Highlands Reserve: The Hilltop Round That Breaks Florida Flat
Mike Dasher's 1998 course drapes 120 feet of Green Swamp Ridge elevation, waste areas and a Biarritz green over the villa community that shares its name.
3 minute read
Florida golf is supposed to be flat. Highlands Reserve Golf Club, at 500 Highlands Reserve Boulevard off US-27 in Davenport, is the local refutation: an 18-hole public course draped over the Green Swamp Ridge with about 120 feet of elevation change from its high point to its low basin — a Carolina-pines and Scottish-links hybrid that happens to sit ten minutes from the Disney gates. Designed by Mike Dasher and opened in 1998, it remains the corridor’s defining round, and the reason a whole villa community shares its name.
A course that dances
Dasher’s own description of his routing is that the holes two-step: from a high point at the first green down to the low basin of the 13th fairway, then terraced back up through holes 13 to 17, which climb the side of a gently rising bowl separated by elevation, planted vegetation and bunkering. The land is essentially a giant sand hill, so natural waste areas were available wherever the design wanted them — they divide holes, save turf and water, and cut into the angle of play as strategic bunkers, most pointedly on the drives at the par-4 seventh and tenth and the approaches at the tenth, eleventh and twelfth. Parallel holes stay private behind linear rows of pines; citrus trees along the edges remember what this ridge grew before it grew fairways.
The greens are the argument
The yardage — about 6,650 yards from the back tees, par 72 — will not intimidate anyone, and Dasher is explicit that the design really begins at the greens. It is one of the most varied sets of green complexes in Orlando-area golf: the first green is 52 yards deep and barely a dozen paces across with a swale through its middle; the third is tilted and almost perfectly round; the fifth is crowned and elevated against the short pitch; the ninth splits into upper and lower levels; the tenth hides a front-left pin nearly six feet below the rest of the surface. The set piece is the 16th, a Biarritz green modeled on the Gate hole at North Berwick — 53 yards deep, cut in half by a trough some two feet lower than either shelf. Add back-to-back par-5s at the eighth and ninth, several par-4s a long hitter can reach, and Diamond Zoysia greens over Bermuda fairways, and you have a course that plays friendly for the high handicapper and keeps asking the low handicapper better questions.
Practicalities
The club runs a full practice setup — driving range and putting surfaces — and stocks rental equipment down to full Wilson sets, so a villa guest who flew in with nothing but a glove can still play. The clubhouse snack bar covers the turn and the post-round hour without ceremony. Tee times book through the usual online channels, and the course’s year-round season means the corridor’s winter visitors — the British and Canadian regulars who return to the same rental streets each year — treat Highlands Reserve as a home club that happens to rent out its lockers by the week.
The villa-golf symbiosis
Highlands Reserve the community — street after street of privately owned pool villas — exists because of the course, and the course thrives because of the community: rental foursomes fill the morning tee sheet, owners walk to the range, and the whole operation runs at the friendly, affordable end of Orlando golf, with a driving range, clubhouse snack bar and rental sets for the traveler who left the clubs at home. It is the anchor of our corridor golf guide, where Providence and White Heron offer the sterner tests. Book the early tee time, play the ridge before the heat builds, and be back in your own pool by lunch — that rhythm, more than any single hole, is what Highlands Reserve sells. Find it on our Orlando Top Spots Map.
Photo: Chad Sparkes, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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