Southern Hills Country Club now has championship golf on its calendar for the next eighteen years. The United States Golf Association confirmed in May 2026 that the club will host the 2036 U.S. Mid-Amateur, the 2039 U.S. Girls' Junior, and the 2044 U.S. Amateur, stacking three more majors onto a course that already has a PGA Championship booked for 2032. Alongside those championships is an annual Monday charity outing that supports a junior golf program based elsewhere in Tulsa.
That gap between the two calendars is the actual story of living next to Southern Hills. One calendar belongs to the sport. The other belongs to the neighborhood.
The Calendar the USGA Just Extended
The May 21 announcement was specific about what each new event means. The 2036 U.S. Mid-Amateur will be the first time that championship is played anywhere in Oklahoma. The 2039 U.S. Girls' Junior will be the third staged in the state and the first since 2015, when Tulsa Country Club hosted. The 2044 U.S. Amateur will be Oklahoma's fifth and the first since 2009. Together they'll mark Southern Hills' 11th, 12th, and 13th USGA championships, and the third time the club has hosted the U.S. Amateur specifically.
USGA managing director Mark Hill framed the extension as a continuation of something already decades deep. "Our relationship with Southern Hills spans more than 80 years, and the club's dedication to excellence gives us every reason to extend it further," he said in the announcement. In a News On 6 report, club president Tim McFerrin called the expanded partnership "a point of tremendous pride for our club" and said the new championships reflect "our club's reverence for the game's traditions and our enduring commitment to competitive golf at every level."
That's on top of a PGA Championship history that already includes five appearances, with winners ranging from Raymond Floyd and Dave Stockton to Tiger Woods, Nick Price, and Justin Thomas. The course returns for a sixth PGA Championship in 2032. None of these dates require anything from the people who live nearby. The tournaments arrive, fill the surrounding streets with credentialed traffic for a week, and leave. The neighborhood's relationship to that calendar is mostly proximity.
A Private Course in the Neighborhood
The course itself dates to 1935, when oil executive Waite Phillips donated the land after being talked into it by local boosters who wanted a family club with a pool, stables, and a golf course attached. Architect Perry Maxwell laid out the original 18 holes, and the course opened officially on May 23, 1936, with a clubhouse built in an English country manor style that same year. Gil Hanse's 2018 renovation restored much of Maxwell's original intent, and that restored layout is what the USGA is now booking through 2044.
Southern Hills is a private, member-owned club. Waiting lists run long, and guest play through a member is, realistically, how most people who live in the neighborhood ever set foot on the grounds. The course is a prominent feature of the area.
The annual tournament is one opportunity for the wider Tulsa golf community to play at the club.
The Annual First Tee of Tulsa Tournament
Southern Hills Country Club Charitable Foundation put on the first First Tee of Tulsa Charitable Golf Tournament in 2001, seeded by proceeds from the 1995 and 1996 PGA Tour Championships. The tournament has run every fall since, and by the club's own accounting it has raised more than $1,695,400 for the First Tee of Tulsa junior golf program over that span. This year's tournament was scheduled for Monday, September 21, 2026, at the club, with the format that's become standard: two shotgun starts, one at 8:30 a.m. and one at 1:30 p.m., breakfast and lunch service, and an awards ceremony to close the day.
The tournament supports First Tee of Tulsa, whose junior golf program is based at Mohawk Park Golf Course. Its headquarters are nine miles north, where a 5,079-square-foot learning center opened in October 2001 with an indoor hitting facility and classroom space. The Southern Hills Country Club Charitable Foundation was instrumental in establishing that program, and the club's board still solicits funding to keep it free for every participant.
For golfers, the day offers a chance to play Southern Hills; for Tulsa children, its lasting impact is access to free instruction at Mohawk Park.
Two Clocks, One Fence Line
Put the two calendars next to each other and the shape of the neighborhood's relationship to its own landmark gets clearer. The USGA's calendar runs in decades and belongs to competitive golf as a sport. It will bring a U.S. Mid-Amateur field of 264 players in 2036, a Girls' Junior field of 156 in 2039, and a U.S. Amateur field of 312 in 2044, each a self-contained competition at the club. The First Tee calendar runs in single years and belongs to Tulsa specifically. It moves money nine miles north to a public course where none of the majors will ever be played.
Neither calendar asks the neighborhood to participate directly. What the neighborhood gets is adjacency to both: the credibility of sharing an address with a course that will host three more national championships, and the fact that the club supports a free junior golf program based at Mohawk Park.
Living next to Southern Hills means living next to an institution that operates on a scale most residents will never personally intersect with. The course's next two decades are already scheduled. The neighborhood's connection to it, in any given year, comes down to a single Monday in September.
If you're curious what's actually on the ground around the club this fall, or you're weighing what daily life near Southern Hills is really like day to day, Mary Lou Doudican has spent over a decade working this stretch of Tulsa and is always glad to talk through it.
