Richardson Just Finished the Plan It Started at Sherrill Park in 2022
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
On Saturday, September 19, a small crowd gathered near the driving range at Sherrill Park Golf Course to watch city officials turn dirt for a building that most golfers who play there won't notice until it opens. The groundbreaking marked the start of construction on a new golf training center and an expanded maintenance barn, the kind of project that sounds like routine city business until you trace where it came from.
It didn't start this year. It started in a July 2022 City Council work session, when Richardson officials laid out four separate renovation projects for the golf course and told residents it would take until 2025 to finish them. After that 2025 target, the last piece just broke ground.
The 2022 plan covered restroom rebuilds on Course 1, a full renovation of Course 2, a new maintenance barn to replace one built in 1973, and a training facility at the north end of the driving range. City officials put the combined cost at $12 million to $13 million, funded through year-end savings, capital reserves, and debt.
The restrooms went first, finishing in early 2023. Course 2 came next, closing for most of 2024 for a course-wide rebuild of every green, tee, and bunker, plus drainage work to fix standing water that had plagued the layout since its last major renovation in 2001. It reopened in 2025, and head professional Ronny Glanton told the city he wanted golfers to come try it for themselves, calling out the redone greens and bunkers on all 18 holes.
The training center and maintenance barn were always meant to be built together, and the money came in stages. City Council approved roughly $700,000 in preconstruction funds in April 2026, then followed with $5 million in August to fund actual construction. That approval cleared the way for the September groundbreaking, and the city now expects the finished building open to the public in spring 2027.
The training center itself is 2,650 square feet, smaller than most people picture when they hear "golf academy." Inside, it will house two hitting bays built for lessons in any weather, a small conference room, and something Richardson has never had before: a dedicated Titleist Fitting Center, the first of its kind in North Texas. A Titleist Fitting Professional will work one-on-one with golfers using a TrackMan launch monitor and a full equipment matrix to match clubs to an individual swing, rather than sending players home with off-the-rack specs.
The maintenance barn addition solves a more mundane problem. The current barn dates to 1973 and has been outgrown for years. The expanded facility will give the grounds crew the equipment storage and workspace that a 36-hole municipal operation actually needs, which matters more to course conditions on any given Tuesday than the fitting bay does.
Neither piece changes anything about how the two golf courses play. Both remain open through construction, and the work is contained to the range area rather than the fairways.
Green fees at Sherrill Park go up on October 1, the first increase since 2024, as part of the city's 2026-27 budget. Richardson residents keep their standing 25 percent discount off listed rates, a benefit that has applied for years and isn't changing with this budget cycle.
The timing is worth sitting with. The fee increase and the $5 million construction approval both moved through the same budget process this summer, alongside the citywide water and wastewater rate changes that also take effect October 1. None of these numbers were announced as tied to one another, and the city has never said green fee revenue is earmarked specifically for the training center. But a resident paying more to tee off this fall is doing so in the same budget year the city committed real money to rebuilding the facility they're standing on, which is a different story than a fee hike showing up on its own with no visible return.
The course carries the name of Richardson's first city manager, R.B. Sherrill, who ran the city from 1956 to 1973 and watched its population grow from roughly 3,000 residents to 57,000 during his tenure. The Richardson Daily News announced the course naming in August 1973, shortly after Sherrill's departure, and it's stayed Sherrill Park ever since, even after he passed away in 1980.
Golf course architect Leon Howard designed Course 1, which opened in 1973, the same year the naming was announced. Course 2 followed a few years later, built into a former landfill of roughly 120 acres, a detail that explains some of the drainage issues the 2024 renovation was built to fix. Buster Creagh was hired as the first golf professional in April 1972, and he brought on a young assistant named Ronny Glanton in 1981. Glanton is still the head professional today, more than four decades later. He's been named PGA of America Golf Professional of the Year, the highest individual honor the organization gives, and he's the only two-time president of the Northern Texas PGA. Golfers who've played Sherrill Park for years likely know him by name before they know the course's yardage.
Course 1 got its last full renovation in 2015. Course 2 finished its rebuild in 2025. That means for the first time in a decade, both 18-hole layouts at Sherrill Park are playing on greens, tees, and bunkers built within the same recent window, rather than one course riding on work from years earlier while the other waits its turn.
For a golfer deciding which course to book, that closes a gap that's existed off and on since Course 1's 1997 redesign and Course 2's follow-up in 2001, when the two tracks were rarely on comparable footing at the same time. It also means the training center opening in spring 2027 will serve two courses that are both, for once, current rather than one propping up the other.
The practical upshot for anyone booking a tee time this fall: expect the driving range area to have some construction activity through spring, but both 18-hole courses remain fully open, the resident discount is unchanged, and the fee increase that hits October 1 is happening at the same time the city is putting a meaningful amount of new money into the ground you're standing on.
If you're the kind of Richardson resident who tracks what the city is actually building with your tax dollars, or you're weighing how a neighborhood's public investment holds up over time, that's exactly the kind of question 23 Lux Collection likes to talk through. Let's connect.