Vineyards' North Course Just Made Golf Digest's List. The Neighborhood Had Already Moved On.
"This recognition supports our belief that great clubs never stand still," said Michael Procacci Jr., co-owner of Vineyards Country Club, when Golf Digest named the club's North Course one of the nation's Best Transformations on January 20, 2026. Golf Digest's editors had combed through more than 350 renovated courses nationwide and kept fewer than 50. Vineyards' North Course was the only one from Southwest Florida to make the list, joining just two other Florida courses, one near Orlando and one near Tallahassee.
For a national golf publication, that's a fresh headline. For anyone who actually plays the North Course, it isn't news. Members had already been walking those rebuilt greens and fairways for more than a year by the time the recognition landed. The real story in Vineyards this season isn't the award itself. It's the gap between when the course changed and when anyone outside the gates noticed.
In April 2023, Vineyards Country Club officials announced the start of construction on the 18-hole South Course, originally designed by Bill Amick. Architect Kipp Schulties led the redesign, and the club announced its completion that December, in time for the 2023-24 season. Then, in March 2024, with the paint barely dry on the South Course, the club broke ground on the North Course. That project ran through the year and wrapped the following December.
Line those dates up and a fact emerges that no press release captures: for roughly twenty months, spanning three golf seasons, at least one of Vineyards' 36 holes was a construction site at any given time. That's not a footnote for members. That's two full winters of rerouted cart paths, rearranged tee sheets, and a golf calendar built around whichever course happened to be open that month. The Golf Digest honor closes out that stretch. It doesn't describe it.
The North Course work went well past cosmetic. Crews rebuilt every green complex from scratch, installed TifEagle greens, and laid Bimini bermudagrass across tees, fairways and rough. Bunkers were refurbished and the irrigation and drainage systems replaced outright. Schulties used the extra room on the back nine to reposition tee boxes, opening up new angles into greens that didn't exist under the old routing.
The changes show up hole by hole. The par 3 on 8 now plays from an elevated tee. The par 5 on 14 has been reworked entirely. The finish through 17 and 18 was redesigned to close the round on a harder note than the previous layout allowed. None of this was cosmetic turf work. Vineyards' Director of Agronomy, Billy Huskins, CGCS, was part of the design process from the start, balancing the new playability against long-term turf performance so the course wouldn't need another disruptive rebuild anytime soon.
While the two courses were mid-rebuild, the building at the center of the property wasn't. The clubhouse's own renovation cycle, which began with a new Wellness Center and Spa years earlier, had already wrapped well before the North Course reopened. By the time members were walking off that redesigned 18th green, they already had a full run of dining choices in place: Mr. P's Pub, the Lobby Bar, Terrace Dining, the Acqua Pool Bar, and Café V, the Blue Zones-certified spot serving smoothies and lighter fare since the wellness center opened.
For a couple of years, the dining side of Vineyards had nothing left to renovate. The golf side was the piece still catching up. That's an unusual sequence for a club redevelopment, where the building and the course typically finish closer together. Here, the 19th hole was ready long before the front nine was.
The club also adjusted its membership rules this year in a way that only makes sense once both courses are finished at the same time. Under the current policy, Lifestyle Members, the tier built around wellness, dining and social access rather than golf, can play after 3:00 p.m. at a reduced rate without it counting against their one round per month.
That kind of twilight allowance would have meant little when half the property was fenced off. Now that all 36 holes are simultaneously playable, it functions as an incentive to get members who don't hold a Full Golf Membership onto courses they haven't been using, filling afternoon tee times that would otherwise sit empty. It's a small rule change, but it only makes sense as a response to a very specific condition: for the first time in years, there's nothing left under construction to work around.
This fall is the first season Vineyards can point outward and describe the finished product with something other than its own newsletter. For the people who live here, that change happened enough seasons ago that it already stopped feeling like news. The award confirms what the neighborhood already knew.
If you're weighing a move into a golf community and want the ground-level read on what's actually finished, what's still in motion, and how a club's renovation calendar lines up with your own, The Silvers Group can walk you through it neighborhood by neighborhood, not just listing by listing.
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