CARLSBADCARLSBAD — The greens on the refurbished North Course at Omni La Costa Resort & Spa were hard, really hard, as new greens tend to be before the root structure matures. Many shots into the signature 16th hole would hit, bounce and roll into bunkers.
And that, symbolically, was the fear when the NCAA Division I men’s and women’s golf championships came to La Costa — a shot bouncing off the green in their first year.
Technically, La Costa has the championships for 2024, 2025 and 2026. But the ambitious goal is to make it the permanent site of the NCAA championships — in much the same way that Omaha, Neb., is for college baseball or Oklahoma City for college softball — and they weren’t getting three years to prove themselves.
The NCAA’s Division I golf committee is scheduled to decide on a 2027 and 2028 host in the fall, giving La Costa one year — and not three — to audition. Go somewhere else in 2027 and 2028, and the dream of a permanent site is quickly extinguished. Get another two years, and La Costa has a chance.
“I’m not being arrogant about it,” said Texas men’s coach John Fields, whose school served as the official host to preserve the event’s neutrality. “But I do think we stood up to the plate, took one curveball, took another curveball and then hit a fastball right out of the park. … It’s been kind of a dream come true.”
Fields is biased. This is his idea, his baby. He is the connection to Robert Rowling, the billionaire owner of Omni Hotels and a prominent University of Texas donor, and to respected designer Gil Hanse, whose $30 million renovation transformed the North Course into a 7,538-yard beast with elevated greens, waist-high native grasses and perilous barrancas bordering holes.
But the overwhelming consensus among coaches and players was similar.
“I would love this to be the permanent site,” said Trey Jones, the longtime Florida State men’s coach. “The hospitality could not have been better from the resort standpoint and from the San Diego community. I think there are things about being a permanent site that they’ll tweak, but those are things they can control. It’s an honor to be here.”
“This place is awesome,” said J.M. Butler, the Auburn senior who won the clinching match to give the Tigers their first men’s national championship. “The setup with the residences being right next to the golf course and the practice facilities and having 15, 16, 17 and 18 being right there on the back patio, it’s very cool — very cool. I’d hope it would be here for future years.”
The 600-room resort allows all teams to stay on-site. The Pacific time zone allows it to be televised in prime time in the East. The layout, unique among championship courses, allows fans to see multiple matches at once as they come to the closing holes.
And the temperate, predictable May climate — upper 60s, overcast, breezy — is a welcome change from pretty much anywhere else in the country this time of year. There are tornadoes in the Midwest, rain in the East, heat in the South and Southwest. The previous three championships were at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz., where, one Texas staffer recounted, he called the pro shop on a 100-degree afternoon to inform them the key in his golf cart had melted in the ignition. They told him not to worry, it was the third one that day.
All that was already in place at La Costa. The course, though, was not.
The inevitable permitting and construction delays endemic to Southern California, followed by an unseasonably wet winter, nudged the project perilously close to the May 17 start of the women’s tournament. No one had played the course, included. The greens were too hard, the bunkers too fluffy, the rough too sparse, the aerial visuals too jarring with native vegetation in the barrancas not fully grown. A late storm had turned the ninth and 10th fairways into a torrent, and the grass hadn’t fully grown back.
“It could have been a nightmare because we were held back for one reason or another,” Fields said. “We weren’t wanting to rush it. We had plenty of time. We just got pushed back. I’m not complaining by any means. That’s just the world today. It takes time to get things done, and this took a little bit more time.”
They forged ahead, softening the greens as much as possible, spray-painting areas of patchy fairway, praying the course wouldn’t embarrass the players.
There were some big numbers after wayward shots. Georgia Tech’s Hiroshi Tai nearly cost himself the individual men’s title with a triple bogey on his penultimate hole after hitting from one bunker over the green into another. Mississippi State’s Julia Lopez Ramirez tumbled out of second place with a bogey, double bogey and triple bogey on the back nine in the final round.
But no one complained about it being overly penal. Tough, demanding, challenging, yes. Unfair, no.
“I love this course,” All-American Ben James of Virginia told Golf Digest. “There are some courses in the NCAA where you can fake your way around it. You can’t fake it out here. It exposes every part of your game.”
Which was the idea when Hanse and design partner Jim Wagner started moving dirt around and radically shaving off sides of greens.
The average men’s and women’s scores from the four rounds of stroke play were identical: 75.25, or 3-over par. Only nine of the 150-plus women finished under par. Ten men did.
Both winning teams, the Stanford women and Auburn men, entered the week ranked No. 1 and won by 3-2 margins in dramatic match play finals.
“It separated,” said Florida State’s Jones, whose team lost in the final against Auburn, “and that’s what coaches want.”
“Some people say, ‘Well, it will get softer,’” Fields said. “I don’t want it to get softer. I like the way the golf course played for the men. I think most of the coaches did. Because a good shot is a good shot, a great shot is a great shot, and anything less than that is a bad shot. That’s the way it ought to be in a championship.
“You want your golf course to identify the best individual and best team — maybe not perfect all the time but close — and I think this golf course did that. … We got the result that I would love to see, which is par is a good number.”
Now they wait. They already have it for the next two years. Do they get it for two more?
“I hope they don’t wait that long,” Fields said of the fall meeting to pick future sites. “I’d like them to just say, ‘Great job, we’ll see you in 2027 and 2028.’”
