Streamsong announces plans for fifth course designed by David McLay Kidd

In 2012, golf course architect David McLay Kidd attended the grand opening of two 18-hole layouts, neither of which he designed. Streamsong Blue and Red, dreamed up, respectively, by Tom Doak, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, were the main attractions at Streamsong Resort, a new destination in secluded Florida, roughly equidistant from Tampa and Orlando.

McLay Kidd was no stranger to remote golf. As the architect of Bandon Dunes in southern Oregon, he was an OG of the genre. However, during the Streamsong ribbon cutting he felt a mixture of admiration and envy. I didn’t just love the courses. He also coveted the landscape around them, a vast canvas of spectacular humps and gaps left by a mining operation.

“I just thought, one day I’ll have a chance to build a course here,” McLay Kidd said. “So I tried my best to see if I could step in on Streamsong and be a part of it.”

Time passed. In 2017, Streamsong opened a third 18-hole course, Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner’s Black Course, which, like the Blue and Red, debuted in GOLF’s ranking of the top 100 courses in the US six years ago. Then, another Coore/Crenshaw design at Streamsong was unveiled: a 19-hole short course called The Chain.

Meanwhile, McLay Kidd was hardly short of work. Among his many projects during this period were Gamble Sands in eastern Washington and Mammoth Dunes in central Wisconsin, both Top 100. Still, Streamsong remained high on his wish list. But now you can mark it.

On Wednesday the news became official. Streamsong is building a fifth course and McLay Kidd has been hired to design it. When completed, the complex will become the only property in the world with courses designed by Coore/Crenshaw, Doak, Hanse/Wagner and Kidd.

“In my career, which now spans 30 years, I have always considered my peer group to be Bill, Ben, Tom and Gil,” McLay Kidd said. “So for me to be part of that group, the whole group would have to be in the same place.”

As he spoke, on an unseasonably cold afternoon in Florida earlier this week, McLay Kidd was leading a tour of his course in progress. It still doesn’t have a name (Grey? Yellow? White? Green?) but it does have a route, which McLay Kidd and his team had marked with tall stakes in the ground.

The layout will be located between the Red and Black courses and will share a clubhouse with the Black. Coming up with a configuration that began and ended at that clubhouse was complicated, in part, by the protected wetlands. But McLay Kidd found a solution that involved cannibalizing a little-used pitch-and-putt practice facility called Roundabout, whose footprint will make way for the course’s first two holes.

At more than 7,300 yards from the back tees, the new course will be the longest at the resort, with twists and turns that will take you through all cardinal directions in a location with frequently changing winds. Although its foundations are in place, its defining characteristics, McLay Kidd said, will take shape on the course, as he and his team fine-tune the curves and creases of the fairways and the contours of the greens while taking advantage of the shot-scarred terrain. . dunes, eyebrows, unevenness and ridges. Some parts of the field will need to be built and others will require excavation, McLay Kidd said, to better highlight the running game options that are central to their designs.

“I’m not going to be shy about moving dirt when necessary,” McLay Kidd said. “This is a great place for golf, but it was shaped by mining, so it’s not like I’m going to impose myself on nature.”

In 2023, the mining company that owns Streamsong sold it to Lone Windmill LLC, a shareholder in KemperSports, which manages the complex. The new field marks the new owners’ first major investment in the property, but there is more to come, a KemperSports representative said, including additional accommodations that will expand the resort’s overnight accommodation offerings beyond its main 228-room accommodation.

Work on the new field, which is already underway, will continue through the winter and spring, and although a completion date has not been announced, McLay Kidd said he hopes it will be ready for play in the fall of 2026. Leaving Schedule aside, his goal, he said, is to create an engaging playground that complements Streamsong’s existing courses, sharing DNA with its siblings but standing out on its own. If his expectations were high, so was the pressure, the architectural equivalent of nervousness on the first tee.

“I’m very happy to work here,” he said. “But I’m also nervous because the bar is so high.”

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