# AT&T Oaks Course vs. La Cantera Golf Club Resort Course: The San Antonio Choice

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/atandt-oaks-course-vs-la-cantera-golf-club-resort-course/

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Course Comparisons / Texas


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

San Antonio's Texas Open has had two modern homes, and a golfer visiting the city can play both of them. La Cantera's Resort Course, a Jay Morrish and Tom Weiskopf design from 1995, hosted the tournament in its era and still trades on that memory. The AT&T Oaks Course at TPC San Antonio, designed by Greg Norman with Sergio Garcia as player consultant, opened in 2010 and has been the Valero Texas Open's home ever since. So the San Antonio choice is really a question about which version of tour golf you want to buy for a day: the 1990s resort course built in the Texas Hill Country above the city, or the current tour venue built to examine the modern professional. Both appear in [our San Antonio course ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-san-antonio-tx/), and the gap between them in the Dallas Morning News 2025 Texas Top 100 is three places: the Oaks at No. 30, La Cantera's Resort Course at No. 33 on the state's public list. Three places is not a gap. It is an invitation to argue.

## The Oaks: tour golf at full stretch

The Oaks plays par 72 at 7,435 yards, and unlike many tour courses, it does not surrender its character when the ropes come down. Norman's design brief for a PGA Tour venue in this era was consistent: width that invites the drive, then green complexes that charge rent for the wrong side of it. The signature is the 16th green, which has a bunker in its middle, a direct copy of the famous 6th green at Riviera. Borrowing Riviera's most argued about feature is either homage or provocation, and at the Oaks it plays as both: a short hole's worth of decision making transplanted onto a par 4's approach, in the middle of the closing stretch, in front of a tournament gallery every spring.

Access is the resort model's modern version. The Oaks is playable by guests of the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort, which means the public can buy this round, but only as part of the resort's ecosystem. That is the standard TPC bargain and golfers know how to price it: expensive, predictable, and honest about what it is.

## La Cantera: the Hill Country original

La Cantera's Resort Course opened in 1995, a Morrish and Weiskopf collaboration from the years when that partnership was producing some of the most playable upscale golf in the Southwest. Its Texas Open years gave it a tour pedigree before the Oaks existed, and the Dallas Morning News ranking it No. 33 among Texas public courses in 2025 says the golf has aged respectably: three decades on, in a state that has built a great deal of resort golf since, the Resort Course still holds a place in the low thirties. Set in the La Cantera development's Hill Country ground above San Antonio, it is resort access in the classic sense, open to guests and public players through the resort. Texas golfers weighing the state's full bench can place both courses through [the Texas state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-texas/).

The honest limitation is the record itself. La Cantera's file is thinner than the Oaks', its documented specifics fewer, and some of that thinness reflects a course that has been living on a well earned reputation rather than adding new chapters since the tour left. Reputation in resort golf depreciates. The 2025 ranking suggests the depreciation has been slower here than at most of its 1990s peers, which is a credit to Morrish and Weiskopf's original work.

## The verdict

The Oaks wins this one, and the reason is currency. It is the current tour course, the longer and more searching test at 7,435 yards, the one with the Riviera borrowing on 16 that gives a visiting golfer a story no other Texas resort course can tell, and the one the state's own newspaper ranking puts ahead, if barely. A golfer with one San Antonio resort round and a taste for the modern professional game should play the Oaks.

Choose La Cantera anyway if your tastes run to the previous generation's idea of a resort course: Morrish and Weiskopf's playability over Norman's examination, a layout that flatters a good day rather than auditing a bad one, and a former tour site with three decades of patina on it. The Oaks is where the Texas Open lives now. La Cantera is where it used to live, and used to, in Texas golf, is still a fine address.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.