BallenIsles Country Club: South Course

The South Course traces its lineage to BallenIsles' 1964 opening as PGA National, when Dick Wilson and Joe Lee routed the property that would host the 1971 World Cup and host PGA Seniors' Championships in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rees Jones completed a tee-to-green renovation in 2019 that rebuilt bunkers, greens, cart paths and irrigation.

The South Course at BallenIsles Country Club is one of three 18-hole layouts descended from the original PGA National Golf Club, the Palm Beach Gardens complex commissioned in the early 1960s by developer John D. MacArthur as the national home of the Professional Golfers' Association of America. Under a 1963 agreement between MacArthur and the PGA, architects Dick Wilson and Joe Lee were engaged to plan the original courses; the facility opened in 1964 with the South among its earliest championship 18s. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s PGA National hosted the PGA Seniors' Championship, and in 1971 the property hosted both the PGA Championship — won by Jack Nicklaus on the adjacent East Course — and the World Cup. When the PGA relocated in 1973, the property continued as JDM Country Club until 1989, when it was reorganized and rebranded as BallenIsles Country Club. The South Course retained its Wilson-and-Lee routing for several decades before the club commissioned Rees Jones to undertake a full-scale renovation that was completed in 2019. Jones's work was a tee-to-green rebuild costing roughly $7.5 million that replaced every bunker, rebuilt the greens and tees, installed a new irrigation system, rerouted and repaved cart paths, and reworked the strategic framework of the course while respecting the original corridors. The renovation repositioned the South as BallenIsles' most modern layout and gave it a distinct character from the club's Dick Wilson / Joe Lee East and the Kipp Schulties-rebuilt North. Today the three courses sit within the 1,575-home BallenIsles community, and the South's direct line back to the 1964 PGA National design remains one of the club's clearest connections to its founding era.