Ask most people in Emerald Hills what happens at 938 Wilmington Way and you'll get some version of the same answer: a par-3 course, good for teaching a kid to swing an iron, maybe a story about someone's uncle making a hole in one on the ninth. That's the Emerald Hills Golf Course everyone knows, and it's not wrong. It's just incomplete.
For the last eleven years, the same nine fairways have hosted a second sport entirely, one that most residents driving past on Wilmington Way have never clocked. On August 22, that second sport is putting on its biggest show since 2023.
The Course Everyone Thinks They Know
Emerald Hills Golf Course opened in 1933, designed by Ellis Van Gorder, and it has stayed exactly what it was built to be: a short, hilly nine-hole par-3 layout, 1,205 yards from the longest tees, with a course rating of 45 and a slope of 88. It's the kind of number that tells you everything. This was never meant to be a test of championship golf. It was meant to teach a swing, keep a short game sharp, and let a family play nine holes without burning an afternoon.
The Redwood City Elks Lodge 1991 has run the course on its 30-acre property for decades, and the pro shop still does what pro shops at courses like this have always done: sell snacks, pour a cold beer, and keep the lights on for regulars. It's a neighborhood fixture in the truest sense. Nothing about the ball golf side of the operation has needed reinventing.
The Second Course Hiding in the Same Fairways
What changed is what got layered on top of it. In 2015, the Elks installed a permanent disc golf course on the same property, and it grew into something with its own rhythm entirely separate from the ball golf calendar. The disc course runs 11 holes across two loops that share fairways with the short nine, and it now carries an average rating of 4.4 out of 5 from more than 900 community reviews on UDisc, a rating disc golfers describe as very good by the standards of the sport.
The Peninsula Disc Golf Club has operated a year-round league at the course since that 2015 installation, and the club's calendar has quietly become part of the neighborhood's Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Weekly groups form at 4:30pm, and the pricing reflects a course built for regulars rather than tourists: bag tag holders play for $10 on league days, while a standard nine runs $10 on weekdays and $12 on weekends. A season bag tag costs $25 for 2026. It's the kind of fee structure that only makes sense if you assume most of the players showing up already know the course cold.
That assumption turns out to be right. This is not a course people discover once and move on from. It's a course people return to every week, for a decade, without ever making the local news for it.
The Tournament That Changes That
On August 22, the Peninsula Disc Golf Club is bringing the Climate Best Open back to Emerald Hills for the first time since 2023, a one-day, two-round tournament with 72 players split across professional, amateur, women's, and junior divisions. Registration opened July 12 through Disc Golf Scene, and the club has been open about why this particular tournament matters more than a typical league night.
PDGC President and CEO Michael Regula put it plainly when the return was announced in July: "Many local disc golfers have clamored for a tournament to return to Emerald Hills since the last one in 2023."
The tournament also lands at a specific moment for the club itself. PDGC was recognized as a nonprofit organization this past May, and the Climate Best Open doubles as something of a coming-out event for that new status. A three-year gap between sanctioned tournaments is a long time in a sport built on weekly repetition, and the fact that 72 competitors filled the field suggests the demand never actually went away. It just didn't have anywhere to go.
What Changes at the Course That Saturday
If you live near Wilmington Way and you're used to the course's usual rhythm, August 22 will look different. A two-round, four-division tournament with 72 players means more cars in the lot earlier than a typical weekend, more foot traffic between the ball golf tees and the disc baskets, and a course that's running on a tighter schedule than its normal Friday-through-Sunday pace of casual play. If you're not playing and you're not watching, the simplest plan is to treat that Saturday like a course visit is better saved for Sunday.
If you are curious enough to walk over and watch, this is also the rare weekend where the course's two lives are visible at the same time. Ball golfers on the short nine tend to be generous about disc golfers playing through, according to regulars who've logged rounds there, and a tournament Saturday is when that shared arrangement is most on display: two very different sports, same nine acres, same afternoon.
Why This Is Worth Knowing Even If You've Never Thrown a Disc
The interesting part of this story isn't really the tournament. It's what the tournament reveals about a piece of the neighborhood that's been operating in plain sight without much notice. Emerald Hills Golf Course has spent over ninety years being exactly what it looks like from the road, a modest par-3 built in 1933. But for the last eleven of those years, it's also been quietly building a second identity as a genuine disc golf destination, one with a weekly league, a loyal membership economy built around bag tags, and now a sanctioned tournament with a three-year backlog of pent-up demand behind it.
That's the kind of detail that doesn't show up unless you're paying attention to what's actually happening at a place, not just what it was originally built to be. The course on Wilmington Way isn't hiding anything. It's just been busy running two overlapping communities that rarely cross paths, until a Saturday like this one puts both of them on the same nine holes at the same time.
If you've lived in Emerald Hills for years and never once considered the golf course anything more than a place to teach your kid a swing, August 22 is as good a reason as any to walk over and see what else it's been all along.
If you're weighing a move to Emerald Hills or the wider Peninsula and want a clearer read on what a neighborhood's daily rhythms actually look like beyond the market data, Helen & Brad Miller bring the kind of local grounding that comes from actually knowing which Saturdays matter. Reach out today.
