Bradenton Country Club

Located in the Gulf Coast city of Bradenton, this 1924 Ross design features a traditional Florida parkland layout with mature tropical vegetation. The course has served the Manatee County community for a century.

Bradenton Country Club is one of Manatee County's oldest private golf institutions, a Donald Ross design from 1924 that carried two names before settling into its current identity and has been recognized twice in its history by landmark renovation work — once in the late twentieth century and again by a three-time major champion and five-time Ryder Cup captain who considered the restoration a personal commitment to the Ross legacy. The club's founding traces to early 1924, when a group of investors associated with the Palma Sola Investment Company — including A.F. Wyman and E.P. Green, who had acquired a significant tract of land from Pennsylvania landowner Rhonda Allen — engaged Donald Ross to design a golf course for the property.

Ross walked the site and declared the terrain well-suited for golf, and he proceeded to design what opened as Palma Sola Country Club in 1924. The name "Palma Sola" referenced the solitary palm tree — palma sola in Spanish — that stood as a navigational landmark visible from Palma Sola Bay, guiding maritime traffic toward the Gulf Coast harbor. The club subsequently adopted the name Bradenton Country Club when the city itself was renamed from Bradentown to Bradenton. Ross's design for the Bradenton property followed his characteristic approach to Gulf Coast terrain: an 18-hole layout calibrated for the flat landscape of Manatee County, with bunkering and green contour providing the strategic challenges that elevation change could not supply.

Ross's fundamental design philosophy — that every hole should present a clear risk-reward structure visible from the tee, with a premium placed on accurate approach play into crowned and contoured putting surfaces — is embedded in the original routing. The course underwent a renovation in 1999 with work by Ron Garl, addressing years of accumulated modifications and wear. A more comprehensive transformation followed in 2018, when Tony Jacklin — a three-time major champion, CBE, and five-time European Ryder Cup captain who was a longtime member of Bradenton Country Club — personally led a complete renovation of all 18 holes. Jacklin stated his intention clearly: "This course was designed by Donald Ross over 90 years ago and I am simply trying to bring it back to being a classic Donald Ross course." The renovation scope included the complete rebuilding of all greens, tee boxes, and bunkers, the removal of cart paths to restore the course's walking character, selected fairway raising to address drainage, and the planting of more than 200 native palm trees as part of an environmental restoration effort.

The cart paths were taken back to their original crushed limestone design as part of the renovation, and the overall restoration received favorable recognition for its fidelity to Ross's original intentions. The Bradenton Herald's People's Choice Awards had previously named Bradenton Country Club the Best Private Golf Course in Manatee County in 2015, a designation that reflected the club's standing in the regional private club market before the Jacklin renovation further elevated the course's quality. Today Bradenton Country Club operates as a private club on a Donald Ross routing that has been restored twice in the last quarter-century, most recently by one of golf's most decorated figures applying his personal connection to the club in service of the Ross original.