The Landings Golf & Athletic Club still markets itself around six championship golf courses, and for good reason. Deer Creek hosts the Korn Ferry Tour's Club Car Championship every spring, a four-day, 72-hole event with a $1 million purse in 2026 that airs on Golf Channel. On a Tuesday night at the Franklin Creek Sports Complex, the crowd is there for pickleball, and it has grown quickly enough that published player and court counts differ depending on when each one was written.
The Landings Golf & Athletic Club's pickleball league started in 2017 with 80 players. The club's current Court Sports page says that number has grown to more than 200. A golf industry writer reporting in July 2026 put the real figure at over 750 active players, playing across 15 courts with expansion to 22 already planned. That's not a rounding difference. That's two different pictures of the same amenity, and the gap between them says something about how fast this has moved.
A court count that changes depending on who last updated the page
Look up how many pickleball courts exist at Franklin Creek and you'll get a different answer depending on which site you land on. A pickleball directory listing from February 2024 counts six courts. A newer aggregator lists ten. Another puts it at twenty, split between ten indoor and ten outdoor. The club's Court Sports page mentions eight pickleball courts and also describes four DecoTurf courts and six concrete courts lit for night play, which totals ten. Counts like these are hard to keep current while courts are still being added.
| Source | Courts listed |
|---|---|
| Club's own Court Sports page | Mentions eight and also describes ten (four DecoTurf, six concrete) |
| Pickleball court directory, Feb. 2024 | 6 |
| Golf industry reporting, early-to-mid 2026 | 15, with expansion to 22 planned |
None of these sources are wrong exactly. They're timestamps. Franklin Creek has been adding courts fast enough that a listing written eighteen months ago is now a historical record rather than a current fact. That pace tracks with the demand: a league that started with 80 people in 2017 and is now pushing past 750 doesn't wait around for the website to catch up.
Golf still gets the big checks, but not because it's growing faster
None of this means golf is fading. It means the club is investing in two different growth stories at once, and the money still leans golf. Deer Creek, the Tom Fazio design that hosts the Club Car Championship, sits at the center of a tournament that used to run under a smaller name. It was previously called the Savannah Golf Championship before the Korn Ferry Tour rebranded it, and the 2026 edition carried a $1 million purse across all four broadcast rounds.
Terrapin Point, the Willard Byrd course at the island's tip, is next in the renovation queue, with Davis Love III's name attached to the project as of mid-2026. Duininck Golf, the contractor handling the club's long-term course renewal plan, has completed work across more than 36 holes to date working alongside Bill Bergin Design. That's real capital, and it's going where the club's tournament history already is.
What's changed isn't which sport gets funded. It's which sport residents are actually showing up to play on a random weeknight. Golf's investment is tournament driven, built around hosting the Club Car Championship and the ATP's Savannah Challenger, the latter played on Franklin Creek's clay courts and a stop that has drawn names like John Isner and Nick Kyrgios in past years. Pickleball's growth is participation driven, built by residents who wanted a court on a Tuesday and kept showing up until the league outgrew its own numbers.
The complex building the courts is also building a kitchen
Franklin Creek isn't just adding paddle sports. The same campus recently got The Deck at Franklin Creek, a fast-casual dining spot built next to the resort-style pool complex and its splash pad. It's part of a $25 million capital plan at the club, open from 8am to 9pm daily, serving coffee, bagels, and hand-tossed pizza to people coming off the courts or out of the pool.
Across the club's other four clubhouses, the dining lineup has kept pace with the same energy. Finjin Sushi & Noodle Bar opened in October 2022. The 109th Hole, a Scottish pub concept with thirteen screens for sports, opened in October 2023. Palmer's Steakhouse anchors the fine dining side. And instead of tipping at any of them, members pay a flat $99 monthly fee that covers gratuity across the board, a detail that shows up in golf industry coverage as one of the club's small but telling operational choices.
None of this is about golf anymore. It's about building a place where the after-court crowd, the after-pool crowd, and the after-league crowd all have somewhere to land without leaving the island. Franklin Creek has become the spot where that instinct is most visible, because it's where the club keeps adding both courts and tables in the same construction cycle.
A membership getting younger while it gets busier
Part of why the courts feel tight has less to do with pickleball's national popularity and more to do with who lives at The Landings now. For years the community sold itself to retirees. That's shifted. A February 2025 feature in LINKS Magazine described a membership base of roughly 9,000 people across the 4,600-acre community, with one member describing the club's sprawl of amenities as a "stationary cruise ship." That same piece noted the community now counts 1,000 residents under the age of 18, with kids getting dropped off after school to drill at the Landings Tennis Academy.
More kids on courts after school means more court time booked before the evening leagues even start. A junior tennis pipeline and an adult pickleball league founded on 80 people are now both drawing on the same pool of real estate at Franklin Creek, at the same hours, on the same complex that's also trying to keep two golf tournaments running smoothly every spring.
What this actually looks like on a Tuesday
If you already live at The Landings, the practical version of all this is simple. Franklin Creek Sports Complex, at 910 Franklin Creek Road, runs pickleball league play on Tuesday nights, and that's currently the most reliable way to guarantee a spot rather than hoping for open play to thin out. The complex is also an official stop on the World Pickleball Tour, which means a handful of times a year, the same courts residents use on a weeknight host a sanctioned event with outside competitive players and a different kind of crowd.
The court expansion toward 22 total is planned, not finished, so anyone counting on more open time in the near term should treat that number as a direction rather than a date. In the meantime, bocce has quietly built its own following on the same campus, with more than 800 league players filling eight oyster-shell courts that get far less attention than the pickleball lines but just as much regular use.
The clearest read on where this is headed sits in the contrast between what gets a press release and what gets a crowded Tuesday. The Club Car Championship gets Golf Channel coverage and a seven-figure purse. The pickleball league gets a line on the club's website that's already behind the actual number of people showing up to play. Both are true at once, and for now, the second one is the story residents are living inside more often than the first.
Curious what a home near Franklin Creek's courts and clubhouses would actually cost, or want a straight answer on which section of The Landings puts you closest to the action without the wait? The Teresa Cowart Team knows this island court by court. Let's Connect.
