Pros:
What to Expect: Beautiful 18 Hole Park style golf with dual tee pads, a "Championship" layout and a shorter "Recreational" layout with separate tees and singular pin locations. Plenty of room to air out bombs on this mix of light to moderately wooded holes with some other rather open bomber holes.
Amenities: Trail of Tears Museum shares a parking lot with the disc golf course, modern bathrooms, walking trail, deep winding creek through the center of the course, several soccer fields, a playground, and a nice bridge over the creek with good views.
Tees/Signage/Baskets: In typical HB Clark fashion all these are on point and well done. Nice course Kiosk near Hole #1 with all relevant information and a course map. 36 large textured concrete tee pads. Tee signs are nice with full color hole maps and all relevant information. Baskets are newer Mach X's (though I am not a fan of Mach baskets personally) they are still in great shape.
Design: Shorter tees are excellent for recreational players and below. There are tons of shorter par 3's and softer par 4's where birdies are plentiful, while balancing several more difficult and more lengthy holes where the birdie is very hard to achieve. Short tees give you a chance to score well but also challenge you at times as well. Championship tees add both length and shot shape difficulty to compliment the short tees. You can tell both sets are independent of each other and designed separately (and equally well for their intended player bases). Course utilizes small changes in elevation well where available, utilizes the creek (the only water hazard on the course), and the old hardwood trees extremely well in an otherwise open park setting to give each hole shape and character.
Signatures: Several to choose from really depending on what you love in hole design (technicality, beauty, challenge, memorability, etc). Like Hole #2 a flat and open hyzer into super guarded right to left bomb Par 3 in the 475 ft range. Hole #5 (The fish-hook hole) which is a tight low ceiling uphill tunnel shot that goes straight for 200 feet and then out into the clearing and immediately wrap hard right and back towards the tee pad on the other side of a dense wall of trees right on the bank of the winding creek. People love to hate this hole, but it is a very unique shot shape for this course. Hole #6 probably gets my vote as signature hole though. After you cross the bridge over the creek you are faced with a daunting 330 ish foot Par 3. The skinny fairway is guarded only a couple feet to your left by a deep and wide creek the entire left side of the hole. The right side is protected by massive hardwood trees down the entire right side leaving only a small 30-40 foot strip of fairway down the entire hole. A deep steep ditch runs down the right side of the fairway next to the trees and then cuts across the fairway just outside circle one. If your tee shot comes up short you will more than likely filter into this ditch and the top of which will be over your head and you will be forced to get creative to throw your approach into the green. If this wasn't daunting enough the basket is probably 15 feet from the bank of the creek, protected by massive hardwoods on the right at the edge of the circle, and a thick unimproved wooded rough long at the edge of the circle. This hole to me encompasses all the beauty of the park, with the bridge, water, hardwoods, etc and showcases the difficulty and technicality this course requires.
Extras: This course does a wonderful job of allowing you to choose your own challenge. With two sets of tees, ace run holes, varying difficulties, and some eagleable par 4's with extremely well executed lines and distances, Trail of Tears is a course you can grow with as your game improves and never run out of challenges. All the holes have well defined gaps, the grass is mowed well, course is free of trash and debris almost always. No forced or gimmicky OB or baskets in my opinion. Pin positions were challenging but accessible. A lot of risk reward shots on this course, while still providing a safe way to make par on each hole if that is your style.
Cons:
Navigation: The course plays in three "distinct" areas and the transitions from each area can be confusing without a course map or U-Disc to navigate. Transitions between Holes 1 to 2, 4 to 5, 5 to 6, 6 to 7 and 9 to 10 can be troublesome. There are quite a few long walks between baskets and the next tee as well.
Elevation: This is almost an entirely flat park style meadow with large mature trees course (especially the board flat back 9). Course does well to incorporate multiple hole types (1-5 are wooded technical, 6-9 are park style with mature trees along a beautiful creek, and 10-18 are a flat and much more open neighborhood park style). The lack of available elevation change does make this course less impressive and less memorable, but only slightly.
Flood Plain/Old Neighborhood - Holes 6-9 are definitely in danger of flooding out, being extremely soggy, or completely unplayable after heavy rains. This area also appears to be an old campground with multiple utility poles and remnants of structures. Holes 10-18 play through what looks like an old neighborhood with paved access roads, remnants of driveways and foundations. It also plays very near to a current neighborhood (Hole #16 can get squirly depending on where the home owner decides to park their vehicles, and Hole #14 plays out to a neighborhood intersection and feels like you are playing in someones backyard).
Benches/Trashcans: This is a big course with a lot of walking and could certainly use multiple benches and some trash cans throughout.
Championship Level?: I'm not sure I would go so far as to call the long tees Championship. While they are certainly more skill intensive, most average recreational players can shoot even par pretty easily from them. I would expect professionals to score extremely well on this course as it lacks tight OB or really tight lines through the woods.
Other Thoughts:
Overall not a stellar course and definitely not a bad course. It falls right in that area where a park course should. Very good for the area and land available while having room for improvement. This course falls just below what I would call a destination course on its own. There isn't another stellar course nearby to pair it with unless you want to drive another hour. It is a very enjoyable course though, that will test multiple skills and several discs in your bag. This course is a par fest though and scoring separation could be difficult in tournaments. There isn't a lot of punishment for bad shots and good shots (not great ones) are still likely to end with par. For those who have played multiple other HB designed courses, this is on the upper end of his middle ground park designs, but should not be compared to stellar designs like Mahr Park.