AUSTIN (Fox 7) – Palmilla Beach Resort & Golf Club’s Asset Manager, Greg Carr was interviewed on Fox 7 Austin about rebuilding the Palmilla Beach golf course after a natural disaster and its impact on the community.

Palmilla Beach Golf is back in full swing

Host: We’re talking a little bit about golf already on the show this morning with the first round of the U.S. Open coming up. We’re also talking about a unique golf and vacation opportunity that you have down in the Port Aransas area.

We’ve got Jeff Hentz with the Port Aransas Chamber of Commerce and Greg Carr from Palmilla Beach Resort & Golf Club.

Gregg, tell us about the new development and projects happening.

Greg Carr: Absolutely. We’re probably the fastest growing development in Port Aransas right now.  We have 45 rental properties that consist of cottages, condos, townhomes and single-family homes.

We have about 38 homes that are under construction right now with another 24 to start before the end of the year (2019).

Rebuilding After Hurricane Harvey

Bradley Boyd lines up his shot at the recently reopened Palmilla Beach Resort and Golf Club.

Host: The Palmilla Beach golf course has been around for more than a decade and was almost destroyed during Hurricane Harvey. You brought it back and you’re trying to bring the community around it.

Jeff Hentz: It was, before Harvey, one of the most popular things to do and experience in town. Having it back is just huge. It’s that extra wind in our sail that we needed and what it is today is even more exciting!

We’ve got families coming into our visitor centers telling us, “Now we can all go play as a family and not take eight hours, but we can take a great break for three hours and go out to Palmilla and enjoy the new golf course!”

It’s like a brand new attraction for Port A.

Current state of the golf industry in Port Aransas

Host: There’s a whole bunch of new amenities down there, and as far as the golf, the setup is a little different now.

Carr: Yes, it is. After the hurricane, we needed to look and see what the industry was doing before we decided how we were going to rebuild it.

The market is primarily families and tourists. I need those folks just as much as I need the avid golfers down at the Palmilla Beach Golf course. To get more rounds, we decided to become more family-friendly. We felt the need to bring more novices and beginners back to the game because the industry’s been declining for about 15 years now.

Host: Sometimes, for a whole lot of reasons, golf is a hard game to get-in-the-door and fall in love with.

Carr: It really is. We’ve also built a three-hole short course we call “The Loop”. It’s got some short holes between 85-105 yards and you can go around it quickly. We rebuilt the most picturesque nine holes that surrounded Palmilla Beach Resort, three of which have wonderful views of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a par 32 course, a little over 2,700 yards and the feedback from both avid golfers and casual players is that we’ve “hit a homerun”.

Watch the whole interview segment below: