The NCAA announced host sites Wednesday for more than 240 sports championships in the 2026-27 and 2027-28 academic years across Divisions I, II and III. Buried in the news release was this nugget: The Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad will continue for both years as the venue for the Division I men’s and women’s golf championships. The refurbished North Course was already granted the individual and team tournaments for three years starting last spring.
But its ambitious goal is to become the championships’ permanent site, like Omaha, Neb., has become for baseball, and Wednesday’s announcement is viewed as a big move toward that. No other golf championship site has been host for five consecutive years.
The problem was that, with the 2027 and 2028 sites being decided this fall, La Costa wasn’t getting three years to prove itself; it got one, after an unseasonably wet winter and other construction delays meant the women’s and then men’s tournaments were the first events on an overhauled layout. Risk, averted. Test, passed.
“I’m not being arrogant about it,” Texas men’s coach John Fields, whose school served as the official host to preserve the event’s neutrality, said last May. “But I do think we stood up to the plate, took one curveball, took another curveball and then hit a fastball right out of the park. .
.. It’s been kind of a dream come true.
” The greens on Gil Hanse’s $30 million redesign were hard and bouncy, as new greens tend to be. .
