Under construction: David McLay Kidd’s new course at Streamsong
By JOHN STEINBREDER
BOWLING GREEN, FLORIDA | The minimalist movement in modern course design began with the creation in 1995 of the Sand Hills Golf Club layout outside Mullen, Nebraska. Designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw and financed by a crusty Cornhusker named Dick Youngscap, the brilliantly fashioned inland links initiated a trend in course development. What followed soon after were such architectural triumphs as Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes, which greeting-card magnate Mike Keiser established on the southwest Oregon coast in 1999 and 2001, respectively.
Equally impressive have been the bright young artists who emerged during that renaissance, starting with David McLay Kidd, the red-headed Scot and son of a course superintendent who crafted the Bandon Dunes layout. And Tom Doak, the cerebral New Englander who designed Pacific Dunes after having studied at MIT, earned a degree from Cornell and worked for Pete Dye.
Together with the more established Coore and Crenshaw duo, those phenoms became leaders of that new awakening. And it was not long before the quadrumvirate was joined by a fifth architect in Gil Hanse, who had proved his mettle with designs such as the original Castle Stuart track in Scotland, the Olympic course he built outside Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Summer Games and the Ohoopee Match Club in the Georgia sand belt.
But as talented and sought-after as those designers have been, they had never constructed courses at the very same place.
Until now.
That’s because a new Kidd creation is expected to come on line next fall at Streamsong, the central Florida resort located on a reclaimed phosphate mine site about an hour’s drive southeast of Tampa. And when that occurs, golfers will finally be able to savor the work of the game’s modern masters all at one spot.
“We have absolutely paid attention to the existing courses here. …we study their design features and understand how they are maintained and the ways that the superintendents deal with turf issues. We try to assemble as much data as possible.”
David McLAY Kidd
Streamsong officially opened in January 2012 with the unveiling of its first two courses – Red by Coore and Crenshaw and Blue by Doak. Both tracks were lauded for their deft routings, quick-draining sandy soil, and turf that played firm and fast. Golfers also liked how the rumpled fairways, towering dunes, massive blow-out bunkers and generous greens endowed the layouts with an enticing Old-World ethos.
I was in attendance that inaugural day and remember how different those courses seemed from anything I had ever seen in the Sunshine State. That was a common sentiment among the other golfers on site as well as the architects themselves. As we stood together on the first tee, Coore told me that shortly after he had started walking the property for the first time, he stopped suddenly to phone his design partner, telling him as soon as he answered, “Ben, you are not going to believe what I am seeing.”
Later, Doak spoke to that same sense of wonderment when he said: “If you had parachuted me onto this property and gave me 75 guesses as to where I was in the world, maybe my last one would have been Florida.”
What clearly captured all of our fancies that day was how much Streamsong looked like something one might find on the Scottish or Irish coasts as well as how vast and empty it felt.
Doak even went so far as to dub it “Bandon East,” and that seemed a very appropriate description even though this resort was nowhere near an ocean. But it possessed all the other elements that golf traditionalists crave, which explains why Red and Blue rocketed to the upper echelons of most top-100 lists.
In 2017, the resort added a third layout, dubbed Black and created by Hanse and his longtime associate Jim Wagner. And it, too, received raves from the golf cognoscenti.
It was another seven years before Streamsong added to its already formidable portfolio with The Chain, a 19-hole short course. Then in the winter of 2025 – two years after KemperSports paid $160 million to purchase the 7,000-acre Streamsong property from Mosaic, the mining company that had originally developed the area for golf – resort executives revealed that it had hired Kidd to design and build a fourth 18-hole course between Black and Red.
“To be included in that group of architects requires my team and I to do something exceptional,” Kidd said in his Lowlands burr at the time of that announcement. “That opportunity both excites me and makes me nervous, but in a good way. We are so excited to add to the history of a place so young and yet so rooted in a tradition of exceptional golf architecture.”
Some 10 months later, Kidd further reflected on that endeavor as he walked the terrain across which the first course he has ever built in Florida – or anywhere in the Eastern United States – was taking form.
“We know we have to do a great job here and realize that there are no excuses,” he said. “But in my mind, it is not about winning and being considered the best course here. We just have to be in the hunt. And our barometer of success would be having groups of golfers sitting in the bar after their rounds arguing about which Streamsong course is better and having some of them insist it is ours.”
“The underbrush is full of rattlers and cottonmouths. … we were on foot and trying to get a feel for the property, we found what we thought were footpaths in some places that made walking much easier. But then we learned they were trails that gators had formed with their bellies. …”
It was 9 o’clock on a mid-October morning when I met Kidd on the site of his yet-to-be-named layout and remarked about weather forecasts that had temperatures rising into the mid-80s that day.
“This is nothing,” said Kidd. “You cannot believe how hot and humid it gets down here in the summer. The working conditions that time of year can be tough.”
Another challenge, he added, was the presence of poisonous snakes and alligators.
“The underbrush is full of rattlers and cottonmouths,” he said. “Early on, as we were on foot and trying to get a feel for the property, we found what we thought were footpaths in some places that made walking much easier. But then we learned they were trails that gators had formed with their bellies. So, we decided that maybe we should not use those.”
Thankfully, Kidd and his crew never had an unfortunate encounter with a gator or a snake. But they did make other discoveries of a much less disconcerting nature. Such as the prehistoric teeth of the long-extinct giant shark called a megalodon. Remains from other denizens of the Ice Ages can be found here as well, from shovel-tusked mastodons and hornless rhinos to humpless camels, which is why this area has long been known as Bone Valley.
In addition to coming across the occasional fossil, Kidd and his crew also found a very good course routing, and one that ultimately got them the job over the other design firms bidding for the work. But it was not an easy process and led the now 57-year-old Kidd at one point to turn quite unexpectedly – and unabashedly – to Taylor Swift for inspiration.
Initially, he had considered a design that would require building another clubhouse at a place that already had two, one of which serviced the Red and Blue courses and the other Black.
“But we really wanted to figure out a way to get our course in and out of the Black clubhouse, so Kemper did not have to construct a third,” Kidd said. “Being able to do that would be a big selling point to them, and I laid awake nights wondering how to do that.”
A breakthrough came in the spring of 2024.
“It was the day after Taylor Swift had released ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’” he recalled. “I sent our design associate, A.J. Bridges, out that morning to play the Red while I stayed in my room trying to come up with a solution with that new album playing in the background. I am not necessarily a Swiftie, but on this day, her music provided just the sort of white noise I needed for my work.”
“A.J. came back after his round, and I sent him out to play the Blue because I still wasn’t done,” Kidd added. “But by the time we sat down for dinner that night, I had the answer.”
And that was using the land across which Hanse had fashioned a modest, seven-hole short course some years ago for the opening and closing holes of the new Kidd track.
“That was how we could start and finish at the Black clubhouse,” the architect said. “A few days later, we took the new plans to Chicago to show [KemperSports CEO] Steve Skinner. I had a good feeling about our prospects after that trip.”
Soon after that meeting, Skinner told him the job was his.
David McLay Kidd and Josh Lesnik
John Steinbreder, GGP
In some ways, the hire represented a bit of a reunion. After all, KemperSports has managed the Bandon Dunes properties from the very beginning, with the executive vice president of that concern, Josh Lesnik, playing a major role in that resort’s development as its first general manager in a position that had him interacting a great deal with Kidd.
“We were kids back then, in our late 20s,” Lesnik said. “And we had a lot of fun as we worked very hard at something neither of us could be really sure would succeed.”
But it did, big time. And after more than a quarter century, they are at it again, as Lesnik plays a lead role in the new Kidd course at Streamsong.
“Getting to work with David again has been a highlight of my career,” said Lesnik.
“We are different in many ways, as he is looking mostly at things from a design perspective while I also have to consider how we actually operate the course that is being built. But we work so well together and picked up right where we left off. He is such a good fit for this project because he is very good at dealing with land that is naturally well-suited for golf as well as creating great golf holes from property that is nondescript.”
Kidd feels much the same way.
“It’s a hoot working with Josh again,” Kidd said. “And while some might have thought we were handed the job because of my past relationship with Kemper, I truly believe that we earned it because our plan was so solid.
“Josh has been out here every month since we started construction last February to check on our progress and maybe tone down some of my inclinations to do too much,” Kidd added. “In the old days, he would be giving me more drinks at night. Now, he’s telling me to go to bed.”
Walking the site with them, it was easy to appreciate their enthusiasm for the course that was taking shape. I liked Kidd’s use of ribbon tees that provided interesting options for golfers of all abilities, and the range of distances Kidd was using on the par-72 track, with a proper mix of long and short holes. He seems particularly enamored of short par-4s these days, and the ones he is fashioning here should be a lot of fun. There is terrific variety in the orientations of the holes, with the four par-3s all playing in different directions. The quartet of par-5s, too, and Kidd has ensured that the par-4s that make up the rest of the 18 are equally diverse.
A few of the holes are fully grassed and begging to be played. The par-3 seventh, which is a classic Redan, looks like a good one, and so does the par-3 12th, which is the shortest on the course with a slightly elevated green tucked into one of the dunes made up of sandy trailings left over from the mining operation and six bunkers scattered in front of the putting surface. I enjoy the reveal Kidd gives golfers here as he takes them from the 11th green on a path that cuts through another dune to the 12th tee.
I make note of other highlights as we walk and talk. The witch’s hat feature on the par-5 ninth. The gap in the sandy ridge about 100 yards out from the green on the No. 14, another 5-par. The tee shot on the par-4 17th that forces players to contend with a trio of cross bunkers and boasts the biggest and perhaps wildest green on the course.
Ask Kidd about the biggest difference between this job and the one at Bandon Dunes that sent him on his rise to the top of the course architecture heap, and he quickly responds.
“I was first at Bandon and fourth here,” he said. “And it is a lot easier to be fourth because I can learn what works and doesn’t work out here by asking questions of those who have been here before me, and also just looking around.”
And Kidd says that he and his crew have looked around a lot.
“We have absolutely paid attention to the existing courses here,” said Kidd. “We get into our [John Deere] Gators at sunset to check out the other courses, to study their design features and understand how they are maintained and the ways that the superintendents deal with turf issues. We try to assemble as much data as possible.”
Kidd attended the opening of Streamsong nearly 14 years ago, invited to that ceremony by his frequent rival Doak even though Kidd had not been asked to build one of those first two layouts.
“Tom felt I needed to see it, and so did I,” said Kidd. “And I believed from that point forward that there would be a hole in my career if I did not one day have a course here.”
Fortunately for Kidd – and for golf – that time to fill it has finally come.
Course photography courtesy Streamsong
