The NCAA announced host sites Wednesday for more than 240 sports championships in the 2026-27 and 2027-28 academic years across Divisions I, II and III. Buried in the news release was this nugget:
The Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad will continue for both years as the venue for the Division I men’s and women’s golf championships.
The refurbished North Course was already granted the individual and team tournaments for three years starting last spring. But its ambitious goal is to become the championships’ permanent site, like Omaha, Neb., has become for baseball, and Wednesday’s announcement is viewed as a big move toward that.
No other golf championship site has been host for five consecutive years.
The problem was that, with the 2027 and 2028 sites being decided this fall, La Costa wasn’t getting three years to prove itself; it got one, after an unseasonably wet winter and other construction delays meant the women’s and then men’s tournaments were the first events on an overhauled layout.
Risk, averted.
Test, ed.
“I’m not being arrogant about it,” Texas men’s coach John Fields, whose school served as the official host to preserve the event’s neutrality, said last May. “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.”
The greens on Gil Hanse’s $30 million redesign were hard and bouncy, as new greens tend to be. The native grasses lining fairways hadn’t fully grown in. A few fairways still showed damage from rainstorms that caused the creek winding through the course to overflow. The bunkers were on the fluffy side.
But the reviews were overwhelmingly positive after Stanford won the women’s title and Auburn claimed the men’s crown, both in dramatic fashion by 3-2 scores.
“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 title. “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.”
La Costa had several things going for it. All teams can stay on site at the 600-room resort. The Pacific time zone allows for prime-time television coverage in the key East Coast markets. The May weather is temperate and, more importantly, predictable, avoiding the torrid heat of the Southwest and tornadoes of the Midwest and spring rains of the South and East.
And the course itself, with multiple sets of tees, proved an equal test for women and men without being a birdie-fest.
The average men’s and women’s scores from the four rounds of stroke play were identical: 75.25, or 3-over par. Nine of the 150-plus women finished under par; 10 men did.
The teams ranked No. 1 entering the championships both won.
“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,” Fields said in May. “We got the result that I would love to see, which is par is a good number.”
On Wednesday, they got the other result they wanted – two more years.
