Course Comparisons / Texas
AT&T Oaks Course vs. The Quarry Golf Club: The San Antonio Choice
San Antonio offers a clean version of the modern golf choice. Play the tour course, the one you have watched on television every spring, by staying at the resort that guards it. Or play the public course across town whose back nine sits inside a hundred year old limestone quarry, and just book it. AT&T Oaks and The Quarry are both in Bexar County, both in the Dallas Morning News Texas Top 100 conversation, and they could hardly be built on more different ideas.
The Oaks: Greg Norman, the tour, and a bunker in a green
The AT&T Oaks Course at TPC San Antonio was designed by Greg Norman with Sergio Garcia as player consultant, opened in 2010, and has been home to the PGA Tour's Valero Texas Open since that year. Par 72, 7,435 yards, ranked No. 30 in the Dallas Morning News 2025 Texas Top 100. The detail everyone remembers, correctly, is the 16th green with a bunker in its middle, copying Riviera's famous 6th hole. It is a borrowed idea executed on a tour stage, and in person it does what it does on television: it turns a short approach into a decision about which side of a green you are willing to miss on.
Seven thousand four hundred thirty five yards is a professional's examination, and the Oaks does not pretend otherwise. Playable by guests of the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort, it is resort access in the strict sense. The resort stay is the ticket, and for a golfer whose trip is built around walking the same fairways as a tour field, that arrangement is not a flaw. It is the product.
The Quarry: Keith Foster and a hole you cannot build anymore
The Quarry Golf Club is a Keith Foster design opened in 1993, fully public, ranked No. 58 in the Dallas Morning News 2026 Texas Top 100. Its back nine plays inside a historic 100 year old limestone quarry per San Antonio course guides. Nobody would be permitted to create that setting today, and nobody could afford to fake it. The quarry walls are the architecture's co-designer, giving Foster's holes an enclosure and a scale that flat Texas ground almost never provides.
We should be honest about the thinner record here. The Quarry does not carry the tour resume, the yardage card or the ranking position of the Oaks, and its No. 58 against No. 30 in overlapping state lists is a real gap, not a rounding error. What it carries is the setting, and public access priced and booked like public golf rather than bundled into a resort stay.
The verdict
On architecture as the professionals test it, the Oaks wins. It ranks higher, it hosts a tour event every year, its 16th green alone has more design conversation around it than most Texas courses generate in total, and it leads this pair in the best golf courses in San Antonio and in the 5 best golf courses in Texas. If you get one round in San Antonio and money is not the deciding factor, take the Oaks and play the tour test from tees you can handle.
The concession is the reason this comparison exists at all. The Quarry is the better recommendation for most golfers, most of the time. It is public, it is bookable without a hotel reservation, and its back nine offers a visual and strategic experience the Oaks, for all its tour polish, cannot match, because resorts do not come with century old quarry walls. A local who plays monthly should not think twice. The Oaks is a pilgrimage. The Quarry is a home course, and home courses are where golf actually gets played.
There is also a pace and price of the day to weigh, even without quoting figures neither course's record gives us here. A resort round built around a tour venue runs on the resort's schedule and the resort's full freight. A public round at The Quarry runs on yours. Over a single celebratory trip that difference fades. Over a season of San Antonio golf it becomes the whole argument, and it is why our access scoring keeps pulling this comparison closer than the state rankings alone would suggest.
Norman built a stage in San Antonio and the tour moved in. Foster found a hole in the ground and built a golf course in it. The stage ranks higher. The hole in the ground is the story you will still be telling in a year.