Watersound Club Is on Par

PGA legend Davis Love III Designs New Course

Story and photography courtesy of The St. Joe Company

The St. Joe Company is excited to announce the construction of another world-class Watersound Club golf course. Watersound Club staff are working closely with Love Golf Design founders Davis Love III, Mark Love, and Scot Sherman to bring the new course to life as an additional amenity for Watersound Club members. In homage to the PGA golfer who helped design the new course and the fact that it will be the third championship golf course in the Watersound Club collection, the new course will be named “The Third.”

The Third is designed to comfortably span approximately three hundred acres just north of another Watersound Club golf course, Shark’s Tooth. The generous acreage allowed the design team room to be imaginative in creating a layout to please and challenge golfers of all skill levels.

Love Golf Design and Watersound Club teams selected a unique eighteen-hole, Par 72 design with six sets of tees. This allows golfers to adjust the course distance to play from 4,900 yards to over 7,600 yards on a firm, fast-playing course. The flexibility of play will offer accessibility for the casual golfer, and even the longest tour players will enjoy a challenge while hitting from the back tees.

The Third joins an impressive lineup of exclusive Watersound Club amenities, including Shark’s Tooth and Camp Creek golf courses; the member favorite Watersound Beach Club amenities comprising two resort-style pools, two dining venues, and over a mile of beachfront along the Gulf of Mexico; and the newly opened Camp Creek amenities featuring a state-of-the-art wellness center, tennis and pickleball courts, a sprawling pool complex, three dining venues, and more.

The Third is the latest of several Watersound Club amenity expansion projects launched in response to membership growth and strong demand for golf among members. Watersound Club membership added more than five hundred new members in 2023 and now welcomes over three thousand members from forty states.

“We’re blessed to have an amount of land and resources available that just can’t be found in many other places in the US,” says St. Joe’s senior vice president of hospitality, Patrick Murphy. “We’re committed to using that to our advantage as we continue to add amenities for our Watersound Club members.”

Leading the Love Golf Design team is Davis Love III. He is perhaps best known as a World Golf Hall of Fame inductee who was twice picked to lead America’s Ryder Cup Team. Just as impressive are the twenty-seven completed projects in Love Golf Design’s portfolio, including new designs and renovations. Working to naturally incorporate the mix of upland vegetation and undisturbed wetland areas into the course layout offers an opportunity to top even those previous designs.

“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 eighteen holes,” says Davis Love III. “Lead architect Scot Sherman, Mark Love, and I believe the variety of the site lends itself to building a course with a timeless character. We’re pleased to work 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 thrilled with how the routing of the golf course is progressing at this point.”

Construction has already begun on The Third, and the company anticipates the course will open for play in 2025. Additionally, St. Joe is in the planning stage of residential homesites near this new golf course.

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For more information regarding Watersound Club, visit www.watersoundclub.com.

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