Huntington Hills Golf & Country Club

Stacked tee times of 7 minutes

teenagers playing in 5 some

People reloading bad tee shots

All of this reflects the popularity if golf without etiquette and rangers controlling pace of play. I blame them course for stacking those tee times close together without having a shepard moving along the sheep! I left after 15 holes

Be careful as the round can take forever! #1 issue is starter lets people play past there tee time and it slows everything down.

Pace of play is terrible took 5 hours to play 14 holes they stack tee times backed up and waiting on everyone hole i definitely won’t be back

Pace of play was the worst ! Some holes had 3 groups waiting on the tees !! Course over books tee times way too close together. I’m not interested in playing that slow and didn’t see a ranger all through our round !

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Greens are always good. We had some rains so course was soft but I’m sure it will help conditions.

5+ hr round. Followed a foursome that had 2 sets of clubs and shared. Course was fairly full but people we followed were painfully slow. Also saw a fivesome a few groups ahead that didn’t help. Love the course and price point. Staff is great but ranger needs to step up.

I would still recommend this course.

This course is challenging from Tee to green. You’ll find no better course in the area like this one. Bring your A game. to play this course, you’ll love it.

2nd time playing here. First time was so slow and I let it slide bc it was a Saturday. Played on a Sunday last week and it was even worse. Course is in great shape but there was at minimum 3 groups waiting at each hole. It gets you out of groove. It’s tough bc the course is layout is fun and challenging. Solid driving range as well.

Overall a very good experience except the pace of play here is almost always 41/2 to 5 hours. This day teed of at 1:15 & finished at 6:05.

The course was in great shape. Greens were slow but in fantastic shape shape. The staff couldn’t have been more friendly. My go to course in Lakeland area

Had a tee time at 930 so we left the Tampa area around 8 am. We did not get back to Tampa until 4pm. Almost a full 8 hours later. Almost 3 hours to get through the front, with the pace getting slightly better over the back 9. 5 and half hour round. Not worth coming back until they space the tee times out a bit more. 7 minutes gaps are not enough. No Marshall anywhere to be seen. We had 5 groups backed up on the 2nd hole. Other than pace, we did enjoy the round. The greens are very well kept. Tee boxes were nice, fairways were decent with some weedage and dry areas along the rough. All in all, this would be a wonderful place to visit more often if they can get pacing under control or get a Marshall to speed groups along.

My round was at 1:45 and I thought it was reasonable that myself and one other person would be able to play a full round before the sun went down, around 5:30-6 pm. We got to the course and noticed 3 groups on the first hole. One group waiting on the tee box for people to clear the fairway, the people on the fairway waiting to hit for people putting on the green. This place was OVERBOOKED. They have no idea how to run a course. It’s also kind of a distasteful feeling looking at the scorecard and seeing it’s full of advertisements. My playing partner and I got through 6 holes and it was nearly 4pm. We decided to drive through the course to see if it opened up ahead of us and it didn’t. It was a 10 minute wait to be able to step onto the tee box on every hole and then another 10 minute wait to actually be able to hit. I wouldn’t recommend unless you want to play a 6 and a half hour round.

On this early March day, not long after a mid-Florida drought had reached its worst, conditions proved to be the main story at Huntington Hills. Yet the course itself remains an otherwise strong design that checks many of the boxes for challenge and strategic interest.

Conditions

Conditions greatly lagged the almost uniformly positive playing surfaces I observed here last year. There were highlights: the greens and bunkers were well-conditioned, the tees mostly above average. Greenside zones proved a mixed bag, as turf conditions made pitching and chipping a strain; before long I began choosing putter from off the green (several times) for fear of botching these shots out of tight or spongy lies. The fairways were underwhelming, given the very sparse grass and a general patchiness. Roughs were far less than desirable.

Layout

About the Huntington Hills layout, however, there is little room to find fault. If any single aspect elevates this layout well above what is commonplace, it is architect Ron Garl’s bunkering, which transforms the course from a simple rolling layout into a study in disciplined positioning.

Creating a strong opening impression, rolling hills define much of the terrain—as the course’s name suggests. Yet it is Garl himself who sets the initial tone, complementing those natural contours with mounding and occasional fairway undulations. Moreover, he places fairway hazards to add another layer of strategic intent. Used with similar variety to the contours are the trees, whether isolated or clustered, or, more ominously, taking the form of dense woodland walls at the course’s outer edges.

Yet the ultimate character of HHGC does not rest on trees and hills alone. This instead stems from the roughly thirty strategic bunkers, which appear most often near the greens but also frequently around fairways. What was Garl up to? Nothing less than transforming the bunkers from a visual feature into a discipline of placement. And it is the bunkers that almost invariably shape a player’s tee-to-green decisions. Sometimes elephantine and bullying, at other times pot-like and rude, they vary widely in size, shape, and depth. Over the course of the round, each seemed to demand my attention. More than any other hazard, they warrant a careful, planned attack: guile outweighs reckless aggression.

Beyond the fine bunkering, Garl wanted to take it up another couple of notches. First, he supplemented the bunkers with waste areas. These often create the greatest psychological threat through their sprawling enormity, especially because they may be seen from the tees as visual magnets. Secondly, he plotted several of these holes such that the most severe hazard–out of bounds, for example–lies on one side of the fairway, counterbalanced by a big bunker or two on the seemingly safer side. It is a tactic that may surprise less experienced players, but it also clearly emphasizes disciplined, positional golf. Making good decisions in response, then, will pay dividends to those weighing their tee shots carefully. Supporting this tactic, too, are fairway widths that often run slightly beyond what is adequate. The structure in this aspect of Garl’s work parallels the similarly controlled strategic edge that Robert Trent Jones, Sr., often employed. And coming from a savvy architect like Garl, this can hardly be called surprising.

What about the typical Florida inland water hazards that show up here? Essentially taking part as cameo players, they still up the ante at holes such as three, four, twelve, and sixteen. The third, especially, is a tough target hole—-playing over a large pond-–that tightens the screws from tee to green. And four, an uphill par-3 that traverses the same pond, may be overlooked—until the player has been “had" by the not-so-subtle slopes on and around its green. The Huntington water hazards do not create genuine risk-reward setups. Their presence, though, again signals an emphasis on tactical and positional golf.

Further splashes of color appear through the fine and unpredictable green design, but also several short par-4s (they include 8, 16, 17 and 18) that are both original and fun to play.

It is not a sensational course, but it stands well above the norm. Garl achieves excellence, but in a way that you almost fail to notice.

Pace

Over the opening four holes, the pace of play left something to be desired, with several groups taking a deliberate approach—uncomfortable to watch—to their pre-shot routines. The logjam peaked at the third tee; multiple groups were stacked up there in short order.

Conclusions

My foursome was a very pleasant one today, and the staff here treats customers well.

I recommend this course, but with a caveat to golfers who place a high value upon carpet-like fairways and predictable roughs–especially around greens. They will have to look elsewhere for the time being. I suspect, though, that management’s objective will be to do what is necessary to restore the turf to its former standard.

We were here about a week ago, and the course wasn't in such good condition then.

Now the course has improved significantly, and there is green grass on the fairway.

The many broken tees have also been removed from the tee boxes. Thank you.

Thanks also to the cart staff for their excellent service in bringing us a new cart for our round, as ours was damaged.

However, the condition of the bathrooms at the 6th hole still needs improvement.

Otherwise, everything was great, and we'd love to come back.

Fun course that challenges a mid level golfers. Fairways were in good shape. Greens were excellent. Course has many many Sandra's to hit out of. Fun round.