The highest green fee at Soule Park Golf Course is $57. On a weekday, if you are over 60, it is $32. For three days every October, that same course hosts a field that includes U.S. Senior Amateur regulars, a tournament record of 11-under, and players who fly in from Texas, Ohio, Michigan and Montana to compete for a trophy that did not exist eight years ago.
That is the part Keith Brown still finds a little surprising.
“It’s hard to just kind of start a tournament and then hope people will fly in from all over the country, especially to a public golf course,” Brown said during the 2026 Ojai Senior Cup, sitting down with AmateurGolf.com’s Blaire McKeithen a few minutes after making birdie on his ninth hole of the day. “It’s a lot easier if you’re LA Country Club and you start an event, and everybody wants to come play LA.”
Brown holds the 30-year operating lease on Soule Park from the County of Ventura, with 20 years left on it. He acts as general manager. His wife, Marie, runs the scoring table. Their daughter, Kaia, now 10, has been at registration every year since she was two. The Ojai Senior Cup is not an event the course hosts; it is an event the family runs, on a course they are responsible for, with the intent of making it one of the best weeks in senior amateur golf.
The course that earned it
Soule Park opened in 1962 as a William F. Bell design, a solid municipal layout in the Ojai Valley with the Topa Topa Mountains as its backdrop. The flooding of 2005 wrecked it. The rebuild went to Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, whose 2006 redesign gave the course wide fairways, big contoured greens and the kind of short-game options around them that make a course interesting to play every day, not just once.
It also gave Brown a toolkit. Because he owns the operation, he can set the course up however he wants, and the Hanse-Wagner design gives him more ways to do it than most tournament venues allow.
“We mix up tee boxes in alignment with pin placements, and do things so that all three days really feel different out here,” he said. “Number six we played as a short par 4 at 305 today. Yesterday we played it as a par 3 at 190. Tomorrow we’ll play it as a par 3 at 230. Number seven, which was 425 into the wind today, tomorrow is a 280-yard drivable par 4.”
Conditioning is the other half. Soule Park is predominantly kikuyu, a warm-season grass that thrives in the heat of a Southern California summer, and Brown points the maintenance program at the third week of October. The results have been consistent enough that a field used to playing private clubs tells him, year after year, that this is the best one.
“Every year I stress out about it, because they are used to playing some really nice places,” Brown said. “And every year they just say, this is the best one ever. This is our favorite tournament in the country.”
The early years
The first Ojai Senior Cup, in 2019, did not look much like the one that just finished. It was 36 holes. To fill the field, Brown let 50-year-olds play. Rounds were split between Soule Park and the Ojai Valley Inn, the idea being that a resort course would help sell the trip.
“I had hoped to do that,” he said of building a national-caliber event. “But I completely underestimated what it would take.”
What changed the trajectory was the players’ reaction to Soule Park itself. When the championship expanded to 54 holes so it could award World Amateur Golf Ranking points, the field had one request.
“Almost to a person, as we got into this thing, everybody fell in love with Soule Park,” Brown said. “The guys all said, can we just have every round here? It’s nice to come into town and learn one course versus two. Nothing against the Inn. It just feels like home.”
The public-course setting turned out to be an advantage rather than a liability. At a private club, Brown points out, players come off the course, go to the banquet room and disperse. At Soule Park, they stay. The restaurant and the clubhouse sit right where the golf ends, and the field hangs around.
“There really is a lot more connection among the field than you might have at a high-end private club,” he said.
A family at the table
Part of that connection is Marie, who has run the scoring table since the first year and who Brown describes, with a laugh, as the CFO, “because I just like to pour money back into the golf course and she thinks about things like college educations.” Part of it is Kaia, who in year one sat beside her mother with a clipboard, pretending to work, and who now calls off scores in three-hole increments like a seasoned official, after handing out donuts at registration.
“I think the guys have appreciated that little bit of charm,” Brown said. “It can be a bit of a sterile world from time to time, as we all mutter about our missed opportunities. I think it’s just always felt lighter here.”
What it has become
The 2026 championship was the eighth edition and the second to draw 88 players from a dozen states. On a Friday with gusts near 40 mph, a dozen players still broke par. By Saturday, with the wind down and the greens firming, that number was three. The Hanse greens, as Brown put it, were coming into their own.
John Derrick of Waco, Texas, playing in his fifth Ojai Senior Cup, birdied the 72nd hole to win the Senior Division by one over Bob LeDoux. John Pate of Santa Barbara led the Super Senior Division wire to wire to defend the title he won in a playoff a year earlier. Both results followed a pattern that has come to define the event: the past four Senior titles have been decided over the closing holes, and three of them by a birdie at the last.
Derrick, asked why he and his wife make the trip from Texas every October, put it simply. “The field is always really good, and it just continues to get better. Ojai, the town is so nice, and Keith and the staff do such a good job. The golf course is fun to play, it’s always in great shape. I mean, what’s not to like?”
Brown, for his part, shot 74 the day of the interview and was still in the field, which is its own kind of statement about the event. The tournament director plays in it. His wife keeps the scores. His daughter hands out the donuts. And the best senior amateurs in the West keep flying in to a $57 muni to be part of it.
Blaire McKeithen’s full conversation with Keith Brown is available on the AmateurGolf.com podcast.
2026 Ojai Senior Cup final recap · Ojai Senior Cup tournament page · Tournament website