Where to Play
Best Golf Courses in Tampa Bay
Rolling ground, pine corridors, and the state's most respected resort golf.
Tampa Bay is where Florida golf stops looking like Florida. The ground rolls, the corridors are lined with pine rather than palm, and the best courses here would not feel out of place in the Carolinas. Ten courses in the region, and a handful of them are among the most respected in the state.
1. Innisbrook Resort
Four courses in Palm Harbor, and Copperhead is the one the PGA Tour comes to. Larry Packard routed it through pine on genuinely rolling ground, and it hosts the Valspar Championship each spring. The closing three holes are known as the Snake Pit.
The Island is the one people overlook, and plenty who play both rate it no easier. The South is the links-leaning member of the family and the most enjoyable for a mid-handicap. The North is a nine, and not a warm-up.
2. Streamsong
Streamsong sits on a worked-out phosphate mine between Tampa and Orlando, and the sand dunes, ridges and lakes that make it remarkable are what the mining left behind.
Three courses, three different hands. Blue is Tom Doak, Red is Coore and Crenshaw, and Black is Gil Hanse. None of them reshaped the land; they routed through what was there. Playing two in a day is the reason people come.
3. TPC Tampa Bay
TPC Tampa Bay is PGA Tour-owned, open seven days a week, and twenty minutes from the airport. Bobby Weed built it in 1991 and it has hosted 21 consecutive Champions Tour events.
Nineteen water features and 81 bunkers, but most greens are open at the front, so the ball can be run in. It is as demanding as you choose to make it.
4. Saddlebrook and Bardmoor
Saddlebrook is mid-transformation: Rees Jones and Bryce Swanson are converting its two eighteens into three interchangeable nines.
Bardmoor has hosted enough professional golf that the roll of players who have competed there reads like a hall of fame, and it is still semi-private. It is also one of the few Florida courses putting on bent grass rather than a Bermuda ultradwarf.
How to plan it
Two days is the right amount. Copperhead and one other Innisbrook course on day one, then Streamsong on day two, which is worth the hour's drive inland. If you only have a morning, TPC Tampa Bay is the easiest good round to book.
Browse every Tampa Bay course.