If you live inside the gates near Kelly Avenue and Waterloo Road, you already know the neighborhood answers to two different addresses. There's Oak Tree National, the 640-acre course built to be the hardest test in American golf. And there's Oak Tree Country Club, the family club with two courses, a pool, and a clubhouse that hosts more birthday parties than championship trophy ceremonies. Most searches for the neighborhood flatten these into one story. They aren't one story. This month they're two, running on parallel tracks, and a resident can watch both without leaving the neighborhood.
By the time the calendar turns to September, one club will have crowned a state champion and the other will be a full year closer to hosting a national one.
One pair of founders, two very different clubs
Both clubs trace back to the same two men. In 1974, Ernie Vossler and Joe Walser directed golf course architect Pete Dye to build the most punishing course he could design. That course opened in 1976 as Oak Tree Golf Club, later renamed Oak Tree National, sitting on 640 acres with water in play on 13 of its 18 holes and winds that regularly top 30 miles per hour.
Five years later, the same two founders opened a second, very different project a short distance away. Oak Tree Country Club, established in 1981 under Landmark Land Company, was built as a membership home rather than a proving ground: 36 holes across two courses, a pool, indoor and outdoor tennis, pickleball courts, and a dining room built for families rather than tour pros. It remains the only private club in the Oklahoma City metro with 36 holes of golf under one membership.
The split explains something that trips up anyone new to the area. "Oak Tree" isn't a single club with one identity. It's two clubs with two missions, sitting close enough that you can hear one course's practice range from the other's back nine.
| Oak Tree National | Oak Tree Country Club | |
|---|---|---|
| Opened | 1976 | 1981 |
| Layout | One 18-hole course, 7,410 yards from the tournament tees | Two 18-hole courses, East and West |
| Built for | The toughest test in the country | Family membership life |
| 2026-2027 marquee | Preparing to host the 2027 U.S. Senior Open | Hosting the 112th Oklahoma Open, Aug. 20-22, 2026 |
The state's oldest continuing golf tournament is a few blocks from your kitchen
The 112th Oklahoma Open runs August 20 through 22 on the Country Club's East Course. Do the arithmetic on that number and something interesting falls out: a tournament in its 112th playing in 2026 traces its roots back to roughly 1915, a year before the PGA of America even held its first Championship. The trophy handed out on the 22nd predates almost every piece of modern professional golf infrastructure most people assume came first.
The East Course has earned its role as host. Past Oklahoma Open champions crowned there include Bob Tway, Gil Morgan, David Edwards, Todd Hamilton, and Lucas Glover, a run of winners that reads like a list of players who went on to win on tour. The course itself, a par 70 stretching nearly 7,100 yards with a slope rating of 143, has been ranked Golf Digest's fifth-best in Oklahoma.
The last six holes on the East Course put water into four of them. That's usually where the Oklahoma Open gets decided, not on the front nine.
The Open isn't landing in an empty month. On August 3, the Women's Oklahoma Golf Association ran its fundraiser scramble on the same East Course. On August 6, the Oklahoma Open's amateur qualifier played out on the Country Club's West Course. By the time the championship itself tees off, the Country Club's two courses will have hosted three separate competitive rounds inside three weeks, on top of a spring and summer that already included the Oak Tree Invitational college tournament in March, won by West Texas A&M, and the Oak Tree Junior Classic in late May.
The National's own countdown: 2027
While the Country Club works through its August, Oak Tree National is a year out from its own moment. The USGA announced in 2023 that Oak Tree National will host the 2027 U.S. Senior Open, its third USGA championship on that course. It's part of a three-year run that also sends the championship to Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio for 2026 and Crooked Stick Golf Club in Carmel, Indiana for 2028, each club a past host returning for another turn.
Oak Tree National's championship record didn't happen by accident. In order:
- 1984 U.S. Amateur — won by Scott Verplank, a Texan who was playing college golf at nearby Oklahoma State University at the time.
- 1988 PGA Championship — won by Jeff Sluman, who closed with a final-round 65 to finish twelve under par.
- 2000 PGA Club Professional Championship — won by Tim Thelen in a playoff.
- 2006 Senior PGA Championship — won by Jay Haas over Brad Bryant, also in a playoff, with gusty winds holding the field close to par all four days.
- 2014 U.S. Senior Open — won by Colin Montgomerie in a playoff over Sauers.
- 2027 U.S. Senior Open — the course's next major championship, and its third USGA event overall.
More than four decades of major championship golf on one course, with a sixth chapter now on the calendar, is not a common résumé for a private club anywhere in the country, let alone one where members can walk their dog past the practice range on a Tuesday morning.
What this changes about the neighborhood's late-summer rhythm
For most of Edmond, mid-August means back-to-school schedules and the first break in the heat. Inside Oak Tree, it means something else. The practice range fills before 7 a.m. to beat the temperature. Rules officials and marshals move through gates that are usually quiet. Members finish a fundraiser scramble on Monday and watch state amateurs battle through a qualifying round on Thursday, all before the Open itself takes over the East Course for a full weekend.
None of this requires a membership to notice. It's simply what the calendar looks like when two golf clubs with more than a century of combined tournament history sit inside the same set of gates, each running its own countdown at the same time. One clock reads 112 years and counts down to a final round on August 22. The other reads eleven months and counts down to a return to national television in 2027. Living here means living inside both.
If golf season has you thinking about what's next for your own place inside the gates, or you're weighing a move to a neighborhood with this kind of built-in identity, the team at Stetson Bentley knows Oak Tree from the inside out. Book an appointment to talk through the market, or request a home valuation if you're curious what your Oak Tree property is worth this season.
