I don't usually review a course after only one round, but I met Pastor Jeff at hole one and he asked for reviews, so here we go. May update after I get out again. I played long tees to long baskets, so that's what my review will consider.

- Pro-level course that challenges all aspects of your game. You'll need every shot in your bag to score well.

- Mix of wooded and open holes.

- Great environment. Scenic, separate from other park visitors, quiet. Lots of wine berries to snack on the day I was there!

- Holes 7, 8, & 9. Three par 5's in a row, each more difficult than the last, was a cool and memorable part of the course.

- Good use of elevation.

- One of my favorite hole types is the wooded, double-dog-leg par 5. Check. Another is the downhill, open bomb. Check.

- Several holes had some sort of marker to show where the fairway turned. Others had a gravel path that basically followed the main fairway line. These kinds of visuals are helpful for a first-timer.

- Fairways well-maintained.

- Good baskets and pads.

- Blind shots with thick rough. Use spotters.

- The only hole I felt negatively about was hole 17. I'm sure I'll enjoy it more the 2nd time. Big blind shot with lots of thickness to get lost in. The fairway didn't go where it looked like it was going to go (my fault for not walking the entire fairway first) and didn't really match the sign. After several holes of following the gravel path, this one did not. Could use one of those nice visuals at the turn. Make sure to really check this one out before throwing. That being said, it is a cool hole design and as the rough gets beaten in will become more attackable.

- Long (not exactly a con), so prepare. Bring water and snacks.

Great course! Time will make this one better as it gets more broken in. Worth a drive to give this one a try. I'm ready to go back and take another crack at it.

It's a fun and challenging course. It truly is a pro-level course.

Most holes are creative and engaging. Some are truly terrific!

It's BIG, in a good way.

There are issues with environmental sustainability

Nicely maintained fairways, good basket locations and nice tee boxes

Course is very very long with many blind shots, every disc that isnt in the fairway can be a challenge to find. If you are not skilled at putting the disc in a 15 foot window from 75/100 feet away expect to spend a lot of time looking for discs.

Spotters on many holes are basically a necessity.

Condition - 3
• teeboxes: concrete, well kept
• signage: none at the teebox. pins feature arrows pointing to the next tee
• navigation: generally easy. caveats for teeboxes 4 and 18, which are farther and not intuitive to find
• landscaping: easily adequate
• overgrowth: little; well maintained
• mud/flood: some mud

Challenge - 4.5
• length: very long
• difficulty: high. requires power...several landing zones far off the tee. the wooded holes call for long, tight lines
• risk/reward: mostly straightforward

Variety - 5
• woods: good mix of open and wooded
• elevation: great variety and utilization
• demands: will ask you for nearly every shot in your bag

Appeal - 4.5
fairly scenic, endlessly engaging, and presented well. I have a blast here and would recommend this course to any seasoned player. very long though, and potentially exhausting on a warm day. bring plenty of water!

Notable Holes:
6 - long downhill bomb across a 400ft+ field, with a tiny gap through a thick treeline to the green
8 - long, wooded par 5 featuring a right curve, a double left dogleg, and a 50 ft elevation increase. brutal
18 - 340ft (over OB grass) to the island. good luck!

+ Two arrows on every numbered basket pointing the way to the next tee pad, depending on its color/difficulty.
+ Nice practice area
+ The whole course plays in its own quiet and secluded area. Sunny meadows, peaceful forests and formidable hills await.
+ All 18 tee pads are sturdy, wide and long turf with a hefty foundation.

- No tee signs as of April 20, 2021.
- As with any hilly course, safety issues are present in the form of loose rocks/dirt, exposed roots and so forth.
- The course has players cross a road twice. In fairness, it is a scarcely-traveled tertiary road, but please still be careful.
- Some additional guiding signage between certain holes would be nice.

Happy 100th review to me! Buckle up, folks. This is going to be a long one...

'Best of the Best' is meant to be tough to achieve. For disc golf course planners and designers, a large part of their challenge is utilizing the landscape that any park/municipality/county/school/whoever negotiated or otherwise decided to give them. Sometimes, that means that the course is relegated to thin stretches of land around drainage ditches, rugged and rocky swamps on the edge of a park or boring and flat wide-open marshlands in the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, some courses are lucky enough to be installed in huge state parks where land is in adundance, multi-use recreational areas in a region where disc golf is already a draw, or even on private property where a designer can painstakingly mold the land and its features to reflect what they have in mind for it. Yes, luck of the assigned/chosen topography and other natural settings play a large factor in the enjoyability of any given course. Facing facts, there are some courses out there that, try as they might, cannot ever hope to attain 5 out of 5.

Then, there are courses like Green Monster...

Hole4 is my favorite to play because of its challenging uphill climb combined with perpetual right turn into and among gradually condensing woods. Holes6 and 13 are the nicest to look at for the same reason. From those two holes, there is a clear view of a lake in the distance in front of a colorful hilly landscape. 6 takes the player across a wide open sloped pasture perfect for winter sledding, and 13 treats the player to some nice flowering bushes among some tree pepper. Hole8 was the biggest surprise for its unanticipated mountain climbing at the end (no, really!). And hole7 was my least favorite because it served only as a crazy long and flat connecting hole between 6 and the rest of the course.

This course will be big one day. Well, it's already quite large in size and scope, but I mean to say that it will one day be known far and wide for its killer hills, gracious spaces, good woods and disc-taking lake. Refering back to my first paragraph, the land here seems as though it was hand selected and specifically set aside and molded for disc golfing. One minute you're throwing over a lake to try and hit a wooded window. The next, you're trying to make an island green from the tee-off. And then you're throwing endlessly uphill into the woods and hoping it lands safely without a rollaway. The point I am trying to make here is that Green Monster is an authoritative example of what variety disc golf can be. Hills in the open, hills in the woods. Flat in the open, flat in the woods. Low ceiling, no ceiling, left, right, straight and so forth. It rarely feels like the same hole twice at this course.

Rarely. I will submit that holes9 and 10 are nearly identical. High atop a cliff, the player is asked to perform the same tree-dodgey throw seven or eight times, and that can prove a bit tedious. Come to think of it, holes3 an 18 are pretty similar, too. I think most every course has some form of this, so I don't mention it as a negative- just as an observation. I also observed that there were no tee signs when I played back in late April, and that is a negative, however. Also, I saw no supplementary signage during the longer walks or more confusing parts of the course. There is an easily missed arrow to guide the player across the street from hole3 to 4, for example. And you just have to trust your instincts between 10&11 and 15&16. It's not that bad, but unambiguous signage couldn't hurt. There are some safety hazards, too, as I mentioned earlier in the form of rocks, roots and inclines, but just watch where you're stepping. And that's about as bad as Green Monster gets.

I have 3 rules for myself whenever I review a course on this website.
1. Don't publish more than two reviews per week.
2. Don't submit a review for a course if the most recent review is less than two months old.
3. Any flaw, no matter how small, shall prevent any course from earning a 5 out of 5.

Those first two rules are just strategic. I figure that people are less likely to read a review if they can remember reading about that very same course within the last few weeks. And if I produce too many reviews too close to one another, then readers might get irritated and skip it. I'm very well aware that my reviews can be... verbose. Plus, I want to try to keep a healthy backlog by reviewing courses gradually instead of all at once. The third rule is to remind me that 'Best of the Best' is meant to be difficult to achieve.

Well, that certainly is within The Green Monster's grasp. All it needs to do is get those tee signs into the ground (if they aren't there already), install maybe just two or three extra guiding arrows for the longer walks and perhaps insert a few seating arrangements in certain key areas like after the particularly grueling uphill battles.

I already know that this course is going to be my first-ever 5 out of 5. I just need to see it in its final form before I can make it official. But you don't have to take my word for it! I emphaticallly recommend this course to all players who need that shot of adrenaline to their disc-golfing heart. Whether you prefer wide open hilly spaces for endless bombers or tight and constricted tunnels for perfect tactical placement, Green Monster will scratch your itch. Its terrain is reminiscent of any New England-style course you care to name with the kind of tree cover that you can expect from the northeast region at large. It's got the distances. It's got the scenery. All that's missing is you. There. Now.

Wow, I haven't been back to Green Lane for years before this course came up. I might be outing my age, but back in the day they used to have a beach on Snyder Road right before the dam, the opposite side of the lake where this course starts. Those summers were the days as a kid, complete with concession stand and beach balls. Now the sand is gone but DG is year round!

https://i.postimg.cc/sXNR5JgH...b5475528d.jpg

This is a long course perfect for those cannon arms out there, the distances are comparable to Nockamixon in Quakertown or back 18 Roland Park NE of Lancaster. It's definitely not a course you decide to go to an hour before dark, first-timers should figure about 150 minutes of playing time.

The overall layout starts from the lake, and it goes on up to encompassing the entire hillside northwards, across Green Lane Rd, until the Marino Equestrian Campground Parking Lot on Hill Road.

Almost every hole has two tees, huge and generous. Artificial mini-golf style turf on concrete. It's been holding up nicely the last year. The tee signs are gorgeous and well illustrated. There are two layouts, blue baskets for distance and extra challenging trajectories. Yellow baskets are paired with the closer tees, truncating the holes on both ends but still challenging, none-the-less.

The front three and the very last hole are semi to open and flattish. Once across the street, elevation in a mix ranging from heavy forest to open comes into play until #8. From there, it gives a very Nockamixon vibe through to #16 meaning rocky, extreme elevation changes, distance. Fairways are often carved right next to each other, here.

HyooMac has accurately described the good holes, except I liked the steep downhill fraternal twins #12 & #16 and I loved #17. #12 is much more tunnel of the two, and a precise throw can find itself floating way past the basket. #16 doesn't require the same accuracy, but making it to circle's edge without fading at the end keeps eluding me. #17 is a slight downhill straight on that really doglegs sharp back left and downwards into a spiral. Perfect for someone with a good distance rhbh spike hyzer, I suppose, but it seems the disc has equal chance of going AWOL and never be seen again with all the brush about.

The best part of this course is how involved the community is with this place and it will certainly mature into something special over the years and get over any teething problems quickly. It fills a DG niche in the area comparable to many of the better state park courses.

Courses like these make me feel like I'm shotputting bowling balls 5 feet at a time on a mile long track. LOL. Also be prepared for a fair bit of hiking.

I'm not a fan of #1 style starts. One of the hardest holes for me personally, the left fairway which is a bit narrow is bordered by lake and an extremely challenging shape upfront. Not a bad hole at all, but before my arm is properly warmed up. I almost lost discs here twice in one day and that's not how I want to start a game. Others have said there are a lot of fishermen on this hole (seasonal?) and if/when that's the case, I would think it's nearly unplayable.

This place is great in late fall and winter but some of the fairways cut in the open holes (#3, #6, #7, #18) seemed awfully narrow in summertime. I'm not a fan of hide and seek disc golf.

#17 blue seems like an excellent disc golf trap.

Really nearby is an old niner course on church grounds, "The Cedars", extinct here but live on Udisc. It's like Schrödinger's cat, Idk if it's dead or alive. Having this beast here is such an unfair comparison, but maybe it will inspire a Church member to revamp it.

Amenities: Parking lot has a lot of bathrooms. It's a gorgeous park besides, take a gander.

The Green Monster is a big, new course with a great variety of elevation, wooded and open holes. Some finishing touches were still to be made when I played in early 2021, but it's entirely playable as it is - and well worth it



+ The course gets your attention with water on the first two holes: a lake borders the left side of Hole #1 (with the fairway slanting down toward it), and there's a water carry to a protected green on Hole #2


There are so many good holes (no bad ones, really…), but a few really stand out:

Hole #5 is a 500'+ par 4 playing over the crown of a ridge. It's wide open until it swings right, into a heavily protected green with a steep dropoff just behind the basket

Hole #6 is a booming "hilltop across the valley" shot. Another 500'+ par 4, through a treeline (with a gap) about 400' out there

Hole #8 is a wooded 800' par 5 with a late left dogleg, and a basket perched way up on top of a ridge that climbs through the final 200' of the hole. This hole throws completely different challenges at you as you work your way through it

Hole #15 is wooded par 4 (at under 400', a relatively short one) that snakes along the top of a ridge until it curls to the left down to a protected basket. It's hard to describe here, but the hole uses the natural terrain beautifully to create the par 4

Hole #18 is wide open and downhill, bringing you back to the parking lot. It's 340' with an island green formed by a two foot high circle of stones

- There are a handful of longish walks and a few where you cross by other holes on your way to your destination, so it can be a bit confusing. I'm confident this will be worked out when signage is installed


- This is a long course. The par 72 is fair (and the "short" tees are still almost 8000'). My only criticism is that there's no front tee on hole #18 (or at least none at the time I played). 340' to an island green, even one that's downhill, is a lot to ask of some players, especially when an OB stroke is on the line

COURSE AMENITIES:
DiscGolfPark baskets with embedded arrows pointing toward the next tee. Excellent turf tees, some on platforms. There are several really dramatic doglegs. Look for blue arrows mounted on trees to indicate the direction of play. Park facilities include bathrooms. Mostly cart-friendly: there are a few transitions up and down hills that are challenging to roll


~ The course is long and spread out. Expect 2+ hour rounds unless you're hustling. Because there are a number of blind shots, your first play may include a fair amount of extra time walking forward before throwing


~ There are stakes on the holes indicating additional basket positions. Since there's no signage yet, I don't know if those will be alternate positions or permanent baskets. But if this course puts in 36 permanent baskets so you can play four different combinations, it's a 5. (my rating of 4.5 is just to leave room to recognize improvement when the course is finished!


RECOMMENDED COMBINATIONS:
This is a destination course, and I'd play it several times. But it's also a great addition to the area, because it's really different from the notable nearby 18 hole courses like Boyertown and Sellersville. They're a lot flatter, so after a round or two at the Green Monster, they'd be easier walking