Innisbrook Golf Resort

Larry Packard designed the Innisbrook Resort and Golf Club in Palm Harbor, Florida in 1969, on a piece of west-coast Florida pine-and-cypress land thirty miles north of Tampa. The resort opened with four courses — Copperhead, Island, North, and South — and the Copperhead has held the resort's competitive attention ever since, hosting the Valspar Championship every March on the PGA Tour. The Island Course is the resort's second-best, and unusual in Florida resort golf for being routed without a single artificial water feature — Packard used the natural cypress wetlands and the property's elevation changes as hazards instead.

The scorecard reads 7,194 yards from the Black markers, par 72, with a slope of 144 and a course rating of 74.8. The four par-3s sit between 201 and 225 yards. The 225-yard eleventh is the longest one-shotter on the routing and plays across a cypress wetland to a green that sits on a slight rise. The four par-5s range from 511 to 565 yards. The 565-yard fifteenth is the number-one handicap, which is unusual — most par-5s sit lower in handicap rankings — but the green is angled hard right against a cypress hazard and the layup zone narrows to about thirty yards across.

The 455-yard second-hardest and the 449-yard third-hardest are both long par-4s. The Innisbrook signature is the elevation changes Packard used throughout the routing — the back nine plays through the resort's deepest cypress hollows, and the modern course retains the unmoved-dirt aesthetic that Packard insisted on in the late 1960s before Florida resort construction shifted to bulldozer architecture.

The Florida west coast climate keeps Innisbrook playable year-round, with the prime window running November through April when the humidity has dropped and the wind moderates. June through September is the convective storm season; afternoon rounds get suspended frequently. The resort is public-access daily-fee through Innisbrook Resort guests, with public play available outside resort guest priority hours.