Avila Golf & Country Club

Avila Golf & Country Club is a private championship course set within a gated community in north Tampa, originally designed by Ron Garl in 1980 and later transformed by a Jack Nicklaus redesign. The par-71 layout stretches to nearly 6,930 yards from the Gold tees, featuring a blend of strategic bunkering and water hazards characteristic of both designers' philosophies.

Avila Golf & Country Club in Tampa is a private gated community whose 18-hole championship course has a dual design history — an original layout by Ron Garl when the community was established in 1980, followed by a Jack Nicklaus redesign in 1989 that transformed the course into a demanding private club track in Hillsborough County, with water hazards coming into play on 13 of the 18 holes. The Avila community was developed beginning in 1980 by developer J. Robert "Bob" Sierra, whose vision for a gated private enclave in North Tampa emphasized championship golf as the primary recreational amenity. Ron Garl, a Florida-based architect who worked extensively on private and semi-private courses across the state, designed the original 18-hole layout on the community's terrain.

Garl's design gave Avila its initial golf identity as a private club in what was then a relatively undeveloped northern stretch of Hillsborough County. By the late 1980s, the community had grown sufficiently to justify the investment in a major redesign — and the decision to engage Jack Nicklaus for that redesign reflected the ambition of the community's leadership to provide a course of national-caliber quality. The Nicklaus 1989 redesign is documented in the Nicklaus Design portfolio as the Avila project. Nicklaus transformed the Garl original into a dramatically more demanding test while maintaining the integrity of the original course's classic features.

The redesign produced 13 holes with water hazards, positioning Avila among the most demanding private courses in Tampa. The North Tampa location — in the Carrollwood Village and Northdale corridor that has developed substantially since Avila's 1980 founding — gives the club a mature suburban context, with the Avila gated perimeter maintaining visual isolation from surrounding development. The Nicklaus design vocabulary at Avila employs the strategic bunkering and water pressure that characterizes his most demanding residential club commissions: sixty-five bunkers add visual definition and strategic challenge throughout the round, while the thirteen-hole water engagement creates consistent pressure on approach shots and tee shots alike. The combination of the Garl original foundation — which established the routing across the community's terrain — and the Nicklaus redesign has given Avila a layered architectural history unusual for a suburban Tampa private club.

The Nicklaus Design imprimatur attracted the membership and community credibility that the Sierra development sought, and the course has delivered on that promise through more than three decades of operation as the centerpiece of one of North Tampa's most established private communities.