Featured Stop: Streamsong Golf Resort

Built atop sandy terrain in the middle of Florida—1 hour from Tampa, 1.5 from Orlando—Streamsong has been one of the heaviest hitters in destination golf since the moment it opened in 2012. Its setting on former phosphate mining land means the site is interesting in ways other parts of the state are not. And on that canvas, Streamsong has let some of the best golf course architects working today do their thing.

It started with Streamsong Blue and Streamsong Red, 36 holes that came from a rare bit of collaboration between Tom Doak and Bill Coore, who walked the property together before putting shovels in dirt. Doak’s Blue course includes a few Coore holes, then, and vice versa, as Golf Digest writes.

Whatever they did, it worked. On Blue, ranked 21st on our composite top 100 public golf courses in the U.S., Doak summons “dramatic vistas and thrilling shots up and down these ledges,” Fried Egg writes. Encircling Blue is the Red course, coming in at 15th, a Coore and Crenshaw masterpiece defined by its “massive scale and variety,” where the two uniquely routed the holes to show off the huge dunes.

Gil Hanse got his turn next, and Streamsong Black—29th on the composite top 100—lifted the legend of Streamsong that much higher in 2018. But there’s some separation here in setting and feel—Black is a mile south of the other two, with its own club house and some “strategic character,” GD says, in the form of “a hidden punchbowl green at nine, dual putting surfaces at 13, incorporating a meandering creek on the par-5 fourth and a lagoon cove to guard the 18th green.” And the greens are something you won’t see just about anywhere else: “Both the putting surfaces and the chipping areas surrounding them were grassed in MiniVerde, and today both are mowed at a single height.”

How do you improve on this ode to modern golf architecture? Well, by bringing aboard David McLay Kidd—of Bandon Dunes, Gamble Sands, and Mammoth Dunes fame—to put his stamp on the property. The topography of the area would seem a natural fit for DMK’s imaginative, linksy style, which is perhaps why he’s been dreaming of adding to the resort since he saw it for the grand opening in 2012. Since then, he “went to considerable lengths seeing if I could interject myself at Streamsong and be part of it,” he told GOLF.

When the as-yet-to-be-named DMK course opens in 2026, Streamsong’s four options—plus a 19-hole, no-par short course from Coore and Crenshaw called The Chain, which debuted in late 2023—is sure to again raise the resort’s stature on a very small list of places able to offer such contained and elite golf variety.

This piece originally ran in the GTG newsletter. Subscribe here for free and get pricing details alongside the weekly featured stop—plus news on openings, redesigns, and more—in your inbox each Thursday afternoon.