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.
