Boca Woods Country Club: Woods Course

The Woods Course at Boca Woods Country Club is a Joe Lee design dating to the mid-1980s, recently rebuilt in a $9 million Rees Jones renovation that reopened in December 2024. The rework stretched the course to roughly 7,043 yards and rebuilt greens, bunkers, drainage, and tees while keeping Lee's underlying routing through the Boca Raton community.

The Woods Course at Boca Woods Country Club opened in the mid-1980s as one of two original 18-hole layouts at a private residential club in western Boca Raton. The course was designed by Joe Lee, the Florida-based architect whose career produced more than 200 courses across the southeastern United States and Caribbean. Lee routed the original Woods Course through oak hammocks and native wetlands at the western edge of Palm Beach County, alongside a companion Lakes Course designed by Karl Litten that gave the club 36 holes of parkland-style golf within a gated community.

For nearly four decades the Woods Course played largely as Lee designed it, with periodic agronomic refreshes but no major architectural change. The original layout was characterized by gentle doglegs, fast-sloping greens, and strategic bunkering placed across broad fairways framed by mature trees and water hazards typical of South Florida parkland golf. By the early 2020s the membership had approved a comprehensive renovation, and the club partnered with Rees Jones, Inc. — with Bryce Swanson as co-designer — and the construction firm LaBar Golf Renovations on a full rebuild.

The $9 million project broke ground in April 2024 and addressed the course from the ground up. Crews rebuilt every green complex for smoother, truer putting surfaces, repositioned and reshaped bunkers throughout, installed a state-of-the-art drainage system, and added new tees to expand the range of playing distances. The grand reopening took place on December 8, 2024, returning the Woods Course to championship play alongside the Lakes Course and reinforcing Boca Woods's identity as a 36-hole private club with a limited membership of roughly 590 golfers.

The redesigned Woods Course retains Joe Lee's original corridor routing through the community while reflecting the contemporary design vocabulary of Rees Jones, whose portfolio includes multiple U.S. Open venues. The current scorecard plays to a par of 72 over 6,647 yards from the Black tees, with a USGA course rating of 72.7 and a slope of 141 — numbers that reflect the renovated layout's emphasis on risk-reward decision-making around redesigned greens and repositioned hazards.