Every spring, the Colorado Springs Gazette tallies reader votes and hands out medals across dozens of categories in its Best of the Springs contest, the kind of hyperlocal poll that decides bragging rights for everything from best physical therapist to best tex-mex. This year, Flying Horse walked away with four wins: Gold for Best New Home Community, Silver for Best Golf Course, Bronze for Best Wedding Venue, and Bronze for Best Swimming Pool. The Gazette announced the full slate of winners in April, and the community posted its haul shortly after.
Four medals sounds like a marketing department's dream, and in a sense it is. But look closer at what residents actually voted for, and a more interesting pattern shows up. The categories that won this year are the ones tied to daily use: the pool you actually swim in, the course you actually play, the neighborhood you actually live inside. And the single change that has reshaped daily errands here more than anything else in the past two years, a full-size grocery store at the community's front door, isn't a category on the ballot at all. That gap between what got voted on and what actually changed daily life is the real story.
What the Ballot Actually Said
| Category | Medal | What It Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Best New Home Community | Gold | Flying Horse by Classic, the residential development as a whole |
| Best Golf Course | Silver | The Weiskopf Course and Flying Horse North Course |
| Best Wedding Venue | Bronze | The Club at Flying Horse's event spaces |
| Best Swimming Pool | Bronze | The Athletic Club's members-only pools |
Compare that to recent history. Flying Horse won seven Best of the Springs awards in 2024. The following year, the community was nominated across nine categories for 2025, a list that ranged from golf course, neighborhood, and swimming pool to hotel, day spa, wine list, and steakhouse. This year's four wins are narrower than that nine-category spread, and they land almost entirely on the resident side of the property rather than the resort side that markets to overnight guests. That's not a demotion. It's a different kind of recognition, closer to what a homeowner actually deals with on a Tuesday than what a wedding guest sees on a Saturday.
Two Golf Courses Doing Two Different Jobs
The Silver for Best Golf Course covers two distinct courses, and residents who play both know they are not interchangeable. The Weiskopf Course sits inside the main community and hosts the bulk of the club calendar, including member tournaments and charity fundraisers. Flying Horse North, about ten minutes up the road, plays through pine-lined fairways that feel like a completely different round. Between the two courses, the community's own tournament calendar counted more than 60 events during the 2025 season, a mix of annual member competitions, nonprofit fundraisers, and private shotgun-start tournaments. That volume is part of why the category reads as a single Silver rather than two separate wins. Voters weren't picking one course over the other. They were rewarding a golf identity that runs on two tracks at once.
A Wedding Venue Win, and a Restaurant Chasing a Different Kind of Award
The Bronze for Best Wedding Venue went to the Club's event spaces, but the more interesting story sits one door over, at the restaurant that used to be called La Fortezza. The clubhouse dining room reopened as Fortezza Italiana, and unlike some of the community's amenities, it's open to the public, not just Club members, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and daily happy hour. That distinction matters for anyone living in Flying Horse without a Club membership who still wants a weeknight dinner without leaving the neighborhood.
Next door, The Steakhouse is playing a different game entirely. It isn't chasing a local reader poll. It holds the DiRōNA Award for both 2025 and 2026, a national distinction reserved for a small circle of fine-dining restaurants, and it has picked up Wine Spectator's Best of Award of Excellence every year since 2023. According to Wine Spectator's own listing, the wine program runs 425 selections and a working inventory of 1,520 bottles, with particular depth in California, France, and Italy. None of that shows up in the Best of the Springs tally, because The Steakhouse operates on an entirely separate recognition track, one judged by wine and dining critics rather than local readers. Two restaurants, two award systems, both landing in the same clubhouse.
The Pool Award Only Covers Half the Water in the Neighborhood
The Bronze for Best Swimming Pool belongs to the Athletic Club, and that's worth being precise about, because not every Flying Horse household holds a Club membership. The pools that won the award sit behind that membership line, alongside the fitness and spa amenities.
Barefoot Park is the other side of that equation. It's a family park within the community that includes a playground, sports fields, a splash pad, picnic areas, and walking trails, and none of it requires a membership card. For households weighing whether Club access is worth the cost, that distinction is the practical piece: the award-winning pool is one amenity, and the splash pad most kids actually spend their summer at is a separate, open one.
The Gold Went to the Community, Not a Building
Best New Home Community is the broadest of the four categories, and it's the one that best explains why Flying Horse keeps showing up on this ballot year after year. The community spans nearly 1,600 acres and includes homes built by Classic Homes from the $700s in the Village of Turin up to seven figures in the Village of Madonie, plus custom acreage homesites in Flying Horse North for buyers who want more land and fewer neighbors. The Daniels Team has compared Flying Horse's structure against other north-side master-planned communities, including its roughly 1,975 homes built between 2005 and 2024, a build-out timeline that spans two decades and multiple market cycles without losing the identity that keeps winning this category.
That's a different kind of consistency than a single hot amenity or a new restaurant opening. It's twenty years of the same builder executing the same vision at a scale large enough that voters keep recognizing the whole rather than any one piece of it.
What Wasn't on the Ballot
None of the four categories Flying Horse won this year has anything to do with groceries. But ask anyone who lived here before January 22, 2025, what actually changed their week, and the answer usually isn't the pool or the golf course. It's the King Soopers Marketplace that opened that day at 2731 North Gate Boulevard, a 122,000-square-foot store with a Starbucks, a pharmacy, and a fuel center, open daily from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.. Before that ribbon cutting, a full grocery run meant driving down to Briargate Parkway or over toward InterQuest. Now it's a stop on the way to a soccer game.
There isn't a Best of the Springs category for "shortest grocery run," which is exactly the point. Reader polls tend to reward the things people can name and rank against a list of competitors: this golf course versus that one, this pool versus that one. They're less built for the quieter kind of change, like a seventeen-hour grocery store showing up a few minutes from home, that doesn't have an obvious rival to be compared against. The four medals tell you Flying Horse is doing the things it has always done well. The King Soopers opening tells you something the ballot can't measure: that daily life here got easier in a way no one had to vote on.
If you're curious what any of this means for your own home's value, or you're weighing whether a move within Flying Horse or into it makes sense this year, The Daniels Team has spent decades tracking how Colorado Springs neighborhoods like this one actually function day to day. Schedule a free consultation and we'll walk through what your options look like right now.
