The Token, the Butterflies, and the Sunday Weddings at Sterling Hills Golf Club

Ask anyone who golfs at Sterling Hills what makes the course different from the half dozen others between Oxnard and Ventura, and most won't mention the fairways first. They'll mention the token. Every round at Sterling Hills Golf Club comes bundled with a food or drink token, redeemable at the clubhouse grill depending on when you tee off. It sounds like a small thing. It is a small thing. But it's also one of the clearest signs of how differently this course is being run compared to a few years ago, and it says something about how the neighborhood around it functions even for people who have never picked up a club.

Sterling Hills the neighborhood takes its name from the golf course at its center, but the course isn't just scenery here. It's closer to a piece of shared infrastructure, the way a good local diner or an old movie theater becomes part of a town's routine without anyone deciding it should. The token, the driving range's odd weekly schedule, a butterfly conservation program tucked into the rough, and a clubhouse that hosts what feels like a wedding every single Sunday all point to the same thing: this course has become something closer to a community fixture than a recreational amenity, and that shift has a specific history behind it.

A Course the Neighborhood Almost Lost

Sterling Hills Golf Club opened in 1999, designed by Robert Muir Graves and Damian Pascuzzo, and at the time it was the only public golf course in Ventura County. That fact alone tells you it was built to serve more than the immediate neighborhood.

The Zaruka family, which still owns the course today, began operating it directly as a family business in 2018. The very next year, that same ownership tested a very different future for the property. In 2019, the Sterling Hills Homeowners Association filed a formal resolution with the Camarillo City Council opposing a plan by then-owner John Zaruka to sell as much as 20 acres of the course, zoned strictly for open-space golf use, for high-density residential development. The HOA's objection wasn't limited to Sterling Hills. It named the Fairways, Bella Vista, and Las Posas Estates as communities that would feel the traffic, infrastructure strain, and loss of open space too. The resolution argued that any rezoning would set a precedent that could chip away at the rest of the course over time.

The development plan didn't move forward. What did move forward, in the years since, was steady reinvestment in the golf business itself rather than a return to the subdivision idea. Whether the community pushback directly shaped that choice isn't something available records confirm, but the sequence is hard to miss: a shelved plan to sell off open space, followed by a family-run operation that kept investing in the course it already had.

That reinvestment shows up less in press releases and more in the small operational choices a regular golfer would notice within a few rounds.

What Actually Changed

Reviews from golfers who played the course under the old ownership describe a stretch where conditions had slipped, fairways thin and patchy, bunkers closer to concrete than sand. Reviews from the past year describe something closer to a steady climb back. As of this year, the course carries a 4.3 out of 5 rating across more than 1,700 reviews on GolfPass, with players consistently pointing to staff and course conditions as the strongest reasons to come back. It isn't a finished transformation. Some reviewers still flag rough patches on certain holes. But the trajectory reviewers describe, and the operational details the club now publishes, back up the idea that this is a course being actively managed rather than coasted on.

Three names show up on the club's official staff listing and are worth knowing if you're a regular: Lee Harlow serves as General Manager and Head Pro, Katrina Sutton is Director of Golf, and Dan Warne is the course superintendent responsible for turf conditions. These aren't just names on a directory. In a small operation like this, the people in these roles are the ones deciding whether a soft green gets aerated this month or next, and whether a member's complaint about a bunker gets fixed by the weekend.

The Driving Range Runs on Its Own Calendar

If you've ever shown up to hit a bucket of balls on a Tuesday morning expecting to strike off real turf, you've probably been surprised. The Sterling Hills driving range keeps a schedule that most public courses don't bother with.

PGA instructors and Callaway fitting staff work out of the practice facility as well, which is more than most daily-fee public courses in the county offer. It's a detail that rewards knowing in advance, since planning a Sunday evening range session around a Tuesday-only maintenance quirk is the kind of thing that trips up even people who've lived in the neighborhood for years.

Butterflies in the Rough

The most easily missed change at Sterling Hills has nothing to do with golf performance at all. The course is a participant in Monarchs in the Rough, a milkweed and nectar-plant seed grant program run through a partnership between Audubon International, the United States Golf Association, and several other conservation groups. The idea is straightforward: golf courses have a lot of underused rough and edge acreage, and planting it with milkweed and nectar species gives migrating monarch butterflies, a species under real population pressure, somewhere to feed and lay eggs along their route.

Lee Harlow and the Zaruka family are credited by name for bringing the program to Sterling Hills. It isn't the kind of thing that shows up on a scorecard, and most golfers playing the back nine probably don't clock the plantings as anything other than landscaping. But it's consistent with the same pattern as the token and the range schedule: small, unglamorous investments that only make sense if the people running the place expect to still be running it five years from now.

If you've ever wondered why the rough near the ninth hole looks a little wilder than a typical fairway border, that's not neglect. That's on purpose.

Every Sunday, Somewhere, a Wedding

Golfers who've played Sterling Hills for years will tell you the same thing without prompting: it's rare to walk the back nine on a Sunday afternoon without spotting a wedding setup somewhere on the property. The 12,000-square-foot clubhouse, Spanish-style in its architecture, is managed as an event venue by Wedgewood Events, and its selling points read like a checklist built for exactly this kind of booking: a wrought-iron chandelier, a working fireplace, a fountain, and sightlines toward the Topatopa Mountains that make for a dependable backdrop in wedding photography.

For residents who never set foot on the course, this matters more than it might seem. Sunday afternoons around Sterling Hills Drive tend to carry a little more traffic and a few more unfamiliar cars in the neighborhood than a typical weekday, not because of golf, but because the clubhouse is doing double duty as one of the more active event spaces in this part of Camarillo. It's one more way the course functions less like a private recreational club and more like shared civic space that happens to have eighteen holes attached to it.

Why Any of This Matters If You Live Here

None of these details change anyone's handicap. But together they explain something real about how this small pocket of Camarillo works. The course survived a threatened sale of its open space in 2019. The family that owns it chose to reinvest rather than subdivide. And the visible result, years later, isn't a flashy renovation announcement. It's a token with your round, a driving range that runs on its own internal clock, a butterfly habitat nobody advertises, and a clubhouse that hosts a wedding almost every week. That's what a course being taken seriously by its owners actually looks like from the outside: not one big change, but a dozen small habits that add up.

If you're a longtime Sterling Hills resident, chances are you already knew two or three of these. If this was the first you'd heard about the Monarchs in the Rough program or the reason behind the Tuesday range delay, now you know what the regulars know.

Sterling Hills is one of the neighborhoods The Carolan Group has followed closely for years, not because the golf course drives home values on its own, but because the small, specific details of a place are usually the first sign of how well it's being cared for. If you're curious what that kind of steady local investment means for what your home is worth right now, Request Your Home Valuation and we'll walk you through it.