‘We are the green space’

Sarasota barely makes the list of the 75 most populated cities in America’s third-most inhabited state. The Census Bureau estimates 57,376 people live in the southwest Florida city, up from 54,842 in 2020.

But in and especially around the city limits, contractors scurry between projects. Thirty-five new single-family homes here. A new hotel and convenience store there. Once a quiet enclave between Tampa and Naples, Sarasota County went from 202,251 residents dispersed across its 725 square miles in 1980 to 443,465 residents by 2020. More northerners are on their permanent way.

The City of Sarasota is nearly fully occupied for perhaps eternity, thanks to calculated long-range planning. The city, according to retired Parks & Recreation manager Sue Martin, must provide 10 acres of green space per 1,000 residents.

“We’re moving toward that 60,000 people, so that’s 600 acres,” says Martin, describing Sarasota’s green space dilemma while standing outside the temporary clubhouse of the reimagined Bobby Jones Golf Club. The municipal facility occupies 307 acres. The usual visuals of development — homes with screened porches, a Publix and a Starbucks, a private high school with a synthetic turf football field — surround the land. “This is more than 300 acres of our green space,” Martin adds. “If we were to do something with this, how would we make up for that with all the building going around? It works out just perfect.” When finding more green space seems implausible for a community, using golf land smarter becomes an option. Sarasota officials are confident they have found the right mix of golf and green space at Bobby Jones GC. Formerly a 45-hole facility, Bobby Jones GC features a restored 18-hole Donald Ross layout, a practice range that can accommodate 70 people, a 20,905-square-foot putting course and a 90-acre nature park. Those amenities opened in December 2023. A lighted, 9-hole par-3 course with adjustable routings is on the way.

By downsizing traditional golf, Sarasota has rightsized a plot mayor Liz Alpert affectionately calls “a giant Central Park in our city.” From hitting a quick bucket of balls on Celebration Bermudagrass surfaces to casually walking on maintained paths meandering wetlands, Bobby Jones GC provides diverse recreational options.

“I think it’s a great mix,” says Martin, who managed the previous version of Bobby Jones GC. “People who come to the nature park, might go, ‘I want to play golf there next week.’ Or people who are playing golf, might say, ‘I’m going to take my bike on the nature park.”

A conservation easement means the land must be preserved as green space in perpetuity. Three hundred and seven acres in the middle of a bustling Florida county is worth tens of millions to developers. Sarasota officials placed the intrinsic purpose of the land above its financial value.

“We wanted to make sure that we kept this green space for this community,” Alpert says. “When you are designing a city, one of the important things is for the residents to have enough parks and green space. If you don’t have that, people start moving out because it’s not a desirable place to be.”

Two days before the course reopened for its first golf rounds in more than three years — Bobby Jones GC closed at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic for a reexamination of its future — superintendent Ian Murphy leads tours in a four-seat cart. A Tampa-area native who held various superintendent jobs at clubs in Georgia and South Carolina, Murphy returned to his native state in October 2022 to oversee his first grow in.

Fourteen months is a long time to work without seeing a golfer. Fourteen months without golfers means abundant solitude. The nature park lurks to his east as Murphy cruises the 11th fairway. At 530 yards from the back tees, which are designated using red markers, the par 5 is the longest hole on a course restored by architect Richard Mandell. Murphy faces 17th Street, a busy four-lane road, as he weaves between two approach bunkers designed to make golfers ponder second-shot placement.

A 25-year industry veteran, Murphy understands his role extends beyond providing playing surfaces. His team, which includes assistant Max Rudder, occupies no formal role in the maintenance of the nature park. Troon-owned Indigo Sports manages Bobby Jones GC for the city. But Murphy, a Troon employee, embraces the symbiotic relationship between the course and nature park.

“Whether we’re at a resort or at a place with 65 acres, 100 acres, or somewhere like this with 300 acres, this is what we all do,” Murphy says. “We are the green space.”

Working in a city’s largest swath of green space comes with educational perks and calming scenes.

Early in his Bobby Jones GC tenure, Murphy discovered not every pink bird in Florida is a flamingo. Roseate Spoonbills, beefy pink birds with pronounced bills, inhabit the site. They have plenty of winged acquaintances above and on the Bermudagrass. The Sarasota Audubon Society identified 76 different bird species at Bobby Jones GC during a February 2024 count. “If you tell a birder about what’s here, they will say, ‘How can I get there?” says Jan Thornburg, the City of Sarasota’s communications general manager.

Mammals, reptiles and amphibians share Bobby Jones GC with birds and humans. Coyote sightings are common, bobcats have been spotted and Murphy says he sees “every type of squirrel imaginable.” Alligators bask along a pond between the par-3 16th hole and the drivable par-4 17th hole.

“This is home for them,” Murphy says. “North of us is 17th Street, south of us is Fruitville Road. Fruitville has to be the busiest road in the city. We are that big, massive, open green space in the middle of a city that has absolutely exploded when it comes to construction and basically everything else.”

For modern cities to thrive, they need more than recreational opportunities and animal habitats. They need places to move water.

Mandell is a golf course architect by training. His Pinehurst, North Carolina-based firm has received one of restoration’s greatest prizes 11 times: the opportunity to work on a Ross design. Born in Scotland, Ross designed more than 400 courses in the United States, including 34 in Florida. He was in his design prime when the City of Sarasota hired him in the mid-1920s.

A Ross-designed course fit into the city’s strategy to use recreation and tourism to attract residents, a philosophy developed in the late 1800s by six-term, golf-loving mayor J. Hamilton Gillespie. Neither Ross nor Gillespie would recognize Sarasota and the surrounding areas today. The county had fewer than 13,000 residents by the end of the 1920s. Gillespie died in 1923. The Ross design debuted and was named in honor of Bobby Jones in 1927.

As Mandell studied the architect’s work at Bobby Jones GC — and he received abundant time, because his involvement in the project started in 2016 — he experienced a revelation about the architect’s work on the site.

“One of the attributes I love about this course — and you don’t see it in many Ross courses — is his use of mounding,” Mandell says. “The front nine, more than any place, used to flood a lot. He utilized mounding as hazards to replace sand bunkers. He had great foresight, knowing that on a low-lying property you don’t want to put sand bunkers out here because they will just flood.”

The restored course has 55 bunkers. Bobby Jones GC’s high point is 24 feet above sea level; the low point is 12 feet. Sarasota averages 53 inches of rain annually. Punishing downpours are the norm from June through September. Thousands of miles of impervious surfaces exist in 2024 that weren’t around in the 1920s.

Mandell drifts from the second fairway during a December tour and stops at a concrete structure that will go unnoticed by many golfers. The structure is a weir, a small dam built to control upstream water levels. Water racing through a canal called Phillippi Creek Main B, which parallels Circus Boulevard, the road supporting the course’s entrance, will enter the property via the weir and be discharged into a drainage system consisting of 20 acres of wetlands. Residents and business owners who will never use the course or nature park will benefit from the highly engineered green space.

“We have created an emergency spillway situation,” Mandell says. “Instead of Phillippi Main B flooding and discharging too much water downstream, we’re slowing it down. We’re diverting water and allowing the golf course to react as retention for major rainstorms, hurricanes, floods and things like that.”

The stormwater management system will only affect golf in extreme circumstances, because playing surfaces, especially on the front nine, which borders Circus Boulevard and Fruitville Road, were raised during the project.

“For the golfers, all this drainage means you can get out there and play a lot quicker than you used to,” Mandell adds. “When it rained before, just a little bit, especially in the summers, that front nine was waterlogged and you’re done. You’re able to get out on the golf course quicker.”

The course and nature park filter stormwater for a 5,800-acre area, according to city officials. The installation of 14½ acres of native grasses and planting of 49,000 aquatic plants, including sawgrass, fire flag and pickerel weed, mean water leaving the property will be of higher quality than what entered the course and park. Filtered water flows into Roberts Bay, an intracoastal water body between Sarasota and Siesta Key. A $1.5 million Southwest Florida Water Management District grant and a $487,500 grant from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection helped fund water quality parts of the project.

“They fit like gloves, golf and the environment,” Mandell says. “For anyone who thinks they don’t, they aren’t thinking about the big picture.”