Every few months on the Trinity Falls Nextdoor thread, someone posts a photo of the cranes over Highway 75 and asks the same question: is it done yet? The answers people get back, "next year" and "sometime in 2027," are both roughly accurate and both a full year later than what the developers said when ground first broke. Meanwhile, the list of what actually changed in the neighborhood this year has nothing to do with concert seating or surf lagoons. It has to do with a beer wall a few miles down University Drive and a disc golf course that quietly became a stop on a statewide tour.
That gap between what everyone is watching and what already happened is worth sorting out, because it changes what you should expect from the rest of this year and next.
The Two Projects Everyone Asks About
The Sunset Amphitheater sits on 46 acres at the northeast corner of US-75 and State Highway 121, close enough to Trinity Falls that the construction cranes are visible from the highway on the drive into McKinney. VENU, the Colorado company behind the $300 million venue, has spent the past year building a 20,000-seat, multi-season facility that can also scale down to roughly 5,000 guests in cooler months under a canopied roof. The project includes an exclusive members-only lounge built in partnership with former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman and his EIGHT Elite Light Beer brand, plus fire pit suites priced between $480,000 and $1.2 million. As of this August, VENU's founder told the Dallas Morning News that both the suites and the Aikman Club memberships are close to sold out, even though nobody has performed there yet.
That last part matters, because the venue was originally supposed to open this year. Land acquisition and permit delays pushed the timeline back, and the current target is the first quarter of 2027, with the company's CEO saying he expects a March opening and roughly twenty shows already lined up for that spring.
A few miles away at Stacy Road and Highway 121, Cannon Beach is on a similar clock. The $200 million surf and adventure resort broke ground in mid-December 2025 on 35 acres, with plans for a three-acre surf lagoon, a lazy river, a mineral hot springs circuit, a resort hotel, a skate park, a movie theater, and a bowling alley. Local reporters covering the groundbreaking noted that the site "remains an open field" that day. Construction has moved forward since, including a site plan and zoning approval earlier this year, but the first phase is still pegged to open as early as mid-2027, not this year and not next.
So if you've been telling out-of-town visitors that a surf park and a 20,000-seat amphitheater are basically finished, it's worth walking that back. Both are real, both are funded, and both are still more than a year from opening their doors.
What Actually Opened While Everyone Was Watching the Cranes
While those two megaprojects worked through permitting, something smaller actually happened on the University Drive corridor that already serves Trinity Falls. Oak & Stone, a beer-focused restaurant chain out of Florida, opened its first Texas location on May 19, 2026, at 8575 W. University Drive, in the same retail development as Kura Revolving Sushi Bar, Paciugo Gelato Caffe, and Velvet Taco. The 6,000-square-foot space seats 200 people around a self-serve tap wall stocked with dozens of beers, plus wine and cocktails, and it's open for lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch.
It's a small addition next to a $300 million concert venue, but it's also the kind of thing you can actually use this weekend instead of in 2027. That's the pattern worth noticing: the projects with the biggest price tags are the ones you'll wait longest for, while the corridor's day-to-day dining options keep filling in on a much faster clock.
The Neighborhood Already Has Its Own Circuit
The bigger surprise is that Trinity Falls didn't need either megaproject to build its own calendar. The Lodge, the community's newest amenity center, runs a food truck alley alongside its pool, fitness room, and co-working space, and it's become the default gathering spot for residents who used to have to drive somewhere else for that kind of thing.
The clearest example is the Trinity Falls Trail Day 5K, which ran its fourth annual event on June 6, 2026, starting and ending at The Lodge and routing runners through B.B. Owen Park's 350 acres of wooded riverfront trail. The race donates 100 percent of its gross profits to local nonprofits, including Meals On Wheels Collin County, Blood Cancer United, and the McKinney Rotary Club, and the morning wraps with a disc golf demonstration, a Camp Gladiator cooldown session, snow cones from Kona Ice, and food from Honeylu's Truck. None of that required a surf lagoon.
The disc golf course inside B.B. Owen Park tells the same story on a bigger scale. What used to be a neighborhood amenity is now listed on the Professional Disc Golf Association's course directory under the name The Woods at Trinity, with three separate layouts for beginners, advanced players, and championship-level competition across its 18 holes and three lakes. That listing isn't just a formality. The course is hosting the McKinney Classic, an A-tier stop on Dynamic Discs' statewide Dirty Dozen Tour, over the weekend of September 26 and 27, 2026, which means competitive players are now driving into Trinity Falls from outside the community for an event the neighborhood didn't have to import from anywhere.
Put those two things together and you get a version of the neighborhood that built its own reasons to gather while the headline-grabbing projects next door were still working through site plans.
What This Means for Your Year
If you've been holding off on weekend plans because you assumed the amphitheater or the surf park would be open by now, the honest answer is that neither will be ready before 2027 at the earliest, and Cannon Beach's own developers have said the same about mid-2027. That's not a reason to stop paying attention to either project. The Sunset Amphitheater alone is expected to bring more than 70 shows a year to McKinney once it opens, and Cannon Beach is projected to draw hundreds of thousands of annual visitors once its first phase is running. Both will change what a Friday night near Trinity Falls looks like eventually.
But eventually isn't this month. This month, the thing that's actually different is a beer hall on University Drive, a food truck alley at The Lodge, and a disc golf course that now has its name in a statewide tournament schedule. Those are the changes you can act on now, while the bigger ones keep working their way through construction schedules that have already slipped once.
If you're the kind of resident who tracks these things because you're weighing whether now is the moment to make a move of your own, whether that's upsizing inside Trinity Falls or exploring what else McKinney has to offer, North Texas Dream Homes has been watching this corridor as closely as anyone. Reach out for a free home valuation and consultation whenever you're ready to talk about what any of this means for your own address.
