Public golf courses

This site holds records for 13 golf facilities in Sarasota and Manatee County, carrying 243 holes between them. That count comes from the county records rather than from a directory: Manatee publishes a golf course GIS layer and Sarasota assigns dedicated golf land-use codes in its tax roll, so a facility that exists is in one of them whether or not it markets itself. The split by access is 13 public. Access type is the thing worth checking before anything else, because it decides whether you can play at all.

Bobby Jones Golf Club, Buffalo Creek Golf Course, IMG Academy Golf Club, Imperial Lakewoods Golf Club, Links at Greenfield Plantation, Manatee County Golf Course, Pinebrook Ironwood Golf Course and River Run Golf Links, and 5 more are either public or semi-private, which is the group a visitor or a new resident can actually get on. A semi-private club sells memberships and also sells tee times, so you can play it before deciding anything, and that is the sensible way to judge a course you are considering buying next to. A private club means a membership or a member host, and no amount of enquiring changes that.

The architects recorded for Sarasota and Manatee County are Chip Powell, Dean Refram, Gene Bates, Gordon G. Lewis, Gordy Lewis, Jed Azinger, Ron Garl, Roy Albert Anderson, Ted McAnlis and Ward Northrup. Architect, year opened, par and yardage are the facts this site will take from a golf publication, because they do not change and most small clubs publish no course specification at all. Membership structure, access and fees come only from the club itself. Where two sources disagreed about a course, the club's own figure was used, and where the club was silent and two directories disagreed, the fact was left out rather than guessed at.