Big fan of college golf? Good news! The University of Texas at Austin is hosting the NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments. Just don’t try driving out to UT’s golf club in Steiner Ranch to catch it. Or to the Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth. Or TPC San Antonio. Or any other famous course in Texas.
Instead, you’ll have to fly to San Diego, then head 30 miles north to the Omni La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad. Yup! Just when you thought the tech bros were returning to Pacific Time, the University of Texas system’s flagship school is planting a literal flag—18 of them!—in Southern California.
“A pleasure it is to be at Omni La Costa Resort and Spa, the North Course. Year one,” Golf Channel announcer Bob Papa said during the women’s final Wednesday, “for the women’s and men’s NCAA Division I championships, hosted by The University of Texas.”
This is not as incongruous as it sounds. Schools “host” NCAA championships away from campus all the time, particularly for men’s and women’s basketball. Usually it’s close to home—the University of Texas at San Antonio has put on countless Final Fours and regionals at the Alamodome, for instance—but not always. When the NCAA Men’s Frozen Four is played in a market without college hockey, a far-flung school steps in (the University of Vermont is hosting the 2025 event in St. Louis).
But in this case UT’s participation is a part of something bigger: a vision from Texas men’s head coach John Fields to expand the audience for college golf, and put the NCAA golf championships on par with the College World Series in Omaha (baseball) and Oklahoma City (softball). To that end, Fields and former Oklahoma State golf coach and athletic director Mike Holder have formed a non-profit called the College Golf World Championships Foundation, with the intention of making La Costa a permanent neutral site (Omaha has a similar organization for the College World Series, which it has hosted since 1950; it’s also the basic model behind every college football bowl game).
The choice of La Costa is in no way a coincidence. The principal owner of Omni Hotels and Resorts is former UT regent and longtime Corpus Christi oil man Bob Rowling, who also happens to be a major Longhorns booster. Working in consultation with Fields, Rowling hired golf course architect Gil Hanse—who he also tapped for Omni’s PGA Resort Frisco—to completely redesign La Costa’s North Course into something worthy of a permanent NCAA championship site. The resort has had its share of big-time golf over the years, but it stopped hosting the PGA Tournament of Champions in 1998, and held its last LPGA event in 2012. (To some, La Costa is best known as the spa where Larry King once played naked pool volleyball.)
“People ask me all the time, why would a school like Texas host a national championship in California?” Fields says. “And it’s simply because it’s the neutral site. Programs out there in California didn’t want to be involved. And the reason they didn’t want to be involved was simply because you have a pretty good cost associated with tournaments. It’s in the millions of dollars. You have staff and time and effort.”
In other words, hosting an NCAA tournament is like hosting a birthday party—if you’re in charge, it’s on you to rent the chairs and buy the cake. Up until now, host schools have held the golf tournament at their home courses—Arizona State hosted the last three at Scottsdale’s Grayhawk Country Club. That expense and effort was worth it not only for your fans and region, but it also provided a home-course advantage.
“When we won against [Arizona State] in the final in 2022 they [had] played that golf course eighty-one times,” says Fields. “Eighty-one times! That’s their home golf course. We were able to overcome that. But we couldn’t overcome some of the recruiting part.” Meaning, a frequent host like ASU could say, “play for us, and you’ll get three shots at playing for the national championship at home.”
But making a neutral site championship truly neutral means that nearby schools are not allowed to play the course—no matches, no tournaments, no official practices. Because of that, the nearest golf school to La Costa, San Diego State, didn’t volunteer to host. “And,” says Fields, “the only ‘big brother’ that was willing to do it was the University of Texas.”
That “big brother” comment is about as close as Fields might come to public trash talk. The fifth coach at a Texas program built by Tom and Harvey Penick (the latter coached the Horns from 1931–1963 before becoming even more famous as a golf guru and author), Fields is a devout Christian with a penchant for folksy expressions like “the sun and the moon and stars have come together,” to describe success. But he can also recite his program’s long list of accomplishments—both historically and during his 27-year tenure.
“We’re ninety-eight years old,” he says. “We have one hundred and two victories on the PGA Tour. Ten major championships with six major champions. And since we opened the doors at UT Golf Club in 2003, we’ve got twenty-seven victories, and five of those are major championships, from Scottie [Scheffler] and Jordan [Spieth].”
Fields’s Longhorns have now made it to the NCAA championship 22 times in 26 years (the 27th being 2020, when it wasn’t played because of COVID), and a record seventeen times in a row. They’ve won two national championships with two runner-up finishes. The most recent title came in 2022, with what is still a potentially star-studded group—twin brothers Pierceson and Parker Coody are on the PGA Tour and Cole Hammer competes on the second-level Korn Ferry Tour.
Now the next class might be ready for its shot. The Horns came out of their own regional (where they actually were the host at UT Golf Club) as the top team. The group is led by South African sophomore Christian Maas, whose world amateur ranking has been as high as twelfth, while Fields describes six-foot-nine Dallas sophomore Tommy Morrison as “maybe the new prototype for golf.” Texas Tech (third in their regional), Baylor (fifth), Texas A&M (third) and SMU (fourth) are also in the tournament.
Fields’s goal with the College Golf World Championships Foundation and La Costa is to raise the profile of his sport, which he sees as—another Fieldsism—“the center of the sun.” Whether a player turns into a world number one like Scottie Scheffler, a sales rep for TaylorMade (which is based in Carlsbad), or a municipal course pro, it all starts in college golf, including the way college golf develops the best young players.
Raising the profile of college golf would also help more fans understand college golf. The vagaries of team golf and match play are well known to diehards, but for the casual viewer or nonplayer, it can be harder to consume than straight-up stroke play.
Other reasons why Fields thinks La Costa works: the weather (which is also why this event is not in Frisco), and the fact that a daytime tournament in California can air in a favorable time slot for East Coast TV viewers. Fields hopes La Costa will remain the NCAA Tournament site for years to come, and a bid is already in for 2027 and 2028 (though Texas does not always have to be the host institution). He imagines more fans coming to the event than ever, and La Costa’s owners no doubt hope the championships will boost demand for memberships and tee times (you can attend the College World Series or the Rose Bowl, but you can’t take batting practice or throw a football at those venues). And while a permanent site would mean less variety, Fields believes La Costa would make up for it with the lore and the ability to make historical comparisons that come with a static site. (As Tod Leonard of Golf Digest notes, the sixteenth hole at La Costa, already well known for a 1997 Tiger Woods shot, is now also an homage to the twelfth hole at Augusta National.)
Not being the host didn’t stop two California schools—Stanford and UCLA—from playing in the women’s final, which Stanford won. On top of that the women’s individual title wound up being won in UT’s “house” by—Gig ’Em!—Texas A&M’s Adela Cernousek.
So yeah, this is why we have the University of Texas–Southern California. Even Fields couldn’t help but trip on all of it a little bit at a press conference in Austin a few weeks ago, saying that UT was going to “host the national championship, in Texas . . . here in California.”
