Golf’s growth story is no longer simply about how many people are playing. It is about how many different ways there are to be a golfer.
A record 48.1 million Americans played golf on or off the course in 2025, according to the National Golf Foundation, a 41% increase in total participation since 2019. Women now represent 28% of on-course golfers, while younger players and off-course participants are also helping broaden the game’s audience. At Glynlea Country Club in Port St. Lucie, that wider range of golfers, and the community that surrounds them, is already visible.
An experienced player can step onto an 18-hole championship course shaped by Jim Furyk’s philosophy about challenge and playability. A newcomer can spend an afternoon hitting floating targets at the nation’s first Aquatic Toptracer Driving Range. Tennis, pickleball, shaded gathering areas and the Tee Box Grille add other reasons to meet at the club. The common thread is participation: golf still rewards skill, strategy and commitment, while giving people more ways to find their place in the sport.
A Championship Course Designed to Welcome Different Games
As the game attracts players with different handicaps, expectations and levels of experience, course design has evolved with it. The challenge is creating a championship-caliber course that remains strategic for accomplished golfers while still being enjoyable for a broader range of players.
For Jim Furyk, that balance helped shape the vision for Glynlea. The 17-time PGA TOUR winner worked with veteran golf course architect Mike Beebe on Furyk’s first solo course design, creating a par-72 layout that gives players room off the tee while preserving strategic decisions around bunkers, approach angles and greens.
“I want folks to enjoy themselves and come out here and have a great time,” Furyk said while discussing the philosophy behind the course.
That intention shows up throughout the layout. Wide landing areas give players options from the tee, while multiple tee positions change both distance and angle. Stronger players encounter strategic decisions that reward precision, while others have room to move the ball forward and stay in the hole. Five par 3s and five par 5s add variety across the round.
Furyk has described the course as relatively user-friendly while still giving accomplished golfers decisions to make. That balance becomes more important as the game attracts people with different handicaps, expectations and levels of experience.
Glynlea residents Chad and Susan Sanders see that range firsthand. Susan has a straightforward measure of success: “I haven’t lost any balls yet.” Chad, a more experienced player, sees the other side, describing the layout as open, with fast, true greens, and saying it suits “a myriad of golfers and handicaps.” They are playing the same course without needing to play the same game.
At Toptracer, You Do Not Have to Call Yourself a Golfer
Brandie Goan makes the changing golf audience even easier to understand. Asked whether she plays golf, her answer was simple: “I do not.” Then the conversation turned to Glynlea’s Aquatic Toptracer Driving Range.
Brandie and her family had taken their children there and stayed for almost half a day. “It was a blast,” she said. Their younger daughter went from struggling to make contact to, as the family described it, “crushing it.” That is the kind of entry point traditional golf has not always offered.
Glynlea’s Aquatic Toptracer Driving Range features 10 covered hitting bays aimed across the water toward floating targets. Toptracer technology tracks each shot in real time, giving experienced players data for focused practice while also supporting virtual courses, skills challenges and interactive games.
Someone can work on launch, distance and shot shape while another person in the next bay competes with friends. A parent can bring children who are still learning how to make contact. The format makes golf easier to enter without making it less rewarding for those who already know the game.
The setting also extends beyond the swing. The Tee Box Grille brings food and conversation into the range atmosphere, while events and friendly competitions create reasons to stay after the last ball is hit. Chad and Susan recalled bringing neighbors to a closest-to-the-pin event there and turning practice into an evening together. Golf has always had a social side, but today that experience is expanding beyond the traditional round. At Glynlea, that broader approach is already part of daily club life.
Today’s Golfer is Redefining Country Club Life
Golf may anchor Glynlea Country Club, but the activity around the course shows how the definition of a golf community is expanding with the people who use it. Today, residents and guests can play the championship course, spend time at the Aquatic Toptracer Driving Range, meet over food at the Tee Box Grille or head to the tennis and pickleball courts. Shaded gathering areas give neighbors places to linger between activities.
Brandie and her husband, Regan, offer a useful example. Regan grew up playing golf and wants to return to it more regularly. Brandie does not consider herself a golfer. Yet both have found ways to use the club, and their children have joined them at the range, tennis courts and pickleball courts. That is a much more useful picture of the modern golf community than a single golfer profile.
Glynlea can serve the player who cares about course architecture and green speed, the person picking up a club for the first time and the household whose time at the club moves easily among golf, racquet sports, food and conversation.
Planned dining, fitness, aquatics and additional social spaces will expand those options further as the club develops. What is already open, however, makes the central idea clear: there is no requirement that everyone participate in the same way.
Today’s golfer may be an experienced player looking for a course worth returning to, a parent introducing a child to the game or someone discovering that an afternoon at the range can be as social as it is competitive. At Glynlea, those experiences belong to the same community.
Located within Wylder in Port St. Lucie, Glynlea Country Club offers new homes from Lennar, Perry Homes and Dream Finders Homes, with six designer model homes open to explore. Visit GlynleaCountryClub.com to discover the community, golf experience and available homes.
