The Golfer’s Journal: The Best-Kept Secret in Sawgrass
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“…As is often the case in public golf, you got what you paid for. Oak Bridge was never an inspired design, and conditions were always scruffy—at best. Unfortunately, poor management in the early 2000s sent it from Scruffy Charming to Scruffy Dump. In 2014, David Miller, a Southern California native who had lived in Ponte Vedra for 10 years, bought it. He brought in Mike Miles, a former PGA Tour player who previously served as head professional at Virginia Country Club in Southern California. Everyone in town held their breath. What would become of the local favorite?
Miller and Miles came in with a plan that, on the face of it, scared the hell out of people. Miller sold the back six holes to an assisted living facility and turned Oak Bridge into The Yards. The name wasn’t just funky cool: The new course kept the original par-35 front nine—the front yard—and turned the previous Nos. 10-12 into a completely new track with three regulation-sized par 3s on an outer loop, and three smaller ones on an inner loop surrounding a pond—the back yard. The scorecard went from the time-honored 18 holes down to a new number gaining popularity: 12 (or if you’ve got the time, 15). When Miller and Miles further articulated their philosophy for the club to remain public, be elevated but casual, a place where you could wear a sport coat to dinner while others had their shirts untucked on the patio, traditionalists wailed. Parents like me cheered.
“This is the way we have to think,” Miller told the local newspaper. “I’ve got a 10-year-old daughter and an 84-year-old father I’m trying to keep in the game and neither one has 18 holes in the tank. Players are dropping out because of the time and expense golf costs.”
And so The Yards was born. Today, if you show up on any sun-dappled spring afternoon—and you can—you’ll see parents and little ones on the putting green, serious kids getting lessons on the back range or the short-game area, husbands and wives walking the back three, grinders sweating out a second bucket on the range, and mid-handicappers cracking High Noons on the first tee while setting the stakes for their match, all while the latest community event gets set up on the expansive patio. Whatever potential developers may have dreamed for Oak Bridge, The Yards has surpassed it…”