Bobby Jones Golf Course

Bobby Jones Golf Club in Sarasota is a Donald Ross municipal design that formally opened in 1926, one of several Florida commissions that Ross completed during the era of the state's initial golf development boom. Following a comprehensive restoration by Richard Mandell that reopened on December 16, 2023, the course was returned to its original 18-hole Donald Ross design and ranked second on Golf Digest's Best New or Remodeled Affordable Courses for 2024.

Bobby Jones Golf Club in Sarasota, Florida, is a Donald Ross original design opened in 1926, making it one of the oldest continuously operated golf courses in the state and one of relatively few Ross designs still functioning as an accessible public facility. The course's origins trace to a 1925 City of Sarasota ordinance that authorized the issuance of municipal bonds to acquire 290 acres of land for park purposes and to construct a golf course. The resulting layout opened formally on June 5, 1926, when Mayor Everett Bacon cut the ribbons, with the back nine opening for play on September 30, 1926. Ross's office produced a detailed 1925 design plan — drawn by his draftsman Walter Irving Johnson, Jr. — with accompanying field notes that governed construction the following year.

The plan specified the placement of greens, bunkers, and tee positions across the flat Sarasota terrain, applying the characteristic Ross principles that had defined his work across the American South and Northeast: firm, crowned greens that deflect imprecise approaches, natural terrain-following fairways, and bunker placements that reward strategic thinking over raw power. The course carried the name Sarasota Municipal Golf Course until February 1927, when the city invited amateur champion Bobby Jones — then at the height of his fame as the game's greatest amateur competitor — to participate in an exhibition match, after which the course was officially dedicated and renamed in his honor. Jones had not yet completed his 1930 Grand Slam when the dedication occurred, but he was already regarded as the defining figure of American golf, and the name has anchored the course's identity for nearly a century. The course's position on the Florida Historic Golf Trail recognizes both its age and its architectural significance within the state's golf heritage.

As one of the Ross designs still in active public operation in Florida — a state where Ross completed numerous commissions during the boom years of the 1920s — Bobby Jones Golf Club represents a direct link to the design philosophy that shaped American golf in the early twentieth century. After decades of continuous public operation, the City of Sarasota undertook a comprehensive restoration project to reconnect the course with Ross's original design intent. The effort was a decade in the making and involved a more than $20 million investment, funded in part through a city bond. Armed with the original Ross plans preserved at the Tufts Archives in Pinehurst — located just over two miles from renovation architect Richard Mandell's own office — Mandell's team painstakingly restored each hole, requiring only minor adjustments for routing and drainage.

The restored Bobby Jones Golf Club reopened to the public on December 16, 2023. Golf Digest recognized the renovated layout by ranking it number two on its list of Best New or Remodeled Affordable Courses for 2024 — a distinction that underscored both the quality of Mandell's work and the enduring relevance of Ross's nearly century-old design. The reopening returned to Sarasota a public golf course whose original 1925 plans had survived intact, enabling a level of historical fidelity in the restoration that is rare among municipal golf facilities of comparable age.