Town Rankings / Florida

The Best Golf Courses in Sarasota

In 1969, at Royal Birkdale, Jack Nicklaus had a short putt left to halve the Ryder Cup and he conceded it to Tony Jacklin instead, the most famous act of sportsmanship the matches have produced. Four decades later the two men built a golf course together outside Sarasota and named it The Concession. That is the kind of town this is. The history is not decoration here. Sara Bay, a Donald Ross from 1926, sits across town, and the municipal course carries Bobby Jones's name because Jones himself played the exhibition golf that opened Sarasota's golf era that same year.

So Sarasota golf splits into two centuries arguing with each other: the modern championship brute built on a gesture, and the Ross bones underneath the older Florida. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and the modern brute wins on golf alone. It is not the runaway people expect.

1The Concession Golf Club

Jack Nicklaus and Tony Jacklin co designed The Concession, opened in 2006, private, over in Bradenton. The name comes straight from that 1969 putt, and the course plays like two men who understood match play building a place where matches are decided. The greens are severe. That word shows up in every serious account of the place and it has earned it: approach shots land in the wrong section and the two putt becomes a negotiation. Collin Morikawa won the 2021 WGC Workday Championship here, on a week when the field kept saying the same thing, that the course asks for a full shot and then asks what you meant by it.

The championship reputation is the case for No. 1, and the strength of it is that the course backs the reputation up hole after hole rather than coasting on the story. Plenty of clubs are built on a famous name. This one is built on a famous putt and then on 18 demanding holes after it.

The concession, and it is a large one: access. The Concession is private, and estimates put the cost of belonging well into the top tier of Florida clubs. If you cannot get on, the best course in Sarasota is a story somebody tells you. Sara Bay partisans also argue, fairly, that Ross subtlety ages better than modern severity, and that a course you can walk and think your way around beats one that examines your iron play this hard. We still land here. The ceiling is the ceiling.

2Sara Bay Country Club

Donald Ross, 1926, private, up in the Whitfield area near the bay. Sara Bay opened in the Florida land boom winter of Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen, and club lore ties a famous 1926 exhibition involving both men to its opening era. Strip the lore away and the golf remains: a Ross routing that has been restored to emphasize his green complexes, which is where the course lives. The surfaces are the test. Miss on the wrong side and the recovery is a Ross recovery, possible, fiddly, and faintly humiliating.

Sara Bay is the round a thoughtful golfer might enjoy most in Sarasota, and on a different rubric, one that weighted the walk and the history over raw examination, it takes No. 1. It loses here on the second shot standard The Concession sets and on championship depth. It wins almost everything else: charm, age, the sense of playing Florida golf as it was drawn before the state filled in. Estimates put its costs a tier below The Concession, mid to high rather than highest, though private is private and the checkbook still notices.

3Bobby Jones Golf Club Sarasota

The municipal. Donald Ross design dating to 1926, historically 36 holes across the American and British courses, owned by the city and named for the man who headlined Sarasota's exhibition golf in that opening era. The complex went through a major renovation and reduced format in the 2020s, with part of the ground converted to a nature park, which tells you something honest about where a Florida city puts its land values now.

What it kept is the thing that matters for this ranking: Ross ground, open to anyone, at municipal prices, in a town where the top two courses require a member to vouch for you. The renovated Bobby Jones is not the equal of Sara Bay as a test and does not pretend to be. It is the reason Sarasota golf belongs to Sarasota and not only to its clubs. For a visitor with one open afternoon and no connections, this is the round that actually happens, and it happens on a 1926 Ross routing. Most towns cannot say that about their best public option.

4University Park Country Club

Ron Garl designed University Park in 1991, 27 holes, semi private with public windows into tee times. It is the working end of this list: three nines to rotate, a big membership community around it, and golf that asks reasonable questions without the menace of The Concession or the pedigree of the Ross pair.

Fourth is not a dismissal, it is a job description. University Park is where Sarasota golfers who play every week mostly play, and the public windows make it the easiest planned round on this list after the muni. The golf itself is a step down from the three above it, in design and in memory. You will enjoy the day. You will not be telling stories about the greens at dinner, and in this town, with a conceded putt and a 1926 Ross both in the conversation, that is the gap.