"Bocce you can play at night," Anita Wallace, a Desert Mountain Club member for 27 years, told the Club's DM Features series this month. "So, we can either sit home, and drink wine and watch TV, or we'll come here and have a glass of wine and play bocce with our friends together."
The Club has now built for that habit. The fall bocce league opened in October with two new courts at Seven Clubhouse. The new courts have seating, scoreboards, lighting and sound, and the dining area looks down on them. It's the most visible new feature on the mountain this fall, and it's built for evenings at Seven after the last tee time.
What Changed at Seven
The Desert Mountain Club announced on October 14 that Seven now has four bocce courts, all now a uniform size that matches regulation dimensions.
According to the Club, the layout was designed around watching as much as playing:
- Spectator seating plus a railing above the courts, so members can follow a match while they eat or stop by
- Scoreboards and court seating placed so players can watch teammates from either end
- Room along the sides kept clear for game management and officiating
- More lighting and sound, which matters most after sunset
- A view over the No. 7 Golf Course with the mountains behind it
The setting adds to that. The Club describes Seven as a family-friendly gastropub with live entertainment, group activities, shareable plates, cocktails and craft beer. With courts, a railing and seats right beside the gastropub, an evening at Seven can be a game, a meal or both. Sonoran Clubhouse still has its two bocce courts, so members have two quite different places to play.
Why the Club Built It
The decision follows the sign-up numbers. The Club reports about 830 bocce players in the fall season and roughly 1,100 in spring. The first season, in fall 2018, had 96 players. By the Club's count, that is an increase of nearly 765% in eight years.
Spring adds about 270 players to the fall count, so the courts will get busier as the season goes on, not quieter. Today's four courts at Seven were built for an October league that will keep growing into spring.
The Club runs two kinds of league, competitive and social, plus a summer league for members who keep playing in the off-season. With three leagues, bocce runs almost all year at Desert Mountain, and it doesn't stop when the weather turns hot.
How the League Connects People
The Club describes bocce as one more social hub, a place to see familiar faces and meet new members. In the same feature, the Club tells how Patty and Stef Cugno, members for six years, put together a team of strangers at a New Member event. Those teammates are now among their closest friends.
"It really is an athletic event, but it is social. As your team gets better, it brings you together, and certainly some of your biggest rivals, the teams that you're always battling, respect you for that, and then we become good friends with a lot of those people too."
Stef Cugno, speaking to Desert Mountain Club's DM Features
The Club also points out that bocce is less physically demanding than golf or racquet sports. It gives members who can't play those a way to compete. That helps explain how the league grew so far beyond its 2018 start. It's open to members whose week doesn't revolve around golf, and the courts are lit for play after dark.
Bocce is one of many groups. A Club feature from September 23 lists more than 45 social clubs, each hosted by a member. Most of them don't need anything built. The bocce league is the one that got its own lit, seated venue this fall.
Meanwhile, the Courses Reopen One by One
The daytime season has been coming back in stages. The biggest return is Geronimo, which the Club says reopened in late September after a year of restoration.
Most of the work is out of sight. Desert Mountain Director of Agronomy Todd Bohn and Chad Goetz of Nicklaus Design led a project that replaced the old pump station and PVC pipes with a new pump station and HDPE irrigation piping. A single-head irrigation system now waters areas precisely and separately, and Bohn can run its software remotely, even from his smartwatch.
Golfers will notice other changes during a round:
- New turf. The course was regrassed with the same turf varieties used at Cochise, which the Club says delivered better color, durability and consistency.
- Bigger tees, especially on the par 3s, plus pruning that reopened sight lines lost over the years.
- Drainage on No. 9. A low area 50 to 75 yards short of the green used to collect water, silt and debris. It now has two 12-inch underground pipes and an upstream sediment collection area.
- Changes elsewhere on the course. Fairway bunkers moved closer to greens, trees that blocked views were relocated, and boulders were removed or buried to improve play and steer water away from fairways.
- Comfort stations without stairs. The new stations at the sixth tee and beside the 13th green and 14th tee sit at ground level.
Geronimo opened on October 31, 1989. Its first round included Jack Nicklaus, Jim Carter and a 19-year-old Phil Mickelson, and none of them broke par. This fall it came back about a month before its 37th anniversary.
The other courses have followed the overseed calendar. The Arizona Golf Association's 2026 overseed schedule lists these Desert Mountain dates:
- No. 7: closed September 14, scheduled to reopen September 27
- Cochise: closed September 28, scheduled to reopen October 11
- Outlaw: closed September 28, scheduled to reopen October 18
- Apache: closed October 12, scheduled to reopen October 25
That makes Apache the last on the list, scheduled for this Sunday, October 25. These are planned dates, so the Club's golf staff will have the latest status.
How a Fall Week Fits Together
Put the two calendars together and the mountain's schedule looks like this for the next few months. By the AGA's dates, every overseeded course is back in play by Sunday, and Geronimo is running on its new infrastructure. In the evening there's Seven, where four lit courts, a railing above them and a gastropub alongside make a league night easy to join, whether you play or just watch.
Sonoran works at a different pace. Its two bocce courts sit at the clubhouse that also has Café Verde, which the Club describes as counter service for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with smoothies, poke bowls, flatbreads and salads. The Club's dining page lists 10 restaurants and grills across the property.
The Club's October 7 feature on a perfect day at Desert Mountain mentions other evenings that run on the same idea, including an Italian Street Festival at Chiricahua, a Mediterranean-themed event at Renegade, and wine dinners. The member calendar will list dates for this season.
If you're thinking about how Desert Mountain's club life fits the way you want to spend a season, Arizona Luxury Real Estate follows these communities closely, from course calendars to the evenings at Seven. Contact Us for a calm conversation about Desert Mountain and the neighborhoods around it.
