Town Rankings / Florida

The Best Golf Courses in Tampa

Every March, the PGA Tour plays the Valspar Championship at Innisbrook, and every March the players say some version of the same surprised thing: this does not feel like Florida. The Copperhead is hilly and tree lined, more Carolina than Tampa Bay, and its closing stretch, the Snake Pit, holes 16 through 18, has bitten Tour fields for decades. Meanwhile, in South Tampa, Palma Ceia has been the old money club since 1916, the Gasparilla Invitational has run there since 1932, and Babe Ruth played his winter golf in this town when Tampa was a spring training outpost. Tampa golf is two arguments at once: the public Tour test in Palm Harbor, and the private in town game that barely advertises itself.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. The public course wins, which in Tampa is less an upset than it sounds. The private course the members would pick is right behind it, and the gap between them is the most debatable call on this list.

1Innisbrook Copperhead Course

Larry Packard designed the Copperhead, opened in 1971 as the headline course at Innisbrook Resort in Palm Harbor, and Packard designed the resort's other courses around it. The Copperhead is the one with the reputation, earned in public: home of the Valspar Championship, resort access with public booking, a Tour course a visitor can reserve with a credit card and a month's notice.

The golf explains the reputation. Elevation change is a rumor at most Florida courses; here it is the routing. Trees pinch the corridors, the greens ask for the correct side, and the Snake Pit closing stretch, three holes the Tour brands because they genuinely decide tournaments, finishes the examination. The concession is real: resort pace, resort pricing at peak, and a March setup that plays harder for the field than for you, which flatters nobody's scorecard in either direction. Conditioning in high season also carries resort traffic. But a top of the list course that anyone can play, on ground this un Florida, with a Tour event proving the test annually, is the easiest No. 1 call in the Tampa Bay area. Prove us wrong in March, from the member tees the resort sells you.

2Old Memorial Golf Club

Old Memorial is the connoisseur's pick, and its members would have it first without blinking. Steve Smyers designed it, opened in 1997, a private, golf only club founded by the Outback Steakhouse founders, with a sandy, natural design that is unusual for Tampa and an elite caddie program inside a pure golf culture. No tennis, no pool scene, no weddings on the 18th fairway. Golf, caddies, and quiet.

On architecture and atmosphere, Old Memorial may be the best experience in this ranking, and Smyers's sandy ground gives it a texture the Copperhead's parkland cannot match. It sits second on two counts: the Copperhead's championship record is public and current, proven every March, and access matters in our scoring, and Old Memorial's access is a locked door, estimates putting its costs in the highest tier in town. The club wants it that way, and the purity everyone praises is downstream of that exclusivity. If a member hosts you, take the day over any other on this list. A ranking for readers has to count that almost none of them will get the call.

3Palma Ceia Golf and Country Club

Palma Ceia is Tampa's oldest private club, golf dating to 1916 with Tom Bendelow and later Donald Ross era work, set in the South Tampa neighborhood that shares its name. The Gasparilla Invitational, a top mid amateur event, has been played here since 1932, which means generations of the best amateur golfers in the South have tested themselves on this compact in town ground. This is also the Tampa where Babe Ruth wintered and played, the old sporting city in one clubhouse, and where Babe Didrikson Zaharias won in the era's women's golf.

Palma Ceia ranks third because the course is a shorter, tighter examination than the two above it, a classic in town parkland test rather than a modern championship one. What it offers instead is a century of continuous Tampa life around a golf course, in the middle of the city, where the mid ams still come every year to be measured. Estimates put its costs in the high tier. It is the round a Tampa golfer with options protects most fiercely, which tells you plenty a yardage book cannot.

4TPC Tampa Bay

Bobby Weed designed TPC Tampa Bay with Chi Chi Rodriguez consulting, opened in 1991, up in Lutz north of the city. It hosted the PGA Tour Champions senior event, under Outback sponsorship in its long Tampa run, for over twenty years, so the course has a genuine championship resume of its own. The setting is wetlands, Audubon certified, public and semi private access, and it is consistently ranked among Tampa Bay's best public courses, a line that appears in its record because it keeps being true.

Fourth on this list says more about the list than the course. TPC Tampa Bay is the second best public round in the area and the best value among the four here. It concedes the top spots on memorability: Weed built a strong, fair, wetland test, and strong and fair describe a lot of good Florida golf, while the Copperhead has the Snake Pit, Old Memorial has its sand and silence, and Palma Ceia has 1916. If the trip allows one public round beyond Innisbrook, this is it.

March ends, the Tour leaves Palm Harbor, and the Copperhead's tee sheet opens back up to anyone willing to pay resort money to walk the Snake Pit in public. That is Tampa's golf in one sentence. The best test in town will take your booking, the old clubs will keep their gates, and both sides think they have the better arrangement.