Newport's Golf Club Has a New Name. The Membership Deal Changed With It.

"There'll be a number of people that join here... from Charlotte, all different areas."

That line came from Mitch Kovitz and Shane LeBaron, two of the managing partners behind the club Newport residents have belonged to for years, describing who they expect to fill out the new membership rolls. They weren't talking about Newport owners. They were talking about the new tier of members the club is actively recruiting from outside a fifty mile radius, people who will treat this course as a second home rather than the place they golf on a Tuesday.

If you own in Newport, you already know the shorthand: your community includes membership in the club at resident rates, golf and pool and fitness bundled into the deal. That much hasn't changed on paper. What changed is everything around it. The club renamed itself, changed owners, tripled its ambitions, and became the anchor of a $400 million development that, over the next decade, could bring as many as 750 new homes to the ground around it. The course you've played for years is still there. The context it sits inside is not the one you signed up for.

A Different Owner, A Different Name

For nearly 15 years, Jim and Denise Medford ran what was known as The Links at Stoney Point, a Tom Jackson design that opened on the shoreline of Lake Greenwood in 1989. The Medfords bought it in the wake of the 2008 real estate crash and kept it running as a solid, unglamorous local course. In 2024, they sold.

The new ownership group, Greenwood Land Holdings LLC, working with Front Light Building Company as developer, renamed the property Olde Eight, a reference to South Carolina being the eighth state to ratify the Constitution. Greenwood County Council approved economic development incentives for the project on December 3, 2024, clearing the way for what county leadership described as a catalyst for the local economy. The investment group includes Ashley and Shane LeBaron, Mitch Kovitz, Matt Green, and former professional golfer David Duval, who was ranked World No. 1 for 15 weeks in 1999 and won the British Open in 2001. Duval's son plays golf at Lander University, which is part of why he says he got involved.

"When I saw this place... I was all in."

Architect Drew Rogers kept Jackson's original 1989 routing but rebuilt every hole, widening fairways and adding strategic bunkering to create more decision points for players of different skill levels. The redesigned 18 held its ribbon cutting on November 7, 2025, with Duval speaking at the event. More than 50 new employees had already been hired by that point, part of a project expected to create 103 full-time jobs across its build out.

What's Actually Ready This Fall, And What Isn't

If you've driven past the property this year, you've seen a mix of finished work and active construction. Here's what that split actually looks like, sorted by what a Newport resident can use today versus what's still arriving.

The nine hole lit short course and the putting green were both targeted for a fall 2026 finish according to the project architect's own materials, which puts the timeline landing right now. Whether that construction wraps this month or slips into winter, the pattern is clear: the golf course itself came first, the restaurant got a name change almost immediately, and everything that makes this feel like a resort rather than a course, the academy, the lake club, the marina, the general store, is still catching up.

The Airstream is worth noting on its own. It's currently doing double duty as the pro shop while the permanent one gets built, and the plan is for it to eventually become a casual gathering spot along the putting course once its retail job is done. That's a small detail, but it tells you something about where this project actually is: temporary structures standing in for permanent ones, a common signal that a build is still mid-stream rather than finished.

The Paperwork Caught Up With The Product

For years, "membership at resident rates" was the whole sentence. Now Newport's own community materials point buyers and owners to a separate document, the Newport Olde Eight Realtor Guide, to spell out how access actually works under the new ownership. That's not a small procedural footnote. It means the relationship between Newport and its club got complicated enough after the sale that it needed its own paperwork, where before it was just an assumed line item in the HOA packet.

Some context on what membership costs elsewhere in the same system: at neighboring Stoney Point, a separate community that shares the same club, the reported initiation fee at the time the renovation was announced was $25,000, described by ownership as equivalent to the initiation fee at Grand Harbor Club in Ninety Six. That figure applies to Stoney Point, not Newport specifically, but it's a useful marker for what "membership" now means in this part of the lake. This isn't a modest local amenity anymore. It's priced and positioned alongside the other established lake clubs in the area.

The membership strategy explains why. Ownership has said publicly it wants a mix of primary and secondary members, drawing people from outside the immediate area, including Charlotte, to fill out the roster. Public tee times were expected to be available only one or two days a week once the renovation settled in, with the rest of the schedule prioritized for members and residents. If you've gotten used to a quiet course with plenty of open tee sheet, that's the piece most likely to feel different as the build out continues.

What Changes For Someone Who Already Lives Here

None of this changes whether you can still golf, swim, or eat at the club this week. It does change what you're actually part of. A year ago you belonged to a modest, well-run local course with a restaurant everybody just called Bermuda's. Today you belong to one piece of a $400 million development with its own homebuilder (Lanthorne Homes, building exclusively within the project), its own marina plans, and its own recruiting pitch aimed at members who don't live anywhere near Lake Greenwood.

The day to day differences are mostly good ones. The course itself is a genuine upgrade over what existed before, with wider fairways and greens designed by an architect with a national reputation. The restaurant is still open, just under a new name and new ownership. The instruction facility, once it's finished, will put a Callaway-affiliated academy inside a club Newport residents already have access to at resident rates, something the old Links at Stoney Point never offered.

What's different is the scale of what surrounds you. Over the next decade, this property is planned to add up to 750 residential units across seven districts. Some of those future neighbors will be full-time. Many, based on ownership's own stated strategy, will be secondary members who show up a few times a year from Charlotte or wherever else the marketing reaches. Either way, the club that used to be a quiet neighborhood perk is now the front door to something considerably bigger, and the paperwork Newport had to write to explain the new arrangement is proof of just how much changed underneath a name that, on the surface, still just says "golf and pool at resident rates."

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own plans on the lake, whether that's understanding how your HOA documents changed, or just making sense of what's actually finished versus still under construction before you plan around it, Joan Timmerman and the Premier Properties team track these changes as they happen locally. Schedule a Local Market Consultation if you want a straight answer on how any of this affects your specific property or plans.