Q&A: Tripp Davis, Gasparilla Golf Club
Alex Elias
When was the first time you visited Gasparilla Golf Club, and what was your first impression?
I first visited in April of 2022. My wife and I went down and stayed a few days, and I got to play it twice, in addition to touring it with the Golf Course Superintendent, Elliot Garrison.
The course is in a beautiful setting, with five holes playing along Charlotte Harbor—the large body of water inside the outer islands on Florida’s west coast, south of Sarasota and north of Naples. The course is on a relatively small piece of land, but Pete fit the holes together in a way that does not make it feel too tight.
There was a course on the same ground, originally built in 1933, but Pete moved some things around. You could see Pete’s style for sure, but over time, since he did his work there, there had been a lot of change. The bunkers had been changed so the grass faces had been laid down, the sand had been raised, and you could see that the greens were smaller.
The fact that it would be somewhat of a “restoration” made it exciting to think about.
Having now restored Oak Tree National and Gasparilla Golf Club, how would you describe Pete Dye’s designs? What stands out to you most about his designs?
I was fortunate to play a lot of competitive golf on Pete’s courses. Pete’s style was certainly unique and, at times, included a lot of earth movement and distinctive shaping. His courses tended to be visually intimidating, which led many to think of him as very much a penal designer. But I think his designs are typically misunderstood.
The options he regularly created, including more conservative lines of play, with a lot of strategic interest are what I have come to appreciate most over the years of playing and now working on his designs. As innovative as some think his style was visually, he was equally innovative with his strategic substance and how much study it took to understand his courses.
He offered an aggressive line of play on most every shot, with small margins for error. But on nearly every shot on every one of his courses I have played or worked on, there is also a conservative line or shot option that offers a relatively wider margin for error. He highlighted and brought attention visually to the more aggressive lines of play, while the conservative route was often less evident. It was not always directly wide right or left of the more aggressive line; it could be short of it or, at times, long of it.
What changes were made to the bunkers and greens?
I enlarged most every green, and with most every green I shifted the location slightly to fit the strategic intent in a modern way. I took most of the greens and turned them a little to provide more angles into the enlarged portions, creating some new, tougher hole locations.
I had all of the greens mapped with 0.1-foot contours so I could see in detail what the original intent was. They were built to work with much slower greens than we expected we would have today, so I modified contours in places, using the mapping to move the contours to where we may have shifted the green location.
We significantly moved Nos. 1, 4, 8, 16 and, especially, 18, which we moved back 25 yards. With these greens, I redesigned them with Pete’s basic approach in mind.
The bunkers were rebuilt to have good liners and better drainage, and we restored the steeper grass-face style. About one-quarter of the bunkers stayed pretty much where they were, half of the current bunkers were subtly changed, mainly to push them farther from the tees, and one-quarter are new. We also removed 10 bunkers.
The intent with the bunker work was clearly to bring them more into play for better players taking the more aggressive lines, while creating more room for the average to higher-handicap player so they have conservative options with wider margins for error.
As Gasparilla Golf Club has an active membership, while guests of The Gasparilla Inn can also play the course, how did that influence the changes you made? How much emphasis was placed on making the course challenging for low handicappers while still enjoyable for higher handicappers?
There is a very active membership at Gasparilla that makes up at least half, if not more, of the play. They will learn the course better than a guest at the Inn, but we still wanted to make the course fun—interesting and thoughtful, but fun.
I always go back to what I have learned playing and studying Pete’s courses: creating smaller margins for error for the more aggressive lines and providing wider margins for error on more conservative lines.
If you want to shoot near par on one of Pete’s courses, you have to take on a good many of the aggressive lines. The conservative lines tend to lead to bogeys, which is okay for a 15-handicap player, but not for a scratch player too often.
How do you balance modernizing a course while also staying true to Dye’s original design? What are some examples of Dye’s original intent that you wanted to restore?
The game has evolved, not only in how the best players play, but also because there are now many more different types of players—more women play, more senior men and older senior men, more beginners, and more people who play but do so less frequently.
Pete’s basic design intent at Gasparilla was to create a visually interesting golf experience that requires thought. We worked with his original design as the foundation for how we adapted the course for modern players to enjoy experiencing a Pete Dye design.
That is most often found in a lot of subtle things, like tee placements, strategic width of fairways, the demands of missing a green, and less or more stringent hole locations. If you played Gasparilla before, you would likely not notice a significant difference, but it is there—in the restoration of the bunker style, larger greens with a somewhat greater variety of hole locations, slightly different angles into greens, bunkers relocated slightly, and so on.
I would also say that I saw some opportunities to do things Pete may have done had he done this project himself, which was really interesting for me. The change at No. 1 green, adding some tees well right on No. 14, and pushing the green back on No. 18 to make it a stronger finishing hole are examples of that. He may not have been able to do some of those things originally.
His original design intent was largely intact as I found it, only perhaps with a different style in places and greens that were smaller. So we retained most of it and enhanced it where it made sense. There is not one specific thing I wanted to restore from what was there when I found it. I would say it was more about doing some things I think he would have done today.
