OCALA, FL. Inspectors visiting Country Club of Ocala Tennis on SE 12th Circle on September 24 found that the facility had no written employee health policy, no system for workers to report illness symptoms, and no consumer advisory warning members about raw or undercooked foods on the menu — three violations that, taken together, describe a kitchen operating without the most basic disease-prevention infrastructure in place.
The inspection turned up 10 high-severity violations and 3 intermediate violations. The facility was not closed.
What Inspectors Found
The parasite destruction citation is one of the more specific findings. When a kitchen serves fish that will be eaten raw or undercooked, state rules require documented freezing protocols to kill parasites including Anisakis and tapeworm. Without those procedures in place, there is no verification that the fish reaching a member's plate was ever rendered safe.
Toxic chemicals were found improperly stored or labeled. That violation puts cleaning agents and food in proximity without adequate separation or identification, a condition that has caused acute poisoning cases in other facilities through mislabeled containers or accidental contamination.
Inspectors also cited inadequate shell stock identification and records. Shellfish, including oysters, clams, and mussels, carry traceability requirements precisely because they are frequently eaten raw. Without proper tags and records, there is no way to trace an illness back to a source harvest location if a member gets sick.
The person in charge was cited as not present or not performing duties. That finding is not administrative. Research consistently links the absence of active managerial control to higher rates of critical violations, because the person in charge is the enforcement mechanism for every other food safety procedure in the building.
What These Violations Mean
The combination of no employee health policy and no system for workers to report illness symptoms is particularly dangerous. These two violations, documented together on the same inspection, describe a kitchen where a worker with Norovirus or Salmonella has no formal obligation to stay home and no written framework telling them they should. Norovirus is responsible for roughly 20 million illnesses in the United States each year, and food workers are among the most common transmission vectors.
The improper handwashing technique citation compounds that risk. Even when a worker attempts to wash their hands, the technique documented here was insufficient to remove pathogens. That means the handwashing step, which is the primary barrier between a sick worker and a member's food, was not functioning as intended.
The time-as-public-health-control violation adds another layer. When a kitchen uses time rather than temperature to manage food safety, the rules require strict documentation and disposal protocols. Without them, food sits in the bacterial growth range, between 41 and 135 degrees, for untracked periods, and there is no record of when it should have been discarded.
The sewage and waste water disposal citation, listed as intermediate, carries consequences that reach across the entire facility. Improper sewage handling creates pathways for fecal contamination that can affect food preparation surfaces, equipment, and water sources throughout the kitchen.
The Longer Record
The September 24 inspection is not an outlier. State records show 23 inspections on file for this facility, with 112 total violations accumulated across that history. The facility has never been emergency-closed.
The most direct comparison in the record is October 4, 2023, when inspectors documented exactly 10 high-severity violations and 2 intermediate violations, the same high-severity count as this month's inspection. That visit was followed by a February 2026 inspection that turned up 6 high-severity violations and 3 intermediate violations, then a pair of lighter inspections in September and November 2025 with 2 and 1 high-severity violations respectively.
The pattern is not one of steady improvement. The facility has cycled between lighter inspection results and returns to double-digit high-severity counts twice now, in October 2023 and again in September 2026. The violations in those two heaviest inspections overlap in category, including management failures and food safety procedure gaps, suggesting the underlying conditions that produce these citations have not been resolved between visits.
The facility has accumulated 112 violations across 23 inspections without a single emergency closure. The September 24 inspection, with 10 high-severity findings that included chemical storage, parasite procedures, shellfish traceability, and a kitchen operating without any sick-worker reporting system, did not change that record.
The Country Club of Ocala Tennis remained open after the inspection.
