Rock Creek Park Golf Has Its Long Lease Back. For Crestwood, the Trails Come Last.

On October 28, 2026, National Links Trust signed a new 50-year lease with the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service to run and rehabilitate Rock Creek Park Golf and Langston Golf Course. That ended almost a year of uncertainty over the hilly William Flynn course. The course runs along 16th Street NW, north of Military Road and just north of the Rock Creek Park Tennis Center, a short trip up the park's edge from Crestwood. The headlines were about who runs the course. For Crestwood, the order of construction matters more. The nonprofit's plan builds the golf facilities first. The multi-use trails, pollinator meadow and picnic pavilion, the parts that serve neighbors who never pick up a club, are in the second phase.

That makes the rebuild a long project for anyone who lives on the park's edge. Today the most visible progress is native habitat work on the old holes.

How the course got from a closure notice to a 50-year deal

The lease capped twelve months of stops and restarts.

1. November 17, 2025. National Links Trust closed Rock Creek Park Golf to start Phase 1 of its rehabilitation. The plan was to reopen at least nine holes the next spring on a modified routing around clubhouse construction.
2. December 2025. The National Park Service ended the nonprofit's contract to operate DC's three public courses, WTOP reported. According to The 51st, the uncertainty halted planned upgrades at Rock Creek, including a new driving range, a clubhouse powered by solar and geothermal energy, and a 600,000-gallon rainwater cistern for irrigation.
3. May 8, 2026. An agreement with Interior kept all three courses open, and National Links Trust stayed on at Rock Creek and Langston under a longer-term arrangement.
4. October 28, 2026. The new 50-year lease was signed for Rock Creek and Langston. National Links Trust's role at East Potomac Golf Links ends on or before November 15, 2026.

Without East Potomac, the organization says it will put its full resources into the two courses it kept. At Rock Creek, that means restarting the clubhouse, driving range and course rehabilitation that stalled last winter.

What's playable on the course up the street

The rebuild hasn't started again yet. Until it does, Rock Creek runs as a small, cheap, partly closed course. playDC's course page lists the 2026 setup this way:

• Front nine: open, par 65 and 4,961 yards for 18 holes if you play it twice. playDC describes it as mostly flat and open, with short par 4s and long par 3s.
• Back nine: closed until safety renovations are done. A 5-hole loop of holes 10, 11, 15, 17 and 18 is bookable.
• Greens fees: $19 for nine holes Monday through Thursday and $24 Friday through Sunday. The loop is $12 and $14. Seniors 60 and up and military golfers pay $14 and $19 for nine holes, and junior rates start at $8.
• Extras: a free practice putting green, a basic snack bar with candy, chips, soda, water and beer, and no driving range.
• Hours: course 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., clubhouse 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

The back nine is where the course gets its reputation. playDC calls Rock Creek the hardest of DC's three public facilities because of the steep hills and narrow fairways on those closed holes. Hours and status can change with weather and course conditions, so check playDC's facility status page before walking over with your clubs.

The golfers who still play here know what they're getting. One of them told FOX 5 DC why he keeps coming back:

"I think it's great to have a staple of the community stay here for a long time and have a cheap place to play golf. It absolutely needs some work, it has some rough edges, but it's the character of this place that keeps us coming back, so that's why I'm here." Matt Rodenberg, Rock Creek golfer, speaking to FOX 5 DC

Phase 1 is a golf facility, built from the clubhouse out

The October release describes two overlapping workstreams. The first covers vertical construction and practice facilities. The second covers golf course renovation and restoration. Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner remain the course architects, and both have agreed to work pro bono. Completion is projected for spring 2028, pending permits. Golfweek's October 29 report gives the same two-phase schedule and spring 2028 target.

Here is how the project plan splits the work:

Phase 1 offers non-golfers one thing, a restaurant and community gathering space inside the clubhouse. Everything else in the first column serves people who come to swing a club. The plan says the project will be paid for entirely through National Links Trust's operations and private philanthropy.

Phase 2 is where the trails and meadow arrive

For a Crestwood household that walks the dog toward the park more often than it books a tee time, the second column of that table is the one that matters. Trails for jogging, walking and hiking, a pollinator meadow and a picnic pavilion are all Phase 2 items, built alongside the course's rebuild into one regulation nine and one par-3 nine.

The plan describes the whole project as two phases over roughly two years. The October release adds that the phases will overlap, with spring 2028 as the target for finishing everything. So the neighbor-facing pieces are tied to the course renovation, the second workstream, not the first. Clubhouse construction and the driving range are what the 16th Street side of the park will see first once work resumes.

The habitat work you can already see

One part of the plan didn't wait for the lease. The 51st reported in May that National Links Trust habitat restoration specialist Brian Wright kept working through the uncertainty. He and his assistant, Otto Watson, surveyed priority restoration projects around the course. Wright walked the grounds regularly with park botanist Ana Chuquin to make sure the work met the National Park Service's ecological standards.

According to that report, here is what's already in the ground:

• The historic 14th tee. Volunteers replaced tangles of invasives with Virginia wild rye and six other native grass species. The area sits next to a proposed hiking trail and is meant to turn slowly into forest.
• A starter nursery. Wright fenced off a circle of land cleared of invasives with 100 feet of fencing, to be filled with native shrubs and saplings that will grow into habitat for birds and mammals.
• The historic 17th hole. A wet gully became a vernal pond after the winter snowmelt, with a spring chorus of American toads, spring peepers, and green, wood and pickerel frogs.

That work comes from years of invasive removal on the property. National Links Trust's November 2025 update quotes Brian Gietka, a USGA Green Section consulting agronomist, saying "excellent progress has been made in remediating the property of invasive vegetation and dead trees."

Neighbors can take part in this work before the trails exist. National Links Trust's volunteer page invites groups to request service projects at Rock Creek, including invasive plant removal, native planting and trash cleanup. Projects run on weekdays between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. and usually last two to three hours. A block group, a book club or an office team from the neighborhood could spend a morning on the meadow that the Phase 2 trail will eventually pass.

The park edge after dark this winter

The golf course isn't the only change on Crestwood's side of the park this season. The National Park Service's deer management operations run from November 2, 2026 through March 1, 2027, with nighttime road and trail closures. Joyce Road and parts of Beach Drive may close during operations. Piney Branch Parkway and Beach Drive south of Broad Branch Road are listed as staying open. If your evening drive or walk home runs through the park, plan around those closures through early March.

Between now and spring 2028, the course along 16th Street will work through a restarted construction schedule. The clubhouse and range come first, and the meadow and trail corridor take shape on the course's restored holes.

If you live near the park and want to know how a project like this could affect your block, from construction timing to what a new clubhouse and trail network might mean for the streets around it, Tamara Miller is glad to walk through it with you over coffee in the neighborhood. Schedule a free consultation, and bring your questions about Crestwood's edge of Rock Creek Park.