Love Golf Design – headed by Davis Love III and featuring Scot Sherman, ASGCA – are teaming with Florida’s Watersound® Club to design a new 18-hole golf course in Panama City. The plan is to connect the new golf course to the Watersound Origins community, the Wild Heron community, and other future communities that are being planned.
After working through five separate routings, the Watersound Club and Love Golf Design teams selected an 18-hole, par 72 design with six sets of tees, allowing golfers to adjust the course distance to play from 4,900-7,600 yards on a firm, fast-playing course. The flexibility of play will offer a challenge to experienced golfers, and accessibility for those new to the game. Once complete, the golf course will share the existing clubhouse with Shark’s Tooth Golf Course. The existing clubhouse, parking area, and driving range will undergo renovations to accommodate the new course.
“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. “Lead architect Scot Sherman, Mark 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.”
With the routing work well underway, the Love team expects the new design to be finalized by spring of 2022, while the team continues to work through the permitting.
“This course will be unique to our existing golf courses, and add variety to our Club’s offerings,” said Patrick Richardson, Watersound Club’s Director of Golf. “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.”