Six Foursomes a Day: The New Math of Golf at Watersound Camp Creek

Open the Watersound Club app on a Friday morning at Camp Creek and you will see the same message a lot of members are seeing this fall: a lottery request window for The Third, closing at 3 p.m., six foursomes awarded for each of the coming Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. That is eighteen foursomes total, seventy-two golfers, for an entire weekend of play on the newest of the club's three courses.

For a neighborhood built around golf carts humming past low coastal-style homes, that number changes something. The scarcity at Watersound Camp Creek this season isn't really about green fees or course conditions. It's about whether you already have three other people locked in.

The Course That Made 54 Holes Feel Different

The Third opened for play in the spring of 2025, first to members through the lottery and later to Camp Creek Inn guests, giving Watersound Club three courses and 54 holes of championship golf for the first time. Davis Love III designed it with his brother Mark Love and lead architect Scot Sherman, and it sits just north of Shark's Tooth on a flat, pine-lined tract that architecture writers have compared to English heathland courses more than typical Florida golf. GolfPass's review called it a "terrific everyday-type course," which is a modest way to describe a design with six sets of tees running from 4,242 to 7,252 yards.

Camp Creek Golf Course, the Tom Fazio design that anchors the neighborhood and carries an Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary certification, books the way most private courses do: through the normal tee sheet, no lottery required. Shark's Tooth works the same way. The Third is the outlier, and that outlier status is doing more to shape resident golf schedules than the course's yardage or its bunkering ever will.

The Rule That Turns Booking Into Recruiting

Here is the part that catches people off guard. The lottery does not award tee times to individuals or pairs. It requires a complete team of four members submitted together, and teams of three or fewer are not awarded a slot at all, no matter how far ahead they apply. A member can only appear in one foursome request per week. Family members sharing a single membership who each try to submit their own separate request get automatically disqualified from the whole thing.

Requests can only go in through the member app or the desktop portal. Calling the golf shop does not work. The window opens seven days before play, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., which means the entire process for next weekend's rounds happens and closes inside a single Friday.

Read that table again and the pattern is clear. The binding constraint isn't the club's course capacity. It's whether four members can coordinate a week ahead of time, every time, for a chance at a slot that isn't guaranteed even then.

Why This Matters More Than the Score

Mark Love, describing the design intent behind The Third, put it this way: "Players should be able to find a set of tees that matches their game." That's a course built for range of skill. The booking system, though, was built for something else entirely. St. Joe's own language around the opening framed it plainly: more members plus more demand for golf equals the need for more capacity, and the lottery is the interim answer to that math.

What that means for someone who already lives in Watersound Camp Creek is a quiet shift in social behavior. The members getting onto The Third with any regularity are not the ones checking the app cold every Friday morning. They are the ones with a standing group, already agreed on a week, ready to submit the moment the window opens at 7 a.m. Golf here has become less a transaction and more a coordination exercise, and the people who treat it that way are the ones playing the new course.

If you are a member and haven't been able to get a tee time yet, the fix probably isn't checking the app more often. It's building the group first. Find your three, agree on a target week, and be ready the morning the window opens, not the afternoon it closes.

What Fills the Rest of the Week

None of this means Watersound Camp Creek runs quiet the other four days. Watersound Town Center, a short ride from the neighborhood, has been adding names to its roster all year. FP Movement, Hemline, Monkee's, and Sunset Shoes & Lifestyles have all opened their doors this year, with Johnnie-O announced for the same wave of openings. On the dining side, Camp Creek Inn's ANR and 1936 anchor the sit-down end of things, Bark N' Brine covers the casual poolside crowd, and Scout Sports Tavern rounds out the options for anyone who wants a game on and a plate in front of them.

The evening calendar has its own rhythm this fall. The Pavilion at Watersound Town Center is hosting the First Friday Fall Concert Series, a free, family-friendly run of shows on September 4, October 2, November 6, and December 4. The Pink Stones open the season, followed by The Mammals, the Webb Wilder Band, and Michelle Malone & The Hot Toddies to close out the year. The October and December dates add an Art Bazaar starting at 4 p.m., with local makers setting up before the music starts at six. The November concert has a bonus attached: the Cultural Arts Alliance's Flutterby Arts Festival returns to the Pavilion on Sunday, November 8, timed to the Monarch migration that passes through this stretch of the coast every fall.

None of this replaces a missed tee time. But it does mean the weeks you don't get drawn for The Third have their own reasons to be out and about, whether that's a Friday concert under the Pavilion roof or a weeknight dinner at 1936 while you wait for next week's lottery window to open.

The Bigger Picture

The Third didn't just add 18 holes to Watersound Camp Creek. It added a small, recurring test of whether a member's social circle is organized enough to act on a seven-day clock. That's not a complaint about the system. It's just the actual shape of golf access here this fall, and it's worth knowing before you're staring at a closed request window wondering what happened.

Whether you're already part of the Watersound Camp Creek community or you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in a neighborhood built around a private club, Jennifer Drew can walk you through the details that don't show up on a course website. Let's Connect.