For the first time since Arthur Hills laid out its two championship courses in 1981, Quail Creek has only one course open. The Creek Course closed on April 1 and will not reopen until December 1, part of a $26 million renovation the membership approved in March 2025. At the same time, on a different corner of the property, crews broke ground on something that has never existed at the club at all: three enclosed padel courts, the first dedicated padel facility at any private club in Southwest Florida.
Most coverage of this treated the two projects as separate announcements. They are not separate for the people who actually live here. If you golf at Quail Creek, 2026 is the leanest year the club has had in decades. If you play anything else, it is the most interesting year the club has had in decades. Both are true at once, and neither cancels the other out.
Why Only One Course Is Open
The club did not close both courses to speed things along. Its own strategic planning materials are explicit that the Creek and Quail renovations were staggered on purpose, with construction on the Quail Course not beginning until April 1, 2027, specifically so members retain access to at least one 18-hole course throughout the multi-year project. That sequencing is the reason this year looks the way it does: every member who wants to play golf at Quail Creek this year is playing the Quail Course, because the Creek Course does not exist as a playable surface right now.
The preparation for that closure started well before April. During the summer of 2025, Director of Golf Courses and Grounds Gregg Caspio's crew performed what the club described as a strategic termination of the existing turfgrass on the Creek Course, then overseeded it with ryegrass so members could keep playing through the full 2025 to 2026 Southwest Florida season before the course finally went dark for construction. New TifEagle putting surfaces are going in as part of the rebuild, which architect Ron Forse has framed as more than a routine refresh. As he put it, "This is not just a renovation, it's more of a reimagining."
For members who golf every week, the practical effect is straightforward. The Quail Course is now absorbing all of the club's golf demand, not half of it. Anyone used to splitting their rounds between the two courses, or booking around Creek Course tee times specifically for its water features on 14 of its 18 holes, will not have that option again until December.
The Fine Print Behind a $26 Million Rebuild
The renovation carries a full construction roster worth knowing, because it tells you this is not a cosmetic project. Alongside Forse, the team includes General Manager Chris Evans, Caspio, Turf Consultant Mark Burrows, course contractor Clarke Construction Group of Fort Myers, and irrigation contractor Nutt Construction of Tullahoma, Tennessee. That is a lot of specialized labor for two courses that, by the club's own description, already had good bones. Forse has said the appeal of the site was its natural landscape rather than a need to start from scratch, calling the layout roomy with a mature native pine setting that gave him room to build on Hills' original routing rather than replace it.
The Quail Course will get the same treatment on the same schedule one year later, closing April 1, 2027 and reopening December 1, 2027. So the disruption is not permanent, and it is not doubled. It is simply concentrated into two separate, non-overlapping windows, and this year happens to be the first one.
A Second Project Nobody Voted On
While the golf renovation was working through membership approval and turf prep, a second and unrelated capital project was moving forward on its own track. In April 2026, the same month construction started on the Creek Course, Quail Creek also broke ground on a three-court padel complex, its first foray into a sport the club had no prior facilities for at all. The project is designed by McWard Architects, the same firm handling the club's separate clubhouse master plan, and built by D. Garrett Construction, with completion targeted for summer 2026.
The person driving this is Jose Pastrello, Quail Creek's Director of Court Sports and the newly installed president of the Racquet Sports Professionals Association's Florida Division. Pastrello earned RSPA Master Professional status in 2023, a credential held by fewer than one percent of certified racquet sports professionals worldwide, and he has been vocal about wanting the club to move first rather than follow. "Padel is having its moment," he said, and Quail Creek's build positions the club ahead of a trend that is only now reaching the region. A 2026 wellness roundup from Gulfshore Life noted that pickleball has already saturated most local courts and pointed to a 2025 trial court at Emilio Sanchez Academy as an early signal that padel was next. Quail Creek's complex is the first version of that trend built specifically for a private club membership rather than a public academy.
Once finished, the three padel courts round out what trade coverage has called the club's full racquet sports lineup: nine Har-Tru tennis courts, six pickleball courts, three bocce courts, and now three padel courts, all under one court sports program.
What This Adds Up to This Year
Here is the part that does not show up if you read the two announcements separately. The golf renovation and the padel build are sharing a calendar, not competing for one. Golfers are down to a single course for eight months. Everyone with a racquet is gaining a sport the club never offered before, on a timeline that lands in the same eight months. It is not that the club is disrupting itself twice. It is that two very different parts of the membership are experiencing 2026 in opposite directions at the same time.
This is not a one-off. The pattern goes back further than this year:
- 2019: the club completed its Sports Center and Spa, an $18.5 million investment that consolidated fitness, wellness, and pro shop functions under one roof.
- Early 2020s: a full interior refresh of the Greenside Grille, kitchen, and bocce facility.
- 2025: the club was reaffirmed as a Distinguished Club with Exceptional Status by BoardRoom magazine, the same year membership approved the golf course renovation.
- 2026: the Creek Course closure and the padel groundbreaking, running in parallel.
General Manager Chris Evans has described the current renovation as the start of the club's next chapter rather than a break from what came before it, and the sequence above supports that framing. Quail Creek does not appear to renovate reactively. It appears to renovate on a rolling basis, one major project overlapping the tail end of the last, which is exactly what makes 2026 look unusual only if you were not paying attention to 2019 or 2025.
For a member deciding how to spend the rest of this golf season, the practical read is simple. Book Quail Course tee times earlier than you're used to, since it is carrying the full membership's golf demand on its own. And if padel debuts on schedule this summer, it will be the first entirely new sport this membership has had access to in years, arriving at the exact moment golf access is at its tightest. That is the trade this particular year is making, and it is worth understanding before assuming the renovation is simply something to wait out.
If you are weighing what any of this means for property values or timing a move in or out of Quail Creek, that is a longer conversation, and one The Higdon Team is glad to have. Reach out to request a private consultation.
