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If there is a prevailing sentiment shared by most new golf courses being built in the 2020s, it's "Bigger is better." Contemporary courses explore huge corridors with their mega-wide fairways and sizable, heavily contoured greens protected by often rugged, gnarled bunkers in considerable quantities. This approach allows for considerable creativity and strategic merit to be incorporated into these courses, which means they don't so much blend together as fit together into the current movement.
The Third, the new golf course that officially opened in the spring of 2025 at Watersound Club, a multi-phase community near Panama City Beach, Fla., succeeds on almost all levels, with architect Davis Love III taking cues from the prevailing design movement while giving his creation a strong identity of its own.
Nearly dead-flat but intermittently sandy and interrupted by tricky wetlands, The Third's site is far from ideal, but its generous size and the fact that club developers, The St. Joe Company, set it aside solely for golf - i.e. no houses - enabled Love, his brother Mark and their longtime associate Scot Sherman to craft a meandering routing that takes its time pulling golfers out away from the first tee and eventually depositing them back alongside it at the 18th green.
Tall longleaf pines line mostly generous corridors. The Third's first point of departure comes in its use of compression and release. The first three holes string together into vast rooms of golf. When the golfer doubles back on the third to tee off at the long par-4 4th, the forest encroaches, adding both a sense of intimacy and rigor to the tee shots on what is arguably The Third's toughest single hole. Then, the par-5 5th blows the proportions back up again and invites players to swing away.
Love & co. play with scale in this way throughout the round, ultimately finishing on a more intimate note. The mid-length par-4 17th calls for a stout carry over wetlands, followed by an approach to a scaled-down Biarritz-type green with high front and back sections on either side of a low trench; the 18th tee and fairway remain closely swaddled by forest before exhaling into more open space as the golfer rounds a slight bend in the landing area. Though its tract of land is nowhere near as exciting as the sand hills of central Wisconsin or the sandbelt south of London, I sensed echoes of both Tom Doak's mold-breaking Sedge Valley and England's heathland courses in the way The Third moves.
Another important influence on The Third, along with much of Love's work, is Pete Dye. This makes sense - few golfers will ever have a better track record on Dye's courses than Davis Love III, who won five times at Harbour Town and twice at TPC Sawgrass in his 21-victory PGA Tour career. While Love's bunker shaping often points more in the direction of Donald Ross, Seth Raynor and Walter Travis, the arrangement of features and willingness to engage the golfer on a psychological level is Dye-like to the core. Subtle angling of landing areas and greens make seemingly generous spaces play smaller; Dye was a master of that dynamic. The Third's five par 3s are particularly deft in this regard; the mid-length 6th and 8th would fit well on Dye's best courses.
Few architects built better par 5s than Dye, and it's no surprise that Love's firm excels here, too. The Third's three-shotters are a wild bunch, sitting in some of the biggest spaces the course offers, often interrupted by semi-blind hills, center-line bunkers and visual trickery. The best of these, the 11th, features one of the course's wildest greens, with swooping slopes and a tiny front-left appendage that could house a truly cheeky hole location or two. The most fun aspect of the hole is that the optimal line off the tee could vary by as much as 75 yards depending on the day's pin position; the steeplechase of bunkers and hummocks is bound to be different every day.
The golf features on The Third would be best described as eclectic. The bunkering features everything from broad Australian-style shapes to Dye-like pots and naturalistic sandscapes. Somehow, it all works together in concert with an equally varied set of greens, most of which rise gently out of the natural grade and are bordered by plenty of short-grass chipping areas. The course will test practically every shot in a golfer's arsenal without abusing higher-handicappers, though a little work on bunker technique will go a long way towards ensuring a fun routing.
Golf course names scarcely come cleverer than The Third, which simultaneously nods to its place in the rapid expansion of Watersound Club and the name of its architect, 1997 PGA Champion Davis Love III. The Love Golf Design firm has been wildly underrated for years, steadily producing fun and interesting golf across the South. With The Third now open and with a restoration project at Harbour Town underway, the World Golf Hall-of-Famer and his associates continue to add to a sterling resume with trademark grace and gentility.
Like its companions Camp Creek and Sharks Tooth, The Third is mostly reserved for members of Watersound Club. But it is also accessible to guests of the Camp Creek Inn, a splendid 75-room boutique lodge 15 minutes away from the course.
Watersound Club - The Third
Lake Powell, Fla.
Par 71; 4,242 - 7,252 yards (six sets of tees)
Green fee: $295
WATERSOUND CLUB (THE THIRD)
— Tim Gavrich (@TimGavrich) April 30, 2025
Lake Powell, Fla.
Davis Love III, 2025
$295
Course #678
A keen sense of compression and release enables big, freewheeling par 5s and close-to-the-ground par 3s to cohabitate in a sophisticated way on a pine-lined site. Terrific everyday-type course. pic.twitter.com/I9iABneVLW
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