Wasted Potential — Sugarloaf Mountain (NLE)
[Note: This course is permanently closed. The review was originally written in 2011]
Sugarloaf Mountain should be the model for future golf course designs in Central Florida, particularly those built in the scrub, orchard and sand hills regions west and north of Orlando. That is if there are any future golf courses.
Unfortunately the course and development (including a dormant housing component) was built just as the global economy — and the real estate economy specifically — began imploding so the entire project has been in jeopardy of collapsing since the day it opened. As a result, not enough people have seen the course, and even if golfers were more aware nobody’s going to be in a position to build anything like it for a very long time.
That’s a shame because The Mountain, as it’s called, is the first design to come close to capturing the potential of this distinctive Florida ecosystem.
The course draped over the top of a mountain — okay, it’s a big hill, but you know, it’s Florida — made of sand at one of the state’s highest points 30 or so miles from Orlando. It sits on the northern end of Lake Wales Ridge, a narrow chain of giant ancient sea dunes that stretch over 100 miles north to south down the center-west section of the state.
There are a lot of rather wooly, rural pockets of elevated land along the ridge that people don’t really know about. Developers have traditionally crowded them with homes, masking the naturalness. That’s not the case here.
The site possesses some remarkable topographical variety, the highlight being the 507-yard par-4 13th that cascades about 150 feet from tee to green. But the beauty of the course — and what might have been gleaned from it going forward — is the natural appearance, the way the architecture evolves from the ground and subtly bleeds into the surrounding environment. The pedestal green at the dainty par-3 11th looks freshly erupted from a bed of sand and bush.
The routing has plenty of room to breath as it rides across the terrain and banks and sweeps across the slopes, and while the up-and-down character of the holes isn’t necessarily unique, the width and the way they play at angles running against them is. The movement gives the game an element of acceleration and attack that plays off the site’s sleepy rusticity.
A couple of the holes are less successful, like the par-3 8th that plays over a rimmed retention pond to a semi-blind green, and the slender, uphill and mostly blind par-5 18th whose narrow scale seems out of synch with the rest of the course. But as you would expect from this architectural team the putting surfaces are suave and remarkably creative (check out the size and internal movement at the 257-yard par-3 17th), moments of bold elegance amid a sea of native unrest.
I don’t think this is in the first tier of Coore and Crenshaw’s work, but it’s light years ahead of almost everything else in Central Florida. (92)
Sugarloaf Mountain
Minneola/Orlando
Architect: Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw
Year: 2006
