Trying to catch some Orlando magic

     The thought of reviewing golf communities in the Orlando area has always been intimidating to me.  Where do you start?  There are just so many of them, and they are spread out across the huge Orlando area.

        But I cannot ignore Orlando anymore.  I head there on Sunday for the National Golf Industry Show, which runs

for the better part of next week, and I’d feel guilty if I didn’t poke my head into a few local golf communities.  I’ll attend a few workshops at the show –- I am particularly looking forward to one about "The future of private clubs” –- and try to gauge from discussions and the attitudes of those displaying their wares the true current state of the industry. I will be looking especially for those golf club operators who understand that the golf industry has changed forever and that the same old same old approaches just won’t cut it.

        No one, no matter what level of interest he has for the business, can possibly spend five straight days in an exhibition hall (in this case, the Orange County Convention Center and a local hotel’s ballroom and meeting rooms).  I have already booked a visit to Bella Collina, the former Bobby Ginn palace of excess that is now under the management of Reynolds, which just publicly announced some financial difficulties of its own (see our report yesterday, February 3).  It seems Bella Collina cannot catch a break, but the Nick Faldo designed golf course has received rave reviews, and the mansions that are up for sale in the adjacent golf community seem fairly priced, albeit priced mostly in seven figures.  My curiosity has the better of me.

        I am also slated to play the Bill Coore/Ben Crenshaw designed Sugarloaf Mountain course in Clermont, about 15 minutes from Disney World.  Sugarloaf has had a run of bad luck itself.  The course opened to rave reviews in 2008, but the surrounding real estate, developed by the troubled Landmar company, was whipsawed by the economy and is languishing.  Those who played the golf course early last year were universal in their comments -– wonderful layout, awful conditions with no grass to speak of on the fairways.

        “If you can tolerate horrible turf, you’ll enjoy the routing, the setting, and the serenity,” wrote the editors of Golf Odyssey in their latest newsletter.  Golf Odyssey played the course in December.  But recent reports indicate the greens have been over-seeded and the fairways are recovering.

        “In 2009,” wrote Bryan Izatt at GolfClubAtlas.com of his round last week, “the greens were a mess of granulated sand.  Today, they are fully filled in with overseed and run smooth, albeit slowly.  The rest of the course is over-seeded and still a little scruffy.”  No one questions the Sugarloaf layout, which is characteriistic of the designers' do-no-harm-to-the-land approach and spans some of the highest altitude land in the state.  I am looking forward to playing the only Coore/Crenshaw course in Florida.

        If you have your eye on a particular golf community in the Orlando area, contact me and I will do my best to stop by and give it the twice over -– once for the golf course and once for the surrounding real estate.