Streamsong announces plans for David McLay Kidd-designed fifth course

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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