Drive past the Landings Development near Tiger Town this fall and you'll see the same thing most Opelika residents have been seeing for months: cleared dirt, silt fencing, and a sign announcing that something big is coming. The city made it official in December 2025. Chasing Aces, a golf and entertainment brand out of Bossier City, Louisiana, broke ground on its first Alabama location right there, tucked between Texas Roadhouse and the I-85/Highway 280 interchange.
What the announcements didn't quite prepare anyone for is the scale. The building is listed at 371,461 square feet. Lay a regulation football field, end zones included, next to that number and you'd need almost six and a half of them to match it. That's not a driving range with a clubhouse attached. That's a building the size of a regional mall anchor, and once you understand what's actually going inside it, the label "golf complex" starts to feel like an undersell.
The Size Nobody Expected From a Driving Range
A typical stand-alone driving range in a town this size might run a few acres of open turf and a small equipment shed. Chasing Aces is building something closer to a multi-story entertainment venue that happens to include golf. The scale only makes sense once you separate what the company is actually putting inside that square footage: stacked hitting bays with real-time tracking technology, a putting course built for groups rather than serious practice, and a compact par-3 layout designed to move players through quickly rather than hold them on one hole.
None of that requires 371,461 square feet on its own. What fills the rest of the building is the part locals should pay closer attention to.
What's Golf, and What's Everything Else
The Opelika location will include three distinct golf formats, according to the city's announcement:
| Golf component | What it is |
|---|---|
| Driving range | Multi-bay range powered by InRange technology, tracking ball flight and shot data in real time |
| Social putting course | A casual, group-oriented putting layout, not a traditional practice green |
| Par-3 short course | A compact, fast-paced course built for quick rounds rather than a full 18 |
That's the golf. Layered on top of it are the parts of the building that explain the rest of the footprint. Home Run Dugout is a baseball and softball batting simulator bay, unrelated to golf entirely. Closest to the Pin Live is a weekly streamed event that mixes competitive play with live entertainment, the kind of programming built for a Thursday night crowd rather than a Saturday morning tee time. The Hole-In-One Experience adds a prize pool on every par-3 hole that benefits local nonprofits, which tells you the venue is designed around group nights out and community tie-ins, not solitary practice sessions.
Put together, the math on the building makes more sense. A driving range needs bays and turf. An entertainment venue needs a bar, a kitchen, screens, event space, and room for a crowd that isn't necessarily there to golf at all. Opelika is getting the second kind of building, with golf as the entry point rather than the whole point.
The Corner Around It Was Already Changing
Chasing Aces isn't landing in isolation. The same stretch near Tiger Town picked up a second 7 Brew drive-thru coffee stand in May 2026, at 2212 Frederick Road, directly across from the shopping center. That location joined the brand's original Auburn stand, which opened back in 2023, and it came with its own week of community hours and a fundraiser event before the grand opening. Texas Roadhouse has anchored the same corner for years already.
None of these are related businesses making coordinated decisions. But taken together, the pattern on that side of Opelika is hard to miss. A corridor that used to be defined by big-box retail and highway access is filling in with places designed for people to linger rather than just shop and leave. A coffee stand that hosts community hours. A steakhouse built for a sit-down evening. Now an entertainment venue with a footprint six times a football field, built explicitly around group nights out and streamed weekly events.
For anyone who already lives in Opelika, that shift matters more for what it means about traffic patterns and weekend options near Tiger Town than for any single business opening. The area is becoming a destination in its own right, not just a stop on the way to somewhere else.
When It Opens, and What Changes Between Now and Then
Chasing Aces Opelika is targeting a first-quarter 2027 opening, according to both the city's announcement and coverage from local outlets at the time of the groundbreaking. As of this writing, that's still four to six months out, on top of the roughly nine months the site has already spent under construction since the December 2025 groundbreaking. For a building this size, that's not an unusual runway, but it does mean the site will stay an active construction zone through the rest of this year and into early 2027.
Will Kadish of Broad Metro, the developer working with Chasing Aces on the project, noted at the groundbreaking that Opelika will be the first location for the brand in Alabama, a detail that positions the city as the test case for how the concept performs in a smaller Southeastern market rather than a flagship metro. If it works the way the company hopes, it's the kind of thing that could shape what gets built next on that same stretch of road.
Until then, the practical reality for anyone living nearby is a construction site that will likely get louder and more visible as the timeline progresses, followed by a genuinely new kind of evening-out option once doors open. If you're the type who tracks these things, the company has said it will post construction updates and opening details through its own social channels as the project moves forward.
The Takeaway for Anyone Driving Past
The next time you pass that cleared lot near Tiger Town, it's worth remembering that what's coming isn't a golf course in the traditional sense. It's a building sized like a mall anchor, built around a driving range, a batting cage simulator, streamed weekly events, and a prize pool that funds local nonprofits every time someone sinks a hole in one. Opelika is getting Alabama's first location of something that, everywhere else it exists, functions less like a sports facility and more like a place people go on a Tuesday night because they want somewhere to be.
That's a different kind of addition to a neighborhood than most headlines about it have suggested so far.
If you're watching how Opelika keeps changing and wondering what it means for the neighborhoods around Tiger Town, or you just want someone local to talk through what a corner like this does to nearby property values and everyday life, Carter Pair is easy to reach and always happy to talk through what's actually happening on the ground here.
