windmill LLC, a subsidiary of Kemper Sports Management.

The Firepit Collective’s Matt Ginella first reported the sale on Thursday.

Travel

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By: Jack Hirsh

The Chicago-based Kemper Sports is no stranger to the Central Florida resort. Kemper has managed the golf business at Streamsong since the Blue and Red courses opened in December 2012. The company also manages other top-tier resorts such as Bandon Dunes.

For the past two years, Kemper has managed the Streamsong Lodge under its KemperDestinations division.

The sale includes approximately 7,000 acres of land, the three 18-hole golf courses — the Coore and Crenshaw designed Red, the Tom Doak designed Blue (both built in 2012) and the Gil Hanse designed Black, which opened in 2017), two clubhouses, the 228-room lodge, an outdoor pool, tennis courts, bass fishing spots, a shooting range, spa and several restaurants and bars.

The Red and Blue courses are No. 86 and No. 92, respectively, on GOLF’s Top 100 U.S. courses list for 2022-23 while Streamsong Black is No. 39 in GOLF’s Top 100 courses you can play (Red and Blue are Nos. 19 and 27, respectively).

Last year, the resort announced plans for a fourth 18-hole, a 3,000-yard Coore and Crenshaw designed short course and two more putting courses to be built on land by the lodge. Just this week, Streamsong posted a video seemingly indicating construction on the putting course had begun.

“For 10 years Streamsong has demonstrated Mosaic’s ability to put formerly mined land to economically and environmentally productive use,” Mosaic President and CEO Joc O’Rourke said in a press release. “It has always been our intention to identify the right long-term steward of Streamsong, and we have clearly done that with KemperSports.

“Kemper has been an outstanding partner for many years, and we have every confidence that they will continue to build upon Streamsong’s remarkable record of delivering best-in-class guest experiences while providing meaningful employment opportunity and economic impact in Central Florida.”

Ginella reported the money for the purchase is mostly coming from Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, brothers who purchased UFC in 2001 for $2 million and flipped it in 2016 for $4 billion. The brothers invested in Kemper in May 2022.

“We have always valued our partnership with Mosaic, and it is a privilege now to be carrying on the legacy of Streamsong, a place that is so highly regarded by the golf community,” KemperSports CEO Steve Skinner said. “Our team has and will continue to prioritize elevating our guest experience and resort offerings, which includes the development of our new fourth course, The Chain, designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. We are thrilled with the opportunity to continue to invest in and grow the resort.”

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At GOLF.com, our hobby is also our job. That means, just like you, we spend much of the year teeing it up high, swinging hard and trying to avoid double bogeys. But some courses we stumble upon are simply more memorable than others. Here, for the second straight year, we unveil our favorite public courses we played in 2022.

Let me first get this off my chest: I hate Florida golf courses.

They usually play soft. There are houses everywhere you look. There is an overuse of water and sand on flat and uninteresting terrain. The list goes on and on.

There’s a very short list of courses I actually enjoy in the state, but after finally visiting Streamsong Resort this fall, I have a couple tracks to add to the list.

Travel

Why Streamsong's newest course, The Chain, will stand out among the growing list of short courses

By: Jack Hirsh

I’ll admit, I probably picked one of the worst weeks of 2022 to visit Streamsong. I arrived, along with a few other media members for a four-day trip to tour the site of the resort’s planned fourth golf course and try out their new clubhouse experience, on September 26th, two days before Hurricane Ian made landfall less than 75 miles away. Not to mention, September in Florida is still oppressively hot.

The trip’s itinerary was thrown out the window and we set out on Streamsong Red right after a tour of the new course site. We made it about 12 holes before we had to stop for the day because of normal Florida thunderstorms.

Luckily, the plan was still to play the resort’s other original golf course, Streamsong Blue the next day before quickly getting out of dodge.

Good thing we did too because Streamsong Blue was my favorite course I played in 2022.

It had poured the night before after the strong storms, yet my tee shot must have rolled 30 or 40 yards off the 1st tee. As Streamsong Director of Sales and Marketing Craig Falanga explains, the resort was built on the site of a former phosphate mine, which left behind “perfectly round” sand. Sand-based golf courses are all the rage these days for how well they drain and the firmness they play at.

Blue was no exception, and greens recently resurfaced with Mach 1 Bermudagrass made for excellent playing conditions, despite the pounding rain the day before, and the ominous mist on the day we played ahead of the hurricane.

The firmness and the dramatic landscaping created by the sand dunes left behind from the phosphate mine create a landscape more reminiscent of the Australian Sand Belt or the Sand Hills of Nebraska than Central Florida.

Starting with a climb up on top of a dune where the 1st tee sits, the course starts with a pretty awesome view of the property encompassing the Coore/Crenshaw Red and Tom Doak Blue courses. From there the holes unwind naturally around the dunes and every shot is straight in front of you.

My favorite hole was the par-3 7th, probably the most photographed on property, along with the adjacent 16th of the Red course (which I didn’t get to play). The mid-length par-3 plays over a mine cut down to a green that looks like it was hallowed out from the dune on the other side.

With the incoming hurricane, we had little time to soak in the course, but Blue still left its mark on me, especially after the demanding finish of the long par-3 16th, monstrous, nearly 700-yard par-5 17th and uphill par-4 18th.

While I didn’t get to play all of Streamsong Red or even see the newer Streamsong Black, my favorite round of 2022 certainly proved to me Streamsong is not your grandfather’s Florida golf course.

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The post Why Streamsong’s newest course, The Chain, will stand out among the growing list of short courses appeared first on Golf.

Bandon Dunes has Bandon Preserve and Shorty’s. Pinehurst has the Cradle. Big Cedar Lodge has Top of the Rock and Mountain Top. Sand Valley has The Sand Box. Cobot Links has The Nest. Blackwolf Run has The Baths. You get the picture.

More and more top resorts around the country are adding elite-level short courses to their facilities, and soon Florida’s Streamsong will make its foray into the category when The Chain opens for business. Only this 18-hole, 3,000-yard Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw design (the duo also created Streamsong Red) will not be your average short course mostly because of what it lacks: par.

With holes ranging from 90 to 275 yards, there will be no pars on the scorecard, creating what Streamsong director of sales and marketing, Craig Falanga, says is a perfect venue for match play.

Travel

Streamsong’s new short course will stand apart for what it *doesn’t* have

By: Josh Sens

“We really want it to be something that you’re not thinking about what’s par on this hole,” Falanga said. “It’s really intended to be a place to have a lot of fun.”

In that regard, each group, or even each player, will be able to choose where to tee off from on a given hole, as there won’t be tee markers either.

This was inspired, Falanga said, when he and Ben Pratt, Streamsong owner Mosiac’s VP of public affairs, were playing a 9-hole course which intended for whoever won the previous hole to decide where the group would tee off from on the next hole.

“Everything that drove all the other decisions was, ‘Let’s make it as fun as possible,'” Pratt told GOLF.com. “And that so what we ended up with there is we’re not going to have tee markers in any given place. No concept of par will encourage people to play almost the way you would play a game of horse in basketball. You know? You if you win the hole, you pick where you tee off from the next hole.”

There will be areas defined as teeing grounds in multiple spots on each hole, marked with huge chains, similar to the ones found on the site next to the Lodge at Streamsong, which inspired the name of the course. Streamsong is built on the site of one of Mosiac’s former phosphate mines, the remnants creating the sand dunes there today.

The resort decided its fourth course would be shorter than its others when it realized its peak winter season is when daylight hours are shortest and people still want to play 36 holes a day while on property.

“We have a lot of visitors in the winter months who come from the Northeast who can’t really get in a whole round of golf on the day they travel,” Pratt said, adding the course will take about two hours to play 18 holes. “We think it’ll be very appealing to people who check-in, want to get a little golf in that day, or for their getaway day.”

Making that task even easier is that the resort will offer three rates: 6, 12 and 18 holes. The first loop will feature shorter holes, ranging from 90 to 148 yards on the side of the property closer to the lodge. A new bridge will be constructed to cross the small lake next to the lodge, allowing easier access.

Perhaps the signature of the short loop is the 4th, which features a tee shot over an old mine-cut pond to a slightly elevated green. Of course, there’s also a teeing area to the left, avoiding the shot over the water, or a ball could theoretically be putted around the pond.

The 12-hole loop is intended to be more challenging to the avid golfer but still be just as fun as the other six. The 11th hole (of the 18-hole course) features another daunting tee shot over a mine-cut, but this time with no opportunity to putt around the water.

This is where The Chain stands out again from other short courses. A new bridge will be built over the water, and Falanga said the goal will be to leave fishing poles on it in case players want to take a break and cast a line.

“If they want to fish, just let the group behind you play through,” he said. “But the only way you’ll be able to go fishing out there is if you’re playing The Chain.”

Also included on the roughly 100-acre site will be the resort’s second putting course, the Bucket. Although it’s really the second and third 18-hole putting courses because The Bucket will be big enough for two courses and each will be separated from the other by an enormous excavator bucket built into the green. This is another homage to the site’s history as a phosphate mine.

The Bucket will be free of charge and dwarf the existing Gauntlet putting course at Streamsong Black. It will also be convenient for guests staying at the lodge, as both The Chain and The Bucket will be the first two golf experiences (besides the lake’s floating green) available at that part of the resort.

The resort hasn’t yet set rates for The Chain, but Falanga suggested the resort would take tee times for groups to play all 18 holes and allow walk-ups for groups who want to play just the 6- or 12-hole loops.

For now, the design is still in the permitting process and determining which spots on the site are protected wetlands. Pratt said they are hoping for a fall 2023 opening, but could be a spring or fall ’24 opening depending on the permitting process and Coore and Crenshaw’s availability.

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If you’re a certain type of golf nut, you know about new courses long before they open.

You follow their progress like an expectant parent, tracking developments in their design.

Photos. Renderings. Drone-flyovers.

No detail is too small to pique your interest, especially with a big-name project.

With that in mind, we give you the latest news from Streamsong Golf Resort.

Already home to three acclaimed 18-hole courses, the Florida destination has a fourth course in the works. We’ve known that course was coming, and that it would be shorter than its three siblings. Now we also know its name and how it will be routed.

Designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, the course will be called The Chain (more on the name later), and it will sit on a roughly 100-acre site, an easy walk from the resort’s main lodge. The course itself will be a friendly walk as well, maxing out at 3,000 yards, with 18 holes that range in length from 90 to nearly 300 yards, and — this is where the concept gets particularly cool — the options of 6- and 12-hole loops as well.

The 6-hole loop will spill through a grove of native oaks, and its longest hole will be roughly 145 yards. It is meant to be a fit for players of all levels. The 12-hole loop will be more demanding, stretched across old mining cuts and along the banks of a creek. Those 12 holes will range from 125 to 300 yards, and they will be ripe with risks and rewards.

What The Chain will not have is any mention of score relative to par. Not on any holes. And not on the scorecard. Nor will there be traditional tee markers. You’ll be able to pick where you peg it.

The point is to provide the kind of flexibility and fun that the industry has increasingly embraced. The Chain should pose a challenge if that’s what you’re after. But it will also offer a quicker option than Streamsong’s existing Red, Blue and Black Courses. Incorporated, too, into The Chain will be a two-acre putting course called The Bucket, a rollicking venue roughly twice the size of the existing Gauntlet putting course at Streamsong Black.

As for those names — The Chain and The Bucket. They derive from mining terms, which make sense, as the courses at Streamsong sprawl across the remains of dormant phosphate mine, where decades-long operations left behind a heaving landscape, rich in character for golf.

While working on its fourth course, Streamsong has also been working on a logo for The Chain. Special edition merchandise with that logo will be available online and at the resort starting in August. If you’re a certain type of golf nut, you’ll be into that, too. An opening date for The Chain has not yet been set.

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