The unlikely face of Fallen Oak

6 July 2026

By Gary Trask

When MGM Resorts went looking for someone to run Fallen Oak, one of the country's premier resort golf courses, it didn't hire the seasoned golf executive most people expected. Instead, it handed the keys to Lydia Kim, a twenty-something from the company's partnerships team who had never managed a golf course.

On paper, it reads like a list of disadvantages: young, female, limited operations experience, a minority from the Pacific Northwest, dropped into a corner of the Deep South to run a nationally ranked course.

The decision raised eyebrows. So did Kim’s arrival in the GM’s office.

"People walk in, and they assume the general manager is going to be a 50-year-old white male," Kim says. "And they see me, and they think I'm on the beverage cart."

She laughs about it now, two years into the job. She can afford to. The course is still ranked No. 1 in the state, and the guests who assumed she couldn't be the boss have been proven wrong.

Spend a few minutes in conversation with Kim and that list of minuses falls apart. She's composed, direct, and a step ahead of the conversation. Poise probably wasn't on the job description, but she brought plenty of it anyway.

"It's always good to go somewhere you're not used to and experience new cultures and new perspectives, because that's how you grow. That's how you learn people. And we're in the business of people."

A little context for any golfer who hasn't been fortunate enough to visit Fallen Oak. The course is the crown jewel of Beau Rivage Resort & Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, the standout MGM property that sits directly on the Gulf Coast. Fallen Oak, a Tom Fazio design, is about 20 miles north of the resort, and is regularly ranked as the No. 2 casino golf course in the U.S. behind its sister course, Shadow Creek in Las Vegas. The course is accessible only to guests of The Beau, as it is affectionately called by locals.

Fallen Oak is more than a golf course. It’s an entire experience and it routinely stops first-timers cold at the gate with its the majestic clubhouse, towering magnolias, white-sand bunkers, and pristine fairways that roll through old Southern woodland.

So, it’s a fair question: Why would MGM hand a course of this prestige to someone who had never run one? Start with the man who ultimately made the call.

Brandon Dardeau didn't get to the top of MGM's Southeast operations by accident. He got there one title at a time, 13 of them, over more than two decades. It's a long apprenticeship, and he knows the value of it better than almost anyone in this business, because he served it himself. I wrote about him a couple of years ago: the kid from a Louisiana town of 700 people who started in an MGM call center at $10 an hour with a maxed-out credit card and worked his way up to President and COO of Beau Rivage.

That's what makes his decision about who should run Fallen Oak so fascinating. He didn't go looking for a younger version of himself. He looked for the opposite and found Kim. The on-course product was already in good hands. Superintendent Matt Hughes has been with the course since it opened in 2006 and has kept it ranked among the best in the country. What the property wanted was someone to sharpen everything around the golf: the arrival, the guest experience, the touches that make people want to come back.

“Fallen Oak is a unique facility where success is measured by creating a world-class experience with a Southern hospitality flair,” Dardeau told Casino City. “We were intentional about hiring someone who had experienced golf courses around the world that have been innovating and focusing on complementing the golf experience.”

Kim had spent three-plus years in MGM partnerships doing exactly that kind of work. The rest, Dardeau figured, Beau Rivage could backstop.

“We are fortunate to have the support system of Beau Rivage to fill any gaps Lydia may have had,” he said, “but we knew that her work ethic and ability to build relationships would overcome any concerns.”

Two years later, he sounds like a man who'd make the same call again without blinking.

“We couldn't be happier with what she has brought to Fallen Oak and the exposure the course has received through her previous relationships.”

Kim's road to that first operations job is a story worth telling, because none of it followed the usual map. Born in Spokane, Washington, she didn't pick up a club until she was 12, which is late for anyone who goes on to play Division I. It happened by accident. Her dad got stuck on pickup duty one afternoon, didn't know what to do with her, and ended up parking her at a driving range. She grabbed one of his wedges, started making clean contact, and that was that.

“I'm OCD, and with OCD comes wanting to perfect everything you do, even though you know it's impossible,” she said when asked how she got hooked on golf. “I'm a person who runs on productivity and improvement and purpose and intention. And that's all golf is.”

She earned a full ride to St. John's University in New York, choosing it over a partial offer from the University of Kentucky, in part so her parents could steer the savings toward her younger siblings. She graduated in 2019 with a sports management degree and skipped her own graduation ceremony to start work at the PGA TOUR’s Shriners event in Las Vegas, as part of a short PR stint with Kirvin Doak Communications. After COVID wiped out her job, she joined MGM in a partnership role, which eventually brought her down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where she escorted brand ambassadors like NFL quarterback Derek Carr and PGA Championship winner Jimmy Walker to events at Beau Rivage.

Her first trip through the Fallen Oak’s gate got the reaction the course always gets.

“You go through Shadow Creek and it's a wow,” she said. “But when you come through Fallen Oak, because of all the natural landscaping and the scenic beauty, you enter the gate and you feel like there's something different in the air. It's a slice of heaven.”

Two months after that first visit, the phone rang with the GM offer.

“You know those moments in life where things are just clicking the way they need to, very intentionally?” she said. “That was one of those moments where I was like, there's something happening right now, and there's a reason for it. And I really need to follow this."

Then came the hard part. Getting handed the keys is one thing. Getting people to accept that they belong in your hands is another.

“The first few months were tough,” she admitted.

But Kim wasn’t saying this as a complaint. She took the lingering doubt and made it work for her.

“When you're underestimated, you almost take that as a light under your butt, and you fire it up. I'm going to adjust SOPs, I'm going to adjust staffing, I'm going to build this culture, and then we'll get the outcome we all want.”

This is where coming from outside the golf world started to work in her favor. Fallen Oak isn't a country club, and it isn't a daily-fee public track. Run it like either one and you'd be managing the wrong golf course. Fallen Oak is an amenity. It exists to entertain Beau Rivage's casino guests and give them one more reason to come back. No members, no board.

“Our focus is to create an experience, because we're an extension of the Beau Rivage,” Kim said. “We're trying to figure out ways to entertain customers to keep them coming back to our casino. That's our job.”

It’s not uncommon for casino golfers to measure Fallen Oak against Shadow Creek, its flashier MGM sibling in Sin City, even though the two aren't playing the same game. Shadow Creek is fed by a whole portfolio of MGM properties up and down the Strip, a steady pipeline of players and golfers across every tier. Fallen Oak has Beau Rivage. A single property with about 1,700 rooms.

“We have one property we're working off of,” Kim said. “So we need to figure out how to take one property and drive as much revenue as we can.”

That constraint is the whole job. And without members to police the place, her team has to hold guests to a championship standard while still treating them like VIPs. It's a tightrope, and walking it successfully is crucial. So what has she accomplished? Plenty, though she spreads the credit to her managers and the team of about 20 that she oversees on a daily basis. On the business side, the team moved the cart fleet from a purchase model to a lease. Smarter use of capital, more predictable maintenance costs, fresh carts on a set cycle.

On the experience side, it's the details a sharp golfer notices. Upgraded patio furniture. Rocking chairs at the clubhouse and out on the driving range, which she says have been a huge hit. New mowers to push the turf conditioning even higher. And a rethink of the retail space, swapping out tired vendors for labels that move, like Sun Day Red by Tiger Woods, Lululemon and Dunning, while keeping one eye on a core clientele that skews from 45 to 65 years old.

“Golf has changed so much in the last five years when it comes to merchandising,” she said. “We’re constantly asking, ‘How are we staying ahead of the trends, but also making sure we're hitting our demographic?’”

For all the changes and upgrades that have been made over the years, the one constant at Fallen Oak has been Hughes. The veteran super and the newcomer from the Pacific Northwest hit it off from the very start.

“There's no words to describe how much I appreciate my partnership with Matt,” Kim said. “When you have two people who care that much, you're bound to have a great relationship, because you both want to protect the integrity of Fallen Oak. We're on the same team.”

If you press Kim on the single most important thing about Fallen Oak, she won't name the course. She names her staff.

“The way you're treated as a customer, the way we treat each other as team members, our culture is great,” she said. “It took a while to get here, but we've got all the right people in the building. We're a well-oiled machine.”

Spend half an hour with Lydia Kim, and what sticks isn't her age, her background, or how little she resembles the person you pictured for this job. It's how completely she's stopped being a question mark.

Dardeau took an unconventional shot, the same way he once took one on himself, walking into a Las Vegas call center with a marketing degree and not much else.

It turns out the young lady from Spokane was a pretty good bet.

The unlikely face of Fallen Oak is republished from Online.CasinoCity.com.