As High Grove golf club in Venus moves toward its December opening, its owners have begun to hire locals to work on its grounds and its hospitality department.
That’s the word from the club’s general manager.
“We already have 41 locals working on our grounds, and we’re starting to post positions for servers and bartenders,” GM Steve Ousley told the Highlands News-Sun last week.
The jobs, posted on Indeed.com and other sites, include a full-time member services manager who will work weekends when needed. It includes paid time off, dental insurance and vision insurance, and 401(k). Its ads for the culinary team, bartenders, and servers are seasonal positions and include many of the same benefits. The club will be open only during the winter months.
The hiring comes as work on the golf course and guest lodges also near completion.
“We’re still finishing up construction and the golf course is getting closer to completion,” Ousley said. “We’re building the destination rooms right now; they’re lodge style with open rooms off the front. They are designed in the spirit of what Florida looked like years ago.”
High Grove is three miles south of State Road 70 on U.S. 27. It is roughly defined by Prillwitz and Cambria roads, shell roads running east off U.S. 27 to the ridge dropoff. The course is being built along the ridge, with rises and dips between greens.
Ousley was at the Nov. 18 County Commission meeting as commissioners vacated their ownership of Pritzwill and Cambria roads. The club owners will put roadblocks on the roads to prevent the theft of equipment, construction materials, or any other items from the 1,200-acre site.
According to its developers, High Grove is “an exclusive club featuring a meticulously designed 18-hole course by Hanse Golf Design, taking full advantage of the site’s natural ridges, orange groves, and sandy terrain.”
The facility includes a practice area, clubhouse, three lodges consisting of a total of 48 rooms, and a short course. The course uses a walking-focused layout, blending traditional design with the unique topography of Florida’s Lake Wales Ridge, “providing a premier experience for dedicated golf enthusiasts,” Ousley said.
The club owners also planted 10,000 orange trees to enhance the feeling of isolation from the modern world. The citrus will be harvested as a working grove.
Ousley said his company has not made grand announcements on social media, rather preferring to be low-key. The designers of the golf course, Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, have followers of their own, so the chatter is already heavy in the golf world.
“We prefer to keep it more humble, simplistic,” Ousley said. “We don’t want to flaunt it so there’s not a lot of stuff on social media. Not in the sense that we’re trying not to tell anyone anything, we just don’t want to flaunt it.”
The club is expected to open in December.