The Preserve Golf Club

Overview: The Preserve Golf Club in Vancleave is a Jerry Pate design set within a much larger protected natural landscape. The 245-acre course is surrounded by an approximately 1,800-acre preserve, and the routing moves among cypress wetlands, live oak groves, longleaf pine country and native prairie grasses. The course’s woodland character comes from the way the holes pass between enclosed tree-lined corridors and more open fairways. Water is present on several holes, but the main architectural story is the contrast between the maintained playing surfaces and the Mississippi Gulf Coast ecology beyond them. The closing stretch illustrates the balance well, pairing strategic options with water and framed green approaches.

History: The Preserve opened in 2006 as a Jerry Pate design and was developed in close cooperation with conservation organisations. The project worked with The Nature Conservancy and Audubon International to protect the native cypress swamps, live oak groves and prairie grasses surrounding the course. That collaboration is central to the course history: the layout was not treated as a separate clearing inside the landscape, but as a golf project that had to respect a much larger protected setting. The result is a Gulf Coast course whose identity depends as much on the retained habitat as on the shaped fairways and greens.

Did You Know? Eight of the 18 holes are influenced by water. The 17th is a short risk-and-reward par four with a lake along the left, while the 18th approaches a green guarded by bunkers and the same lake, giving the finish a connected visual sequence.