Bonita Bay Club: Creekside Course

The Creekside Course at Bonita Bay Club, designed by Arthur Hills, is the third 18-hole layout on the club's West campus in Bonita Springs, Florida. Hills used the rare (for South Florida) elevation changes on the site, framing rolling fairways with bunkers and moguls around the green complexes.

Bonita Bay Club began in the mid-1980s as a master-planned community on Florida's Gulf Coast, and Arthur Hills was retained as the consulting golf course architect. Hills designed three courses on the original property along Estero Bay: Bay Island, Marsh, and Creekside. Creekside arrived as the third of the Hills courses at Bonita Bay and is distinguished among the trio for its relatively pronounced elevation changes — an uncommon feature on flat South Florida ground. Filled with bunkers and moguls framing the green complexes, the layout conveys rolling terrain along broad fairways that wind through natural vegetation. It plays to a par of 71 over roughly 6,503 yards from the championship tees. The course drew early recognition on the national stage. Florida Golf Week Magazine named it the highest-ranked new course the year after it opened, and in 1989 it appeared on Golf Digest's listing of America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses — a notable achievement for a brand-new Southwest Florida private club. As part of a multi-year golf master plan at Bonita Bay's West campus, Creekside was renovated along with Bay Island and Marsh by Hills-Forrest-Smith, the successor firm to Arthur Hills, ASGCA. The work preserved the original Hills routing while updating bunkering, green complexes, drainage, and agronomy to modern standards, and added forward-progression par-3 tees designed to welcome new and younger golfers. Together with the subsequent Tom Fazio-designed Bonita Bay East campus in Naples, the original Hills trio — and Creekside's distinctive rolling character — continues to anchor the club's 90-plus-hole golf program.