The sign on Grand Hills Drive says Serket now. If you've driven past the entrance to what used to be Rio Secco Golf Club sometime in the last year, you've probably seen the scorpion logo before you registered what it was replacing. The course still climbs the same canyons, still opens onto the same plateau views of the Strip, still runs the same 18 holes Rees Jones drew up in 1997. Only the name on the gate changed.
Cabot, the company that operates the course, described the change as a refreshed identity, and the story behind the new name is a good one on its own. A second explanation has also come up among golfers, and it involves a licensing agreement. Both are worth knowing, because together they show how the course at the center of Seven Hills is run day to day.
What Actually Happened, in Order
Rio Secco opened in 1997, built for the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino and designed by Rees Jones, the architect known for reworking U.S. Open courses. Harrah's Entertainment bought the Rio property in 1998, and the golf club came along with it. When Caesars Entertainment spun off its real estate into VICI Properties in 2017, the course went with that split. In 2022, VICI signed a 20-year management agreement handing day-to-day operations to Cabot, the golf resort company behind Cabot Cape Breton and a growing U.S. portfolio that now includes Chariot Run in Indiana and Grand Bear in Mississippi.
The course closed for renovation in mid-2025 and reopened on September 20, 2025, as Serket. Jeff Krohn, executive vice president of Cabot-Managed Properties, framed it as a fresh identity for a course that had earned its reputation under a different name for nearly three decades. The new name comes from Serket, the ancient Egyptian goddess associated with protection and healing, typically shown with a scorpion. The scorpion is now the logo on the scorecards, the tee markers, and the clubhouse signage.
That's the version everyone can find. It explains the mythology. It doesn't explain the timing.
What the Head Pro Told One Golfer
A golfer posting on the course-review site Greenskeeper.org this year described asking the head pro directly why the name changed, since ownership clearly hadn't. The answer he got back was more about contracts than symbolism: the club had been paying a licensing fee to use the Rio name, tied to the original Rio hotel-casino, and that fee was going up. In that telling, rather than absorb the increase or pass it along in green fees, the club dropped the name. Cabot's announcement doesn't address the licensing question, so this remains one golfer's account of one conversation.
The golfer summed it up simply after talking to the pro shop: the course was still under the same ownership as Cascata, Cabot's other Las Vegas property, and the name change was a way to sidestep a rising cost rather than a signal that anything else about the club had shifted.
If that account is accurate, the rename was also a business decision about a licensing agreement, made by a management company that also happens to run the golf course sitting in the middle of a residential neighborhood. For homeowners in Terracina, Venezia, Presidio, Renaissance, and Rapallo, the guard-gated enclaves that ring the fairways, it's a useful reminder that the amenity anchoring their home values is operated under contracts that shift for reasons that have nothing to do with the neighborhood itself.
What Didn't Move
The parts of the course that actually matter for daily use are the parts that stayed put. The Rees Jones routing is untouched: six holes through steep canyon terrain, six across an open plateau with valley and Strip views, six through a broader desert wash, playing to a par 72 across roughly 6,992 yards from the back tees. The Butch Harmon School of Golf, the instruction academy tied to Tiger Woods's longtime swing coach, still operates out of the same clubhouse. Tiger Woods still holds the course record at 64, a mark set long before anyone was arguing about licensing fees.
Janelas Restaurant & Bar, the clubhouse spot that serves breakfast and lunch to the public, kept its name and its hours through the transition. For residents who've tried to get a table at a Strip brunch spot on a Saturday and given up after a ninety-minute wait, Janelas remains the closer, calmer option, five minutes from most Seven Hills front doors.
The one place where critics have pushed back is turf maintenance, not the rename itself. Golf Digest's 2025-26 course rankings dropped the property one spot, to 16th among Nevada courses, and at least one reviewer on the platform noted two holes weren't overseeded this fall due to water issues, unrelated to the branding change, though the two are easy to run together. The routing and the ranking are two different conversations. One is about a name. The other is about turf.
What This Means for a Seven Hills Saturday
None of this changes the actual rhythm of living around the course. Sonata Park, one of the larger gathering spots inside Seven Hills, still anchors weekend mornings for families who use its playground and walking paths before the heat sets in. The trail loop that traces the outer edge of the golf property, close to 2.6 miles depending on where you pick it up, is still the same stretch neighbors use for an early run or a dog walk, independent of whatever the clubhouse is calling itself that season.
Tee time pricing has shifted to a more dynamic model under the new operator, with rates that move depending on how close to game day you book. Off-season play, roughly June through August and mid-November through January, has run in the neighborhood of $79 to $169. Peak season, February through May and September through mid-November, has run closer to $119 to $259. That's a meaningful range for a resident deciding whether to play a Tuesday afternoon or hold out for a Saturday morning, and it rewards booking early rather than walking up.
Cabot has also leaned harder into pairing Serket with Cascata as a two-course package, marketing stay-and-play deals through area hotels and offering a rate reduction for golfers who play both courses within five days. For a Seven Hills resident who already has walk-up access to one of the pair, that packaging is mostly a note about how the property is being sold to visitors rather than anything that changes life on the ground.
The steadier fact is that the golf course was never really the neighborhood's identity to begin with. It's the amenity in the middle of it, run by whichever operator holds the management contract this decade, subject to licensing costs and rebrand decisions made in a corporate office that has nothing to do with the streets around it. What holds the value in Seven Hills is the same as it's been since the mid-1990s: the guard-gated structure, the park system, the Coronado High School zoning, the fact that the layout Rees Jones built in 1997 is still the layout in the ground.
The scorpion on the sign is new. Almost everything underneath it isn't.
If you're weighing what a home near Serket, or anywhere else in Seven Hills, is actually worth given how the neighborhood's amenities are managed day to day, The LeJon Jenkins Team can walk through it with you.
