Course Comparisons / Texas

AT&T Oaks Course vs. Oak Hills Country Club: The San Antonio Choice

San Antonio's choice is the cleanest version of an old argument: the tour course you can actually play, or the Golden Age private club you probably cannot. The AT&T Oaks Course at TPC San Antonio, designed by Greg Norman with Sergio Garcia as player consultant, opened in 2010 and has hosted the PGA Tour's Valero Texas Open since that year. Oak Hills Country Club, designed by A.W. Tillinghast, opened in 1922. Eighty-eight years separate them, and in the Dallas Morning News 2025 Texas Top 100 they sit twelve places apart, Oak Hills at No. 18 and the Oaks at No. 30. The full city field is in the best courses in San Antonio ranking and the state picture in the best courses in Texas ranking.

AT&T Oaks Course

The Oaks is resort access, playable by guests of the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort, and that fact alone gives it a claim no private club can answer: the San Antonio visitor can book it. What the visitor gets is a genuine tour examination. Par 72 at 7,435 yards, built by Norman to test the field the Valero Texas Open brings every year. Norman's design language is visible in the course's signature device, the 16th green with a bunker in its middle, copied from Riviera's famous sixth hole. A bunker inside a green is theater, yes, but functional theater: the flag's side is the green, the other side is a putting problem, and a tour player who misses on the wrong side has turned a birdie look into a scramble. Garcia's role as player consultant fits that hole's logic. The course was designed with current tour input about how the modern professional actually attacks a green.

Playing where the tour plays has a second value nobody prices properly. You watch the Texas Open on television the next spring and you know the holes, not from a graphic but from your own topped approach. That recognition is the TPC model's real product, and the Oaks delivers it at full championship length.

Oak Hills Country Club

Oak Hills is private, and its argument begins with the name on the design credit. Tillinghast, 1922. The architect of Winged Foot and Baltusrol built in San Antonio in the same period, and the state's own panelists, who can play both courses, placed Oak Hills twelve spots ahead of the Oaks in the 2025 Texas Top 100. That ranking gap, produced by voters with access to the private course and no obligation to flatter it, is the strongest evidence on this page. The Oaks has length, television, and a famous copied green. Oak Hills has a century of members and a Tillinghast routing that Texas raters keep concluding is the better golf course.

What we will not do is invent hole-by-hole detail the record does not carry. The honest version is enough: a 1922 Tillinghast, private, ranked No. 18 in a deep Texas field, represents the Golden Age case that strategic design from that era, on land chosen before bulldozers could manufacture a site, holds up against a 2010 tour stadium built at 7,435 yards.

The verdict

For the visiting golfer, this is no contest and we should say so: play the Oaks. It is the one you can book, it is a real tour course, and the 16th green alone is worth the story. Oak Hills cannot win a comparison for a golfer it will not admit.

For the San Antonio golfer choosing where his golf life belongs, the verdict flips. Oak Hills wins on the golf: the Tillinghast pedigree and the No. 18 state ranking, earned from raters who know both courses, outweigh Norman's longer, louder examination. The Oaks is the better day out. Oak Hills, for the member who can walk it weekly, is the better course. Both answers are true, and which one is yours depends entirely on whether you are visiting San Antonio or living in it.