by Jeff Berlinicke
So you want to build a golf course in Southwest Florida?
Be ready to literally move and build mountains; deal with politicians; have the imagination to come up with a new idea in a state that is inundated with golf courses; make sure your construction equipment doesn’t suddenly sink into the Gulf of Mexico; and drain tons and tons of water from your property, only to use it to build more mountains. Oh, then there are the developers, who’ll battle with you for every square inch of land for the homes they want to build where you hope to put your ninth hole.
It’s a complicated process, but, even so, Southwest Florida features more than one hundred golf courses within a half-hour drive of downtown Fort Myers. Every one of those course designers had to deal with a landscape that isn’t conducive to digging and moving land from one place to another. Remember, the land in Southwest Florida, especially close to the Gulf of Mexico, is basically floating on water. Dig too deep and you get wet. So how do you do it?
Ron Garl, a golf-course architect based in Lakeland, has built more than twenty courses in Collier and Lee counties. He’s dealt with every obstacle that Southwest Florida has thrown at him.
To Garl, they’re just some of the hundreds of challenges he’s faced throughout his career. Building a course in Florida with its difficult terrain? No problem. He’s currently building courses for the kings of Morocco and Thailand, and he recently finished a twenty-seven-hole layout in Nigeria on the Atlantic Ocean. He’s also working on a redesign in China, so dealing with the water troubles in Southwest Florida doesn’t present much of a problem.
“I’ve worked with trees, beaches, and jungles,” Garl says. “I know when I see property if it feels right. It’s so flat in Florida that I have to create things, but I’ve kind of gotten it down…[W]e have ways of making things interesting.”
Because so much land needs to be moved from one place to another, it allows designers to build mounds and dig sand traps. Florida golf is known, somewhat derisively, as “target golf,” meaning players have to aim at exact locations to avoid water. Pin locations are usually close to water, and Florida, of course, has plenty of that.
Garl has designed such Southwest Florida staples as the Crown Colony Golf & Country Club, Olde Hickory Golf & Country Club, and, one of his favorites, Fiddlesticks Country Club, all in Fort Myers. He’s also worked on enhancements for the course at the Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club. He says he can do anything with any land, as long as the funding is there.
“I like challenges,” he says. “Most courses in Florida don’t have a special feel to them, but here [in Southwest Florida], we can make a special course that is unique if we use our imagination.”
When it comes to imagination, there are a lot of hurdles. Most new Florida golf courses are built around housing developments. In the past, a golf-course designer would simply spy some open land and imagine eighteen championship holes. Today, it’s almost impossible to build a course without including houses, which are the bane of golfers’ existence but also a necessary evil, especially when it comes to paying the bills for the property.
There’s a catch, though, to owning a home on a golf course: You’ll often hear players chipping out of your back lawn at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning after an errant tee shot. “Golf course living is great,” says Steve Smyers, another Lakeland-based architect who designs courses throughout the state and is currently bidding on several potential sites in Southwest Florida. “It might make for an early wakeup call, though.”
Arthur Hills, based in Toledo, Ohio, has designed golf courses all over the world and more than twenty courses in Southwest Florida, including the Creek Course at Fiddler’s Creek and Quail Creek Country Club. He finds that the biggest challenge in Southwest Florida is its topography. The sand and the soil are a plus, as it allows vegetation to grow quickly. But it’s coming up with something unique that makes it a bit more difficult.
There are only so many ways to add that element of uniqueness here in the Sunshine State. Island greens are becoming popular, and more designers are starting to understand the importance of working with the environment, something that’s been largely ignored in the past.
Building a course, according to Hills, is a matter of moving land from one site to another. It involves dredging land, usually from the bottom of the swamps and marshes that cover the region, to another spot. In other words, it’s about building mountains, or at least moguls, with land that was taken from the bottom of a lake. It’s a difficult process, but one that’s been used successfully for years.
“We need to work with the environment to make it work,” says Hills. “We have a water table that doesn’t allow for a lot of digging, so moving land around is important.”
That’s where the government comes in. Permits are needed to move land, especially in the swamplands where many of the courses and new developments are being built. It takes time just to get those permits and a lot of jumping through hoops.
“We are building these courses in the wilderness,” says Hills. “The environmentalists want to know what we are doing and it takes time, but we are very careful about not disrupting the environment.” Animals might have to be relocated, and there could be ecological issues. That involves more interaction with local government. Remember, those animals and plants were here long before the first golf course.
The relationship between the developers and the golf-course designers can be a tricky one. It’s a matter of fitting as many homes as possible as close to as many holes as possible. The process starts when a development company finds one of the few pieces of unsettled land in the area that’s zoned for building. The developer typically finds the land and puts out bids for different golf-course architects, who are given the order of coming up with something unique. In an area with more than one hundred golf courses, that isn’t always easy.
When first beginning work on a project, Garl flies a small jet over the property and starts envisioning his course. Even though all he sees at that point is swamp and marsh with way too many trees, it all comes together in his mind.
“I am flying over the property and can already see eighteen holes,” he says. “I give [the developers] a rough idea of what we think will work, then it’s a matter of putting it all together.”
Once you have your land, an agreement with the housing developers over where the homes will be placed, and the equipment to move the land, it’s time to build a golf course that’s easy enough for the club members and tough enough for the low-handicappers who are always looking for a new challenge. “We have to make sure it’s a course that can be enjoyed by everyone, from the best players to a beginner,” says Smyers. “It’s a challenge.”
Smyers, who’s currently building courses in the desert of Dubai and the rock-hard landscape of Iceland, says that Southwest Florida offers something Dubai and Iceland don’t: water.
“Florida presents challenges, but at least we have water, and that makes it so much easier,” he says. “Drainage is the big thing, but we can work with it as opposed to Dubai, which has no water, and Iceland, which is built on rock.”
With the Florida rain, drainage is a major issue, but golf-course designers use it to their advantage. Those little creeks you see meandering through the golf course are actually used for drainage and allow the course to be flushed of rainwater pretty quickly. When golf courses were first designed, they used straight canals to drain the water, doing little to disguise their purpose. Drainage patterns today, says Smyers, are built to enhance the course and to look like part of the natural environment.
There are critics who say that Florida golf courses are starting to look the same, with water on every hole that doesn’t always come into play and a flat layout. But Garl says the perception and the future design of Florida golf courses are about to change.
Homes on Florida golf courses aren’t going away; there’s too much money to be made. But the design of Florida courses is changing. For a time, Garl says, designers were building their courses longer to keep up with advanced golf technology, but the limit may have finally been reached.
“[E]veryone wants to go back to the old-style courses where the holes weren’t quite as long, but there were still some tricks,” says Garl. “The game is still what it is, and we want to return it to its roots. Making the courses longer isn’t doing any good, and it is taking away from the casual golfer. Not every golfer can hit the ball 340 yards off the tee.”
“We can’t keep making them longer,” agrees Hills. “We have to make the courses more playable, and that’s what people have forgotten. Except for a few professionals, this game is a mystery to everyone. But it shouldn’t be about difficulty, and I see the trend going back to making it more playable to everyone. Golf should be fun, and there are a lot of courses [in Southwest Florida] that are like that.”
Got your own ideas as to what would make a great course? Well, if you can deal with a lot of legal red tape, water tables, developers, those pesky summer hurricanes, and all the other issues that come into play when building a course in Southwest Florida, there’s always room for one more golf course. As long as you’re ready to move mountains.
Jeff Berlinicke is a sportswriter who covers the PGA Tour on a regular basis and writes about sports for many local and national news outlets, including the Tampa Tribune and the Associated Press. He lives in Tampa with his wife, Elisa.