Like others have written, I really wasn't expecting much, despite hearing an overall positive report from my neighbor, BrotherDave. I was figuring to find nine baskets basically thrown out into some woods on the backside of a church property, with no real rhyme or reason, sense or season. I was prepared to deal with muddy, rutted, uneven natural dirt tee areas and some brand of most basic baskets. I was imagining no amenities at all. I expected to spend a few minutes on a crappy, cruddy, red or even green level course with disc disappearing and skin scarring briers, brambles and underbrush. I was pleasantly surprised to the point of being proud to have been raised Methodist.
First and foremost favorable feature are the tee pads. Expertly laid, interlacing big bricks make for functional and aesthetic tees. Only Par 4, #6 is still dirt, but the bricks are there, beside the tee area, waiting to be placed. As it is the second longest hole in the layout, I hope that they will give it the extra length of numbers 1 and 9. The other existing pads, including the well leveled concrete slabs on #2, I think it is, are all about six feet long and about equally as wide. Except for #2, there is space behind each pad for additional step-up/run-up.
The baskets are, of course new, bright yellow banded Pro 28's, which is always a big Pro to a half blind old man.
Signage is more than adequate, with properly colored tee signs giving hole number, accurately assigned par, distance and a diagram of the hole layout. There is a nice directional sign at the large parking lot and an informative overview sign at the first tee.
Trash cans are spread throughout. I witnessed no litter anywhere through the course. I didn't look, but I'm hoping now that there are no beer bottles or cans, or other adult beverage containers, as this is a church course.
There are some basic benches placed throughout, though they are set for spotters to sit on the blind holes, as a majority of the holes are. The course does share real estate with walking trails, but I don't imagine that they are often used, except perhaps on Sundays, as I encountered no souls anywhere on the property on a Friday mid afternoon.
I could see that there are areas that are prone to wetness. Pallets have been placed to serve as bridges to help alleviate that problem.
Due to the well planned layout and some smartly located directional signs, navigation is easy, with no long, deadhead walks between holes, while there are no instances of too close proximity between green and next tee.
Concrete culvert covers add to the ease of transversing the transitions crossing the creek(s?).
All in all, Bethel is a wonderful walk in the woods, with babbling brooks, a couple of eye pleasing green grass glens between the trees, and other fairways laid out along old farm tractor trails of more than adequate widths to be more than fair. And perhaps the best Pro of this course, is that if you do land outside the discernible fairways, which I, of course did a couple of times, there are little or no briers, brambles, underbrush, tree trash, or overly heavy arbor foliage with which to deal.
Overall, Bethel is a solid, well considered design, with variances in up and down elevations, direction and distances. Available real estate is well utilized. Though I thought briefly that some of the holes' basket placements, creating end of flight doglegs, with guardian trees and close proximity to the little creek(s?) flowing throughout were a bit gimmicky, my final analysis of those is that the creek(s?) are not disc disappearing and that the dog legs add to the course's overall challenge, making it a good, White level Par 29.