Course Comparisons / Texas
AT&T Oaks Course vs. AT&T Canyons Course: The San Antonio Choice
Two courses, one resort, same opening year, and a choice most guests at the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort make at the booking window without much information. TPC San Antonio opened both the AT&T Oaks Course and the AT&T Canyons Course in 2010. Greg Norman designed the Oaks, with Sergio Garcia as player consultant. Pete Dye designed the Canyons, with Bruce Lietzke as player consultant. If the names on the scorecard mean anything to you, you already sense the shape of the decision: a tour venue built for television on one side, a Dye puzzle on the other. The details confirm it.
The Oaks: the one you have watched on TV
The Oaks Course hosts the PGA Tour's Valero Texas Open, and has since 2010. It plays par 72 at 7,435 yards, and the Dallas Morning News placed it No. 30 in its 2025 Texas Top 100. The signature device is the 16th green, which has a bunker in its middle, copying Riviera's famous 6th hole. A bunker inside a green sounds like a gimmick until you are on the wrong side of it, chipping over sand to a pin you can see but cannot putt toward. Norman built a course that tests the way the modern tour tests: length first, then a few holes where positioning matters more than power. For the golfer who wants to walk the same ground as a tour field and measure himself honestly, the Oaks is the pick, and our profile of the Oaks Course goes deeper on what that round feels like.
The Canyons: Dye being Dye
The Canyons Course is ranked No. 61 in the Dallas Morning News 2026 Texas Top 100, a clear step below its sibling in the pecking order, and it hosted the San Antonio Championship, a PGA Tour Champions event. That resume is a tier down from the Oaks, and honesty requires saying so. What the Canyons offers instead is contrast. Dye courses ask questions Norman courses do not: angles, deception, holes that look harder than they play and a few that play harder than they look. With Lietzke consulting, the Canyons was built to be the playable companion, the course a resort guest could enjoy without a tour card. On a two round trip, it is the better second day. Your swing is grooved, your confidence is up from surviving the Oaks, and Dye's course lets you play golf rather than endure it.
The player consultants sharpen the contrast further. Garcia, consulting for Norman on the Oaks, was one of the great ball strikers of his generation, and a course shaped with his input was always going to reward pure striking from the tee through the green. Lietzke, consulting for Dye on the Canyons, built his career on a reliable fade and smart, unspectacular course management, and a course shaped with his input was always going to reward the golfer who plays the percentages. Two tour players, two philosophies, built into the same resort in the same year. Pick your consultant and you have mostly picked your course.
The access is identical, which simplifies everything. Both courses are playable by guests of the JW Marriott, so this is a pure golf decision with no gatekeeping in it. Our San Antonio town ranking covers the wider scene, and the Texas state ranking shows where both sit statewide.
The concession belongs to the Canyons, and it is real: if you only play one round at TPC San Antonio and you skip the Oaks, you have skipped the course with the tour pedigree and the bunker in the green, and you will spend the flight home wondering. First trip, one round, play the Oaks.
The verdict flips with context. Staying two days? Oaks first for the championship test, Canyons second for the pleasure of a Dye layout that is not trying to break you. Higher handicapper on a buddies trip who values fun over bragging rights? Start with the Canyons and take the Oaks on only if the group insists. The resort built a matched pair on purpose in 2010, one for the cameras and one for the guests. The mistake is not picking the wrong one. It is playing only one of them and calling the comparison settled.