Drive south on Shary Road past the entrance to Sharyland Plantation and you will pass a golf course that has not seen a mowed fairway in four years. The gates at Cimarron Country Club still stand. The clubhouse sign is still legible. Everything else has gone quiet since August 2022, when the club shut down after its owners ran out of money to keep it operating.
If you have lived in this part of Mission for a while, you already know the outline of what happened next. The city bought the property. Somebody eventually bought it from the city. There is talk of golf coming back. What most people have not heard is the number that makes this story make sense: the City of Mission paid $5 million to acquire Cimarron in February 2025, and this June it sold to a private investor group for roughly half that figure. On paper, that looks like the city lost money on a real estate deal. In practice, it is the clearest signal yet that this redevelopment is being taken seriously.
The Discount Was the Strategy
Mission Economic Development Corporation CEO Teclo Garcia has been blunt about why the city moved fast and low on price. A crumbling, overgrown club sitting on one of Mission's most visible roads was doing more reputational damage than the asking price could offset. The EDC's goal was never to break even on the parcel. It was to find a buyer with the money and the motivation to actually finish the job, and price the deal so that buyer would say yes.
That buyer turned out to be New Cimarron Group, LLC, a partnership anchored by professional golfer Abraham Ancer, the Mexico-based development firm GDI FUSA, Diamond Golf International, and RGV-based investors Olimpo Salinas and Manuel Heredia. The group is putting real money behind the discount. Estimates for the full restoration, covering the golf course, clubhouse, driving range, tennis court, restaurant, and pool, run as high as $14 to $20 million. The gap between what the city paid and what it accepted was not generosity. It was the cost of getting a buyer who could write that second, much larger check.
Why a Local Golfer Bought His Old Course
Ancer is not an outside investor who spotted an opportunity on a spreadsheet. He is a Sharyland High School graduate who moved to the area from Reynosa as a kid and played Cimarron most days growing up before going on to become a first-team All-American at Odessa College and eventually a winner on both the PGA Tour and LIV Golf. He has said publicly that driving past the course in its current state, after playing it almost daily as a teenager, was hard to watch.
That personal history matters for what happens next, because Ancer is not just a name on the investment paperwork. According to Diamond Golf International president Salvador Rodriguez, the redesign's most distinctive new feature, a peninsula green on Hole 13, came directly from Ancer's own input on how the hole should play. Rodriguez, whose firm has worked on more than 400 golf course projects worldwide, has explained the broader reasoning in plain terms: courses built in the 1980s are effectively outdated because modern equipment sends the ball much farther than architects like Dave Bennett, who designed Cimarron in 1983, ever accounted for. The routing stays the same. The way each hole plays does not.
What Actually Changes and What Doesn't
For residents trying to picture the finished product, here is where things stand based on what the ownership group has said publicly:
Staying the same: the 18-hole, par-72 layout that Dave Bennett laid out more than 40 years ago, the club's identity as a private facility, and its role as the social anchor for the Cimarron neighborhood, one of the residential communities near Sharyland Plantation within Mission.
Getting rebuilt or reimagined: the golf course itself, updated for modern play, plus a full renovation of the clubhouse, restaurant, pool, and tennis courts. City officials have also floated a future boutique hotel component, though that piece remains a stated intention rather than a funded plan.
Not yet announced: a reopening date. At the June unveiling, held at Mission's Center for Education and Economic Development, Garcia said the timeline for completion was still being worked out. Anyone telling you Cimarron reopens next spring, or next year, is guessing. The ownership group has committed to the investment. They have not committed to a calendar.
The Part That Happened Before Any of This Made the News
The version of this story that gets told in press releases starts with the city's 2025 purchase. The version that residents actually lived through started earlier and looked far less orderly. Back in 2023, Mission attorney Rick Salinas, whose father Norberto Salinas is a former mayor, stood in front of city council after touring the abandoned course on his golf cart and asked why nothing was being done. He was not alone. More than half the residents of the Cimarron neighborhood eventually signed petitions supporting both a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone expansion and a Public Improvement District, tools that would let the neighborhood help fund its own repairs if the city and a buyer never materialized.
None of that resident organizing shows up in the headline about a professional golfer buying the club. But it is very likely part of why the city moved when it did. Ann Camarillo, president of the Cimarron Homeowners Association, put the years of waiting simply after the June announcement: the neighborhood had wondered if it was foolish to keep hoping, and now there was finally something real to hope for.
Part of a Bigger Pattern in the Upper Valley
Cimarron is not the only golf project stirring in this corner of Hidalgo County. Earlier this year, McAllen announced plans for a new course designed by Lorena Ochoa, another Mexican golfer with international standing. Two projects, both tied to well-known golf names with regional roots, both aimed at the same audience: families and business travelers on both sides of the border who used to have more private club options than they do now. Cimarron's revival is not happening in isolation. It is part of a small wave of investment betting that the upper Valley's private recreation and event space market has room to grow again.
What This Means If You Live Nearby
You do not need a membership card or a handicap to have a stake in this. Cimarron has functioned as more than a golf course for decades. It hosted brunches, tennis matches, and business gatherings that pulled in members from both sides of the border. Its slow decline left a gap in that kind of shared space for the whole area, Sharyland Plantation included. Its return, even a partial one, changes what is available for community life within a few minutes of home.
The most useful thing you can do right now is watch for confirmed updates rather than rumors. Mission EDC's own newsroom has been the most reliable source of verified details so far, posting updates directly tied to each stage of the sale and unveiling. If a firm reopening date gets announced, that is where it is likely to surface first, alongside any news about which of the announced amenities, the restaurant, the tennis courts, the hotel, actually gets built first.
For now, the honest summary is this: the ownership is settled, the money behind it is real, and the person steering the redesign has more personal history with this course than almost anyone else who could have bought it. The date on the clubhouse doors reopening is the one thing nobody has given you yet.
If you are curious how developments like this one tend to ripple through daily life in Mission and the surrounding communities, Isaiah Ramos keeps an eye on what is actually changing on the ground here, not just what gets announced at a podium. Let's Connect if you want to talk through what's happening in your corner of the Valley.
