Short courses are popping up all over golf, especially at high-end resorts like Cabot Citrus Farms. Sometimes they're not quite sure what they want to be - user-friendly on-ramps to golf or small-scale distillations of the ideas found throughout the neighboring bigger courses. The Wedge is certainly of the latter sort - a strong taste of what golfers can expect from Karoo, Roost and The Squeeze. -

Karoo makes as strong an impression as any golf course I have played in recent years. Built on a tract that used to house World Woods Golf Club's Pine Barrens course, it takes the original's gestures towards sandscape golf and dials things up to 11, with some of the most intricate and everpresent bunkering - both formalized and naturalistic - in American golf. On top of this, huge split fairways and enormous greens - trumped in size among Florida courses only by Streamsong Black - layer intensity on top of intensity. It boils over occasionally but like a complicated arrangement from a marching band with the odd off-note, you have to admire the effort and ambition.

Roost can fairly be considered a more mild companion to Karoo's squawking swagger, but there is plenty that stands out on this more dramatic of the two big-course properties at Cabot Citrus Farms. The opening trio of holes feels similarly intense to Karoo before heading off on its own sort of adventure, swooping up along and away both sides of a lake. The long par-4 12th features an ode to Augusta National's rollicking 14th green and the stretch of holes from 13 through 17 is some of the strongest golf on property. --

The most consistently high-quality at Cabot Citrus Farms is found on Mike Nuzzo's ode to half-par holes, consisting of several short par 4s, a reachable par 5 and some amusing par 3s. By far the most restrained bunkering found on property allows The Squeeze's rippling fairway and green contours to shine. Nuzzo, whose TX0 (formerly known as Wolf Point) is one of Texas' greatest golf courses, deserves more solo commissions, in my view.