Drive Horton Highway on almost any afternoon this year and you will pass a construction site that has outgrown the word construction site. Cranes give way to finished tennis courts. A turf field appears where there was pasture. A building rises that is too big for a barn and too specific in its purpose to be anything municipal. People in College Grove have been asking each other the same question for months: what is that, and who is paying for it?
The short answer is Farm & Forge Club, a 118-acre athletic campus that is quietly becoming one of the largest single private developments this small Williamson County community has ever seen. The longer answer, and the one worth understanding if you live nearby, is that this is not the park College Grove never had. It is something more specific, more private, and in some ways more interesting than that.
Who's Actually Behind the Gates
For a long stretch of its planning, Farm & Forge was attributed to an anonymous donor. That changed as coverage caught up with the project. The founder is Kenny Brody, co-founder of Taconic Capital Advisors, an $8.2 billion hedge fund, who has said organized sports shaped his own foundation as a kid. That personal history is doing real work here. Reporting on the project describes a dual mission built into the campus from the start: serve elite athletes and serve less privileged kids on the same fields, under the same roofs, rather than running two separate operations.
The build itself carries the credentials you would expect from that kind of backing. Northworks handled the design, and J.E. Dunn, one of the country's larger national construction firms, built it. Public filings show the entity behind the club, Joyful Jackrabbits LLC, doing business as The Farm & Forge Club, was formed back in May 2023, which means this has been at least a three-year undertaking before any resident saw a finished court.
What's There Now, and What Opens in November
Not all of Farm & Forge arrived at once, and that staggered timeline is part of why the campus has felt confusing to watch from the road. The tennis side came first. The club's own materials already describe a full-time tennis academy operating on site, built around 18 courts split between 12 indoor and six outdoor clay, with Musco lighting and electronic scoring on the outdoor side. That part of the campus has been functioning for a while now.
What has not opened yet, as of this writing, is the building most people notice first: a strength and conditioning center that early plans called SPARC, short for Strength, Performance and Recovery Center. A hiring listing posted in August 2026 for the facility's General Manager confirms an opening date of November 2026, which means the largest single structure on the property is still weeks away from welcoming its first members. When it does, the building will include:
- A 13,500-square-foot indoor turf space
- A four-lane track and a strength floor with roughly 16 weight racks
- Recovery and physical therapy services
- Golf simulators and martial arts programming
- A juice bar and food and beverage service
- Direct access to the adjacent full-sized outdoor football field, which is built with NFL combine-style sprint lines and elevated filming platforms
The building itself runs roughly 80,000 square feet, a figure that has appeared in slightly different forms across different announcements but lands consistently in that range. Whatever the exact number, it is a serious piece of infrastructure for a town of a few thousand people that had no comparable athletic facility before this.
Public Park or Private Club? It's Neither, Exactly
Here is the part that trips people up. College Grove has never had the kind of shared civic infrastructure that a facility this size usually implies. There is no incorporated downtown, no parks department building something on this scale, no bond issue that funded it. So when 118 acres of tennis courts, turf fields, and recovery centers show up on Horton Highway, the natural assumption for a lot of residents is that the county or the state finally built something for the community.
That assumption is wrong, and understanding why matters if you are hoping to just walk in one day. Farm & Forge is privately funded and built to operate as a membership facility. Pricing for the strength and conditioning side was still described as under development as recently as spring 2026, but hiring activity this summer shows the club actively building out what one job posting calls "the operating model for adult memberships," which suggests access for adults beyond the athlete-focused academy is coming into shape as the November opening approaches.
At the same time, this is not a standard country club either. The stated mission, tied directly to the founder's own background, is to give underserved kids access to the same elite training environment that paying members and academy athletes use. How that access gets structured, whether through scholarships, community programs, or some other mechanism, has not been detailed publicly yet. What is clear is that Farm & Forge was designed from the ground up to serve both audiences on one campus rather than segregating them into separate tiers of facility.
What to Watch For This Fall
If you already live in College Grove, the practical takeaway is simple. The tennis academy has been running for a while and is worth knowing about if your kids play. The bigger building, the one most people have been watching go up from the road, opens in November, and it will bring a strength and conditioning operation, a track, recovery services, and food and beverage to a stretch of Horton Highway that had none of that a few years ago. Membership details for the general public are still being finalized, so the honest answer right now is to watch the club's own updates rather than assume you know what access will look like once the doors open.
It is a strange kind of landmark for a town like this to get. College Grove has built its identity for decades around family farms, open land, and the absence of the things bigger suburbs take for granted, a Main Street, a rec center, a downtown. Farm & Forge does not undo any of that. It sits alongside it, funded by outside capital and built for a purpose that has nothing to do with municipal planning. Whether that makes it feel like an addition or an outlier probably depends on how you already feel about the pace of change out here.
Either way, it is one more reason people keep looking twice at a town that used to be easy to drive past. The Phillips Group spends a lot of time in College Grove, watching the small changes that add up to the bigger story of a place. If you are curious about what else is shifting in this corner of Williamson County, or you are ready to see what a life here could actually look like, Start Your Home Search whenever the timing feels right.
