More Warming Up in Florida – Clearwater Executive Golf Course
brinkley | March 25, 2010In my previous post on Warming up in Florida I wrote about the Twin Creek Golf Club in Gulfport, FL as a place to warm up before you hit the real courses. A little further north in Clearwater is another great executive course to get your golf juices going.
The Clearwater Executive Golf Course is just a few miles west of the Phillie’s spring training facility and right next to the Clearwater Air Park. This will never be your final destination for golf, but it’s a great place to start coming out of your winter hibernation. The grass only practice facility is a great place to get started with a small or large bucket of balls. In fact if you just caught a Phillie’s game you can drive a few minutes down the street and hit a large bucket of balls before dinner. Don’t worry about it getting dark because the driving range is lighted.
Now for the course itself you’ll find a wonderful place to work on your irons with a little bit of woods thrown in. The 18 hole course is a par 63 and a pleasing length of 4,350 yards. That means you have nine par 4 and nine par 3 holes. The driver isn’t really necessary except for maybe four or five par 4 holes, but you should be able to hit just about every club in your bag at least three times if you were playing par golf.
The greens are well kept and given the winter that they just had in 2010 the fairways were acceptable. Worse case move the ball in the fairway if you need good grass. After all you are warming up, this is the time to get your groove back not play it down and dirty like you do in the summer. The traps here are nothing like a regular course, but if you get in them the sand is good and doesn’t hurt to have a little sand practice. The trees on the course will make you forget that this is a muny course. My wife’s favorite tree is just passed the little bridge on the left side of hole 4. She’s taken several pictures there over the years.
While several of the holes on the course are just plain ole simple golf holes there are plenty here to keep your attention. I’m fond of four holes on the course: 1, 4, 17, 18. Hole 1 is a pretty simple 173 yard par 3 with an sloping green. Nothing hard here but it is 173 yards right out of the chute and you’ve got a lake on left and the ob range on the right which should be more than enough to distract the wandering eye. Hole 4 is a short par 3 with the tree on the left. It has one of the those Donald Ross slopes catch basins in the front that attracts anything the remote bit short. Hole 17 is eye pleasing par 4 slight dogleg left where you can really left the driver fly. I love it for that aspect alone. The elevated green should be about 120 away with a good drive. Finally 18 is driveable 250 yard par 4. Let it rip and see if you can reach the green with a hickory driver.
I can play 18 holes in just a little under 2 hours if no one is on the course, which has occurred late in the day more than once, and feel ready for the real courses in Florida if I can get in with a 72 or lower. Any higher and I’m back out on the course for more work.