Bobby Jones Golf Course reopens with a classic design and new features
The renovated facility now includes a nature park meant to help improve stormwater runoff. Perpetuity is a long time.
But that’s what the city of Sarasota committed to when it decided in early 2022 to keep green — in perpetuity — the land once occupied by 45 municipally owned golf holes at the Bobby Jones Golf Course.
Now reimagined and rebuilt into a sprawling nature park, an 18-hole golf course and a short course across the street, the 307 acres east of downtown between Fruitville Road and 17th Street are meant to remain forever as a spot to unwind amid one of the fastest-growing regions in the United States.
Mayor Liz Alpert said such a commitment is critical to a well-planned community.
“It’s one of the really important things when you’re designing a city,’’ she said on a recent tour preceding the reopening. “One of the important things for the residents is to have enough park space and green space. If you don’t have that, people start moving out, because it’s not a desirable place to be.
“This made sure no matter what happens in the future, that there’s not going to be that temptation to sell this off.’’
The course measures 6,714 yards from the longest tees – marked in red. Central to that plan was use of land not set aside as a golf facility for stormwater transmission, retention and filtering in the form of a 90-acre preserve. Soil excavated to craft those elements was employed to raise the level of the redesigned course, eliminating a bothersome characteristic of the old course— its propensity to flood.
“We’re allowing the golf course to act as retention for rain in major storms, hurricanes, floods like that,’’ said course architect Richard Mandell, who led journalists on a tour of the course recently. “There will be times when the golf course will take on water, but that’s designed, and the good news is that the greens, the tees, the fairway playing areas are raised enough that they won’t be affected, except in very rare situations.’’
