Orlando Golf - Course, Resort and Package Information

If the golf courses of Florida were diagramed as a family tree, with similarly styled courses aligned along similar lineages or threads, Southern Dunes would occupy its own prominent branch, a wild promontory jutting permanently out and away from the mass of like courses that comprise the center.

The trunk of the golf tree might consist of the older, rather traditional courses sprung from a venerable seed such as Seminole, but which have grown narrowly and imitative, showing little true variation. The diagram would appear as a succession of common themes, lacking in originality, and so the tree would be shaped like a poplar.

The old-school resort courses, for example, would form a solid, weight-bearing interior branch and Pete Dye's Stadium Course at Sawgrass might be the only significant alteration to the evolution, and by now that would have sprung its own offshoots and variations. It should be hoped that the renegade bough of Southern Dunes (along with Tom Fazio's Pine Barrens at World Woods) does the same. It's a course worthy of its national audience, one that could ruin Florida's reputation as a state with only two-dimensional golf courses.

For years the country has been under the impression that there were no hills or elevation changes in Florida. It might as well have been true because the accessible golf courses that were held aloft as the state's standard were flat, largely featureless tracks usually routed around man-made lakes, cookie-cutter sand traps, and palm trees.

That style of golf still dominates the landscape, but when a course with as much movement and swale as Southern Dunes is beheld, the understanding that the best golf courses are predicated by good land is truly revelatory. And while it will always be possible to fashion solid, even inspiring, courses out of a swamp, not every course can find the construction budget or the architect to do it uniquely. What results in a state with lots of swampland and dozens of courses that may look slightly different but play the same.

But it's not always like that. There is a vast sandy ridge that traverses the west-central part of the state through western Orange County, Polk County, and onward south. It is on this landscape, in the small, unassuming town of Haines City, that architect Steve Smyers was given the property to create something much needed in Florida: the engaging, explicitly shaped Southern Dunes.