By Scott Kauffman
In 1926, La Quinta Resort & Club opened in California’s Coachella Valley and introduced the world to a luxurious new 1,400-acre desert layout about 120 miles east of Los Angeles.
Featuring a nine-hole course for a daily green fee of $1, the Palm Springs area escape quickly became the private playground for the rich and famous, including Hollywood luminaries like Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Shirley Temple and Frank Capra. After developing five championship courses in the 1980s and becoming a regular stop on the professional golf circuits, La Quinta made this desert destination synonymous with world-class golf and paved the way for a plethora of high-profile private clubs and residential golf developments to come.
One such premium property is Trilogy Golf Club. After Shea homes developed the 55-plus retirement community in 2003, the Gary Panks-designed course achieved must-play status after hosting The Skins Game from 2003 to 2006.
But the La Quinta facility lost its luster in recent years after the course and clubhouse-related assets were sold to a labyrinth of owners leading to a series of financial troubles and mismanagement. The course, which was renamed Coral Mountain Golf Club, shut down in 2022 and sat fallow for nearly two years as it idled in financial uncertainty.
That’s when the 1,238 homeowners decided to take Trilogy matters into their own hands and find a solution for what was now a community eyesore. The answer was being a course owner themselves but not after enduring one of the more complex acquisitions in memory.
What made the reported $6.17 million purchase so difficult was the fact parts of the 229-acre course and clubhouse/restaurant assets were controlled by three different squabbling ownership interests, resulting in the course not being watered and maintained for two years during subsequent loan defaults and an eventual Chapter 7 involuntary bankruptcy.
Earlier this year, the Trilogy homeowners association overwhelmingly voted to purchase the golf assets, with 1,011 residents approving the critical one-time $12,000 assessment, according to sources familiar with the deal. Mark Reider, board president of the Trilogy at La Quinta Maintenance Association, was particularly thrilled that 92 percent of the 1,140 residents who voted supported the final deal.
"We did over twenty town halls, focus groups, and Q&A sessions,” Reider told a local television station last January. “We were ecstatic.”
Not long after, the community reverted the club back to its original name, Trilogy Golf Club at La Quinta, and invested in a complete multi-million-dollar renovation to modernize the facilities and bring them back to their former golf glory. The homeowners have even brought back the original management team from BlueStar Resort & Golf to oversee the renovation and manage the club.
“The course has great bones,” said Reider, who played collegiate golf at UCLA from 1973-75. “You can see all the characteristics that made it one of the best in the region. It has a tremendous setting and a very playable, enjoyable design. It just wasn’t cared for properly for a very long time. Now, crews are out there every day putting it back the way it should be. We’ve got a great team on this, and we can’t wait for our community and people from the surrounding area to be able to enjoy this golf course the way it was when it hosted The Skins Game.”
The ongoing work to restore the course to its original design is extensive. All greens have been re-grassed, and the collars have been resodded. The greenside irrigation heads have all been replaced. The pump station was replaced, and the entire irrigation system is being audited to ensure exceptional playing conditions.
Working with architect Gary Brawley, who was part of the late Gary Panks’ original design team, several bunkers have been reshaped with lowered bunker noses to enhance playability, and all bunkers have been completely rebuilt with new drainage, new liners and a new 50/50-blend Emerald sand.
As an added feature for players, when Trilogy La Quinta reopens later this year, the club will make the original “Skins tees” available for play, allowing golfers to experience the course the way Tiger Woods, Fred Couples, and Phil Mickelson did back in its Skins Game heyday.
According to Ben Keilholtz, longtime BlueStar executive and vice president of member experience for the Trilogy by Shea Homes brand of active adult communities, said Trilogy’s renovation is progressing well and should be ready for play after the overseeding season is completed sometime in November. The grand reopening of Trilogy’s full-service clubhouse and restaurant is yet to be announced.
As for the golf facility, Keilholtz and the rest of the BlueStar team and Trilogy residents are confident the course will reclaim its status as a must-play, daily-fee golf course in California’s Coachella Valley. And Keilholtz stressed Trilogy might never have been resurrected if it weren’t for the perseverance and commitment from Reider and his fellow Trilogy homeowners board directors ensuring this transaction would eventually get done.
“The real hero here is the Trilogy board of directors led by Mark,” said Keilholtz, whose BlueStar team manages 20 clubs in nine states, with approximately half of them being golf facilities. “The complexity of this transaction is to reconstitute all the assets from the previous owners. … What they were able to do, it was just handled so deftly by the board.
“Then being able to assist them in navigating some transactional issues and galvanizing the eventual community support, it’s been an incredible partnership.”