Drive up Geno Martini Parkway on a Saturday morning and you'll see carts lined up at the first tee, players squinting at a TopTracer screen before their drive, rooflines rising and falling along fairways cut into the hills above Sparks. It looks, from the parking lot, like a golf course working the way golf courses are supposed to work. Walk toward the building where the clubhouse should be, though, and there isn't one. There's a small pro shop counter, a rack of chips and candy, and not much else.
That gap between what you see from the tee box and what you don't find afterward is the whole story of this course, and it's a story most of the neighborhood already knows in pieces but hasn't seen laid out end to end. The short version people tell is "it closed, then it reopened." The real version is that what came back isn't what residents spent a decade fighting for.
What Residents Voted to Lose in 2012
D'Andrea Golf Club opened in 2000 as an 18-hole championship layout designed by architect Keith Foster, built to wind through the high desert canyons above Sparks with sweeping views back toward the Sierra Nevada. For its first decade, the course anchored the neighborhood the way a golf course is supposed to: a shared amenity, a reason the homes around it carried a premium, a place people walked to.
Then the numbers stopped working. The ownership group lost money on the course year after year, and in early 2012 the managing partner, Will Gustafson, asked D'Andrea homeowners to approve an additional $28 monthly fee per residence to keep the water running and the course open. Homeowners voted it down. The course closed in March 2012.
What followed wasn't a quiet mothballing. It was years of a golf course sitting unmaintained in the middle of an occupied residential neighborhood, weeds tall enough to become a fire hazard, chemicals stored in an unsecured maintenance yard, and a legal fight between the city, the ownership group, and the residents living around all of it.
The Clubhouse That Never Came Back
On October 28, 2015, the original clubhouse burned down. It was never rebuilt.
That fire, more than the closure itself, is the hinge point for what D'Andrea actually looks like today. In its wake, a group of residents led by Steve Trollope and Randi Thompson formed D'Andrea Rising, an effort to force a resolution on the abandoned property. Their early proposal was ambitious: an amphitheater, a performing arts center, a wine-tasting room where the clubhouse used to be, vineyards, and a scaled-down nine-hole course. Residents pushed back hard on the noise and traffic that vision implied, and the plan got trimmed to something more modest: a nine-hole course, a rebuilt restaurant and clubhouse, and a handful of holes repurposed as a practice facility. The homeowners association treated the golf course itself as the first priority, with language requiring any winery concept to wait until after the course was rebuilt.
By March 2017, the Sparks City Council had had enough of waiting and voted to pursue a court petition to force action on the derelict property. The pressure worked, in a sense. A company called D'Andrea Phoenix Acquisition LLC took over maintenance of the site, and once upkeep resumed, the city dropped its nuisance lawsuit rather than continue litigating. A year before that, another interested buyer, a company called National Landscape Company, had reportedly been in talks to purchase part of the property, according to a Sparks planning official's comments to a local television station, though that particular deal never became the one that stuck.
The course itself reopened to golfers in 2023 as a restored nine-hole layout. Here's the timeline compressed:
- 2000: Course opens as an 18-hole Keith Foster design.
- March 2012: Course closes after homeowners reject a $28 monthly fee increase.
- October 28, 2015: The clubhouse burns down.
- 2016: Resident group D'Andrea Rising forms to push redevelopment.
- March 2017: Sparks City Council votes to pursue legal action over the derelict property.
- 2018: A potential buyer, National Landscape Company, surfaces in local reporting.
- 2020: The city drops its lawsuit once D'Andrea Phoenix Acquisition LLC resumes maintenance.
- 2023: The course reopens as a restored nine-hole layout.
Eleven years between closure and reopening. As of this summer, it has been nearly eleven years since the clubhouse burned, and it still hasn't been rebuilt.
Nine Holes, Not Eighteen
The course that reopened in 2023 is a par-36, nine-hole layout, still built on Foster's original routing, still carrying the elevation changes that made the back nine a workout in either direction. It's a smaller footprint than what closed in 2012, and it's a smaller footprint than what the original D'Andrea Rising compromise even asked for. The 2017 plan called for the nine-hole course plus a rebuilt restaurant and clubhouse as a package. Only half of that package showed up.
Part of the old back nine has a different afterlife entirely. As part of the negotiated compromise that got the redevelopment moving, plans were approved for a 72-home single-family development called Monticello, arranged around what used to be the eighth and ninth holes. Some of what residents remember as fairway is now, or was slated to become, someone's backyard.
What $55 Buys You Today
If you've played the course this year, you already know the practical shape of it. Reviews from golfers who played rounds in early and mid-2026 describe a course in decent shape with recently punched and sanded greens, a TopTracer-equipped driving range, and a nine-hole round that can run close to three hours with typical weekend pace. Green fees run around $55 for nine holes, a price several recent reviewers have called steep for a course without a clubhouse, a restaurant, or much beyond snack-counter food after the round.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Some real estate descriptions of D'Andrea still circulating online reference a 20,000-square-foot Tuscan-style clubhouse with a full-time general manager, a golf pro, and daily lunch and dinner service. That description was accurate once. It describes the amenity that burned in 2015, not the one that exists today. If you're relying on older write-ups to understand what living near this course actually feels like, you're reading about a building that hasn't stood in over a decade.
The Neighborhood's Social Life Moved Next Door
The clubhouse gap didn't leave a void so much as push community life sideways. The 55-and-older Toscana community sits just a few minutes from the D'Andrea clubhouse site and has its own clubhouse, recreation room, gym, pool, and spa, giving that slice of the neighborhood an indoor gathering space the golf course itself can't currently offer.
The D'Andrea Ladies' Club, which draws members from across Sparks, Spanish Springs, and North Valleys and plays on Tuesdays, splits its rounds between two courses rather than sticking to D'Andrea alone. One of those courses is Red Hawk Golf and Resort out in the Spanish Springs Valley, a sign that even the neighborhood's own golf social scene doesn't lean entirely on the course carrying its name. When the on-site clubhouse disappeared, the informal infrastructure of the neighborhood, at least for organized golf, rerouted itself elsewhere rather than waiting.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this means the course isn't worth playing. A restored Keith Foster design with real elevation, a modern driving range, and the same Sierra views that made the original layout memorable is still a genuine neighborhood asset, and locals clearly keep coming back to it despite the price grumbling. What it does mean is that the story of "the golf course reopened" is only half the sentence. The other half is that the building where the neighborhood used to gather for lunch, for meetings, for the 19th hole after a round, has been gone since 2015 and nobody has committed to bringing it back. Plan your rounds around the snack counter, not a sit-down meal. If you want indoor community space, Toscana's amenities are the closer bet than anything at the golf course itself. And if you're comparing D'Andrea to how it's described in older marketing material, know that the physical reality has moved on without updating the copy.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like D'Andrea actually offers day to day, against what the listings and old write-ups still say about it, that's exactly the kind of gap The Mike Wood Team spends time closing for people making decisions in Northern Nevada. Make Your Next Move With Confidence.
