# Shingle Creek Golf Club vs. Rio Pinar Country Club: The Orlando Choice

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/shingle-creek-golf-club-vs-rio-pinar-country-club/

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Course Comparisons / Florida


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Orlando golf splits into two cities that happen to share a name. One is the convention corridor, resorts and new construction and courses built to handle a thousand outings a year. The other is the older Orlando east of downtown, classic parkland, clubs that were holding tour events before the theme park era rearranged everything. Shingle Creek and Rio Pinar are the cleanest representatives of each, and choosing between them is really choosing which Orlando you came for.

Shingle Creek is the resort course at Rosen Shingle Creek, opened in 2003, originally by David Harman, then redesigned by the Arnold Palmer Design Company in 2016. Thad Layton led that redesign and it added three entirely new holes. The Palmer stamp shows in the brief the record gives: large greens and Palmer-style risk-reward par 5s. It plays par 72 at 7,213 yards from the black tees, water comes into play on 15 holes along the headwaters of the Everglades, and the ground is flat, water-heavy Orlando parkland throughout. It hosts collegiate and charity events on the convention corridor, which tells you about its conditioning and its logistics. This is a course built to be played by visitors, in volume, and to look sharp doing it.

Rio Pinar is the counterweight. Opened in 1957, designed by Mark Mahannah, refreshed by Lloyd Clifton in 1995 with enlarged greens and reshaped bunkers. Par 72, 7,001 yards. Classic parkland east of downtown. And a tournament record Shingle Creek cannot match: Rio Pinar hosted the Florida Citrus Open from 1966 to 1978, the predecessor to the Bay Hill invitational, and then hosted the LPGA Tour's Lady Citrus Open from 1979 to 1982. For more than a decade, tour golf in Orlando meant Rio Pinar. That is not nostalgia, that is the city's actual golf history, played on this ground.

## Resort polish against a real record

On the golf, this is closer than the vibes suggest. Shingle Creek is longer, wetter, and more overtly strategic on its par 5s, where Palmer's risk-reward design asks the second shot question that resort golf often skips. Fifteen holes with water in play is a lot, though, and we should be honest about what that does to a visiting mid-handicapper. Water on 15 holes stops being strategy around hole 11 and becomes attrition. Your scorecard will have a penalty story on it. Some trips want that test. Buddy trips counting every stroke for money may not.

Rio Pinar's test is quieter and older: parkland lines, mature ground, greens enlarged in 1995 so they play more generously than a 1957 course usually does. At 7,001 yards it is not short. What it lacks is the modern resort apparatus, the conditioning budget, the event infrastructure, the big hotel behind the first tee. Its access history is private and semi-private, now with public-access periods, so checking the current tee time situation before you plan around it is the practical move, while Shingle Creek as a resort course is built for booking.

In [our Orlando ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-orlando-fl/) and in [the Florida state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-florida/), that difference is the whole argument. Shingle Creek is the safer recommendation for a visitor with one day, a hotel stay, and no local connections. Rio Pinar is the better story and, for a golfer who cares about the game's history in a city, arguably the better round.

The concession goes to Shingle Creek's critics, and they have a point worth making. Resort golf on the convention corridor can feel interchangeable, and flat water-heavy parkland is the most interchangeable genre in Florida. If you played Shingle Creek blind, you might not know which Orlando resort course you were on by the fifth hole, Palmer par 5s aside. Rio Pinar could never be mistaken for anywhere else in the corridor, because it predates the corridor. Age is a design feature here. The trees, the routing, the tournament ghosts are all specific.

Verdict: Shingle Creek wins for most visitors, on access, conditioning, length, and those par 5s, and it wins this comparison. Pick Rio Pinar anyway if you have a second day in Orlando, if tour history matters to you, or if you have played enough resort golf to know exactly what it tastes like and want the older Orlando instead. Play Rio Pinar in the morning light, on ground that held tour fields from 1966 into the 1980s, and you will understand what the city was before the corridor arrived.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.