Walk the amenity list at Arbor Greene's Community Center and you'll find two pools, a fitness room, a fitness studio, a gathering room built for parties, and courts for two different racquet sports: eight Har-Tru clay tennis courts and two pickleball courts. What you will not find, anywhere in that lineup, is a golf course. Arbor Greene was built as a tennis-and-pool community, full stop.
That gap used to mean something simple: if you wanted golf, you drove somewhere else and paid a guest rate, or you didn't play. This spring, the club a few miles up the road made that arrangement look a lot more interesting than a workaround.
What Happened at Hunter's Green in March
On March 29 and 30, Hunter's Green Golf & Country Club hosted its first Celebrity Golf Tournament, organized by the Bullard Family Foundation. The event brought a mix of athletes, entertainers, and community leaders to New Tampa for what local coverage described as a genuinely new addition to the area's calendar, not a repeat of something that had run quietly for years.
The name behind it is one most sports fans in the area already know. Thaddeus Bullard, who spent years performing as WWE's Titus O'Neil, hosted the tournament himself. More than a hundred people showed up. Bullard has lived in Tampa since 2004 and has said the city is where he raised his sons and found his footing before he ever put on a wrestling boot.
"Tampa is so important to me. It's where I grew up as a man. I came here in 2004. I wasn't a WWE superstar when I got here. I was trying to find my way. I raised my sons here and just continuously poured into this area. I've seen it grow, and it helped me grow."
The foundation isn't new to giving back locally. It's known around Tampa for back-to-school backpack giveaways and Christmas giveaways, and organizers said proceeds from the golf event go toward youth development, education, and family stability. What made this one different is the format: a celebrity tournament, run for the first time, at a private club less than a fifteen-minute drive from Arbor Greene's front gate.
The Course Underneath the Cameras
Strip away the celebrity guest list and Hunter's Green is still a serious golf property. The course was built in 1989 and carries a Tom Fazio design, with additional work credited to Fazio in 2006 and to original co-designer Dennis Wise. From the Gold tees it plays 7,059 yards with a course rating of 73.3 and a slope of 133, and the greens are TifEagle grass, the same fine-bladed Bermuda variety used on a lot of the courses that host serious tournament play in the Southeast.
None of that shows up in a headline about a celebrity fundraiser, but it's the reason the club could host an event like this without anyone questioning whether the course could handle it. A first-year charity tournament works because the golf holds up underneath it.
Why an Arbor Greene Resident Should Care
Here's the part that actually changes something for people who live in Arbor Greene and have no plans to move.
Hunter's Green, the residential community that surrounds the club, is built differently than Arbor Greene. It spreads across 23 neighborhood enclaves around 43 lakes and roughly 65 acres of protected wetlands, and it borders the Flatwoods Nature Park trail system, which loops for about seven miles through the county's wilder acreage. But the country club sitting at the center of all that isn't bundled into the homeowners association the way Arbor Greene's pools and tennis courts are bundled into its own. Club membership at Hunter's Green is optional, purchased separately, and open to people who don't live inside those gates at all.
That's the detail that matters if your address is Arbor Greene, not Hunter's Green. You don't have to buy a home there to belong to the club. Membership is a transaction, not a residency requirement.
What membership actually includes goes beyond the golf course itself:
- An 18-hole Tom Fazio championship layout, tennis courts, a fitness center, and a resort-style pool
- Two on-site dining venues for casual and formal meals
- A club calendar built around themed dinners and member social events, the same kind of calendar that produced this year's tournament
- Access to Invited's national XLife network, which extends benefits to more than 1,000 hotels, resorts, and entertainment venues
- Reciprocal Cross Bay privileges at two or three additional Tampa Bay clubs, including discounted cart fees, reduced guest fees, and a 25 percent discount on food and beverage purchases at those partner clubs
That last point is the one worth sitting with. Membership at Hunter's Green isn't just an entry pass to one course. It's a foothold in a wider club network across the Tampa Bay region, available to anyone willing to pay the membership fee, regardless of which gated community they actually drive home to at night.
What This Means for the Rest of the Calendar
A first-year event is worth watching, not just attending. If Hunter's Green just proved it can run a tournament that draws a hundred-plus people and a genuine celebrity host, the natural question for anyone nearby is whether that becomes an annual fixture or a one-time experiment. Either way, it tells you something about the direction the club's programming is heading, and that's useful information whether you're a member, considering membership, or simply the kind of resident who likes knowing what's happening within a short drive of home.
For Arbor Greene, the takeaway isn't that the neighborhood is missing something. Two pools, eight tennis courts, and a full fitness center is a real amenity package on its own. It's that the golf, when residents want it, doesn't require a change of address to reach. It requires a membership card, a good year for the tournament calendar, and, this March, a WWE legend willing to host.
If you're weighing what a home in this part of New Tampa actually gives you access to, beyond the walls of your own HOA, that's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks these details closely. Pamela Link at Your Link To Luxury has spent two decades working these New Tampa and Wesley Chapel neighborhoods and can walk you through what's bundled, what's optional, and what's actually next door before you make any decision about where to plant roots.
