The Club at Berry Creek Changed Hands. The New Owners Started With the Water, Not the Clubhouse.

Drive past the gates at 30500 Berry Creek Drive and you'll notice the sign has changed. It used to read Berry Creek Country Club. Now it says The Club at Berry Creek. If you assumed that was just a rebrand, a new logo slapped on an old business, you're missing the more interesting part of the story: this is the first change of ownership the club has seen since it opened in 1986 under local ownership.

That distinction matters more than the new name. A sign change is cosmetic. A sale is a bet, and how a new owner spends its first dollars tells you what kind of bet they're making.

A Sale That Skipped the Rebrand Playbook

The Williamson County Sun reported in July 2025 that the club, which had operated under local ownership since its 1986 debut, was purchased by a Texas management company under the guidance of Dale Folmar and Jacques James, partners in San Antonio-based Encore Leisure Group. Encore's own account of the transaction fills in the rest: it was a fee simple acquisition of 160 acres, purchased from CBONS International Golf Group, that included the 18-hole course originally built in 1986, a full-service clubhouse, practice facilities, a swimming pool, a fitness center, eight tennis courts, and six pickleball courts.

Encore Leisure Group continues to run daily operations under General Manager Claire Hallett, who was already leading the club before the sale. That continuity matters for anyone who plays there regularly. The pro shop staff, the tee sheet, the person who knows your usual foursome, none of that reset the day the paperwork closed.

What Got Fixed Before Anyone Could See It

Here's where the story gets specific. According to Encore Leisure Group, the first capital project the new ownership executed wasn't in the dining room or at the front gate. It was a full irrigation system upgrade paired with a new Watertronics pumping station, the equipment that controls how water actually reaches the fairways and greens across the roughly 115 acres of golf course inside the club's 160-acre footprint. Inside the clubhouse, the first renovation was a full remodel of the restrooms and shower areas.

Neither of those projects photographs well. Nobody posts a picture of a pumping station on the club's social feed. But irrigation is the thing that determines whether Bermuda turf holds up through a Central Texas summer, and it's usually the last thing an owner fixes if they're planning to sell the property again quickly. Spending real capital underground, before touching anything a member would notice walking in the front door, reads less like a flip and more like an operator planning to hold the asset.

"The support from the members and the surrounding community has been incredible," Folmar said of the acquisition.

The Numbers Depend on Which Site You Trust

If you go looking for details on the club's amenities right now, you'll run into a small contradiction. Several pickleball tracking sites, including Pickleheads and the Global Pickleball Network, still list four courts at what they call Berry Creek Racquet Club. But the new ownership group's own accounting of what it acquired in the 2025 sale counts six.

That gap probably isn't a construction story. It's a data lag story. Third-party directories update on their own schedule, and a lot of them hadn't caught up to the sale by the time this was written. The practical lesson for anyone trying to get current information on the club is simple: the ownership group's own materials, not the recreation apps, are the more reliable source right now.

Here's where things stand as of this writing:

The Part That Isn't Changing

New ownership inherited a piece of golf course history that predates the sale by decades, and by all accounts they're keeping it rather than sanding it off. The club's own history page traces the course back to a rock quarry, dug to supply material for the construction of Interstate 35, where a cave and a spring turned up during excavation. That quarry became what is now the course's Hole #8, once singled out by a Dallas newspaper as one of the two most unique holes at any golf club in Texas. The original developer liked the quarry so much he built the clubhouse dining room to look out over it, and members still eat dinner with that view today.

The same history page recounts that Tom Kite, one of the most accomplished professional golfers of the era, played in the club's very first round in 1986, splitting nine holes each with two of the club's founding members. It's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a listing sheet, but it's part of what makes the course feel like more than a generic 18 holes on a map, and it's not the kind of thing a new owner tends to erase if they're planning to stick around.

What's Still on the Master Plan

The irrigation work and the restroom remodel appear to be phase one. Encore Leisure Group has said additional physical and experiential improvements are being master-planned, including expanded dining and social spaces both indoors and outdoors. Nothing has been built yet, but the intent is on the record.

James, the other half of the new ownership group, put it this way:

"Being able to implement the ideas we've envisioned for years... is deeply rewarding."

For members and neighbors, that's worth filing away. The visible changes, the ones that will actually alter how the clubhouse looks and feels, haven't happened yet. What's already done is the unglamorous groundwork that makes those later projects possible without the turf falling apart in the meantime.

Why This Is Worth Knowing If You Live Here

You don't have to be a member to have a stake in how well the course is maintained. The fairways and greens are the view from a lot of backyards in Berry Creek, and irrigation problems tend to show up first as brown patches visible from the street, not as line items in a press release. A serious investment in the water system before anything cosmetic is a reasonable sign that whoever owns the course now intends to keep it looking the way it has for the better part of forty years.

Berry Creek has always been a neighborhood where the golf course is part of daily life whether you play or not, from the dog walkers on Briarcrest Drive to the neighbors who just like the view. Understanding who owns the club and what they're actually investing in is part of understanding the neighborhood itself.

If you're curious about how a change like this fits into the bigger picture of living in Berry Creek, or you just want to talk through what's happening around the neighborhood over coffee, the team at Oak & Willow Realty Group knows this stretch of Georgetown well and is always happy to talk it through, no agenda required.