Semi-Private golf courses

This site holds records for 12 golf facilities in Sarasota and Manatee County, carrying 219 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 12 semi-private. Access type is the thing worth checking before anything else, because it decides whether you can play at all.

Bent Tree Country Club, Calusa Golf & Country Club, Esplanade at Azario, Misty Creek Country Club, River Isles Golf Club, Serenoa Golf Club, Terra Ceia Bay Golf & Tennis Club and The Club at River Wilderness, and 4 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 Chris Wilczynski, David Martin Alden, Gordon Lewis, Ron Garl, Roy Albert Anderson, Ted McAnlis, William B. Lewis and later work by 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.