Okay, here's my (very long) course review of my trip, broken up into two posts:
My 2012 PDGA World Championships trip started off with a stop at Randolph Park DGC in Dublin, VA, which is just south of Blacksburg and very, very conveniently located just off highway I-81. It's a relatively new course, having just been established in 2008 but it's a very nice pro par 58 track. Playing from the longest set of tees (blue) I thought this was an excellent mix of wooded and open holes and never got boring. Some of the blue tees were a little difficult to find and we actually ended up playing from the white tee on the pro par four sixth hole and the pro par five thirteenth hole, but that did not diminish our enjoyment of the course. For a Pennsylvania woods golfer, I found the woods on the front nine to be tough but fair and would be a good preparation for the Charlotte courses; however, my traveling companion Bill Newman felt that the wooded fairways were just a little too narrow for his liking. I can only think of a few small areas for improvement which relate mostly due to distance and par assessments. For example, the 425 ft twelfth hole is listed as a par four from the blue tees but this an easy two-shot par 3 hole. And at 465 ft but playing severely downhill, the fourteenth hole is reachable for a deuce and nowhere even close to par four consideration, even if the drainage channels around the basket were considered OB. On the flip side, the 590 ft pro par four sixteenth hole is just so well protected in the woods that I don't see scores of birdie three as a very realistic possibility on a consistent basis. Both Bill I felt that the polehole should be shortened by about 40-50 feet to allow blue level (~950) rated players (for which it was presumably designed for) a better opportunity at birdie.
Bottom line is that with a 3.65 rating here at DGcoursereview.com, I feel this course has loads of potential, and with a little adjustment it could easily crack the 4.0 line and be considered a course WELL above average. I was certainly glad that we stopped in to check it out, and I'd definitely love to check it out again, especially if the retention ponds on holes#11-12 and 13-14 are full with water.
Arriving in Charlotte on Friday, we immediately proceeded to the famed Renaissance Park. Driving into the park and first seeing the power line 8th and 15th holes on my left, followed by the famed 2nd and 18th holes on my right gave me goose bumps! This is a course which obviously has a great reputation and as someone who is sick of pitch-n-putts and is a huge fan of pro par four and pro par five disc golf, Renny had been a glaring omission on my disc golf resume for over a decade. From a design perspective, the course exceeded every expectation and then some. I simply have not seen any other course which offers so many different options, challenges, and unique features from a course design perspective. Without fail, you are likely to use every disc golf shot you've ever learned in the course of play, and you'll love every frustrating minute of it. I have never experienced a course where I shot two 7s and an 8 in one round and wasn't all that upset about it, and in fact thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of it. A good majority of the holes could be signature holes at any other course, and when they follow each other in succession, it feels almost too good to be true. I have never experienced a putt like I had from below the basket on hole#2, and the 18th hole is simply one of the most sadistic & masochistic, but ingenious, holes in all of disc golf. To record a spectacular eagle three here would be something you could honestly boast about for the rest of your life, and just securing a score of birdie four is an amazing testament of disc golf skill, combining both distance and accuracy on every shot.
With that being said, I was actually majorly disappointed with the course, namely due to its appearance. For starters, the course looked beat – like it had been neglected for quite some time. What's really mind-boggling is that a course which is less than 15 years old looked like it was twice that age. I was shocked at the amount of litter and trash which dotted most of the wooded holes on the front nine, and this was a mere four days before the start of the World Championships there! The tee pads were crumbly and decayed, and the blue "W-12" painted on the tees were badly faded on most holes. The chain link fence with barbwire on holes#3-5 was absolutely atrocious and had no business being on a course of this supposed high caliber. The OB markings which gave the course its teeth were sadly inconsistent and ugly, with wooden stakes, PVC pipe, metal pipe, painted garden stakes, orange flags, orange paint, and red flags all used at various times to denote OB, and sometimes all within the same hole! The tee signs also featured similar inconsistency, with unappealing numbering techniques such as metallic mailbox, plastic, and wooden numbers used in various locations, and frankly, it just looked ghetto. On the back nine, the OB stakes between holes#11 and 13 were missing altogether in many places. From a flow of play perspective, the course was a nightmare. The signage and ease of finding one's way around on the front nine were dreadful, and three of us wandered around aimlessly at many times trying to find the next tee. On the back nine, the two longest holes come within a span of three holes, with another completely wide open par four sandwiched between them. The course itself is also crowded into a far, far smaller space than I imagined and it's no wonder that outrageous backups causing 4-5 hour rounds occur – this is simply not a course which can safely and easily handle a full tournament field, because of the ease with which shots can stray from one hole onto the fairway of another hole.
I appreciate the amazing amount of work which went into the creation of this course early last decade – surely this was a monumental task and I don't want to diminish the efforts of all those who labored in overbearing heat and humidity to carve out this track. Perhaps I simply overhyped it in my mind over all these years. Perhaps the local volunteers had too much work to perform on other courses in the last year or two and felt that Renny was in acceptable shape. Perhaps I was spoiled by the absolutely pristine appearance and country club conditions at courses like Bradford, Nevin Park, and R.L. Smith. But if all the top rated courses such as Flip City, Idlewild, Deer Lakes, Tyler State Park, etc. had trash all over them and looked as ghetto as Renaissance did, you'd dock these courses just as severely, too.
The next course I got to see was Bradford Park as the assistant TD of the Pro Mixed Doubles event. The park itself is located in what appears to be a very affluent suburban neighborhood well outside of the city, and the course had what I considered to be a correspondingly country club feel to it. While I didn't get to play the course, I was most impressed by the appearance and playability of a course which was less than eleven months old. I liked how the course progressed through several different topographies, alternating between some open holes, some tight woods, the "Cedar Alley" portion of the course, some more open holes, back into the woods, and then back out in the open to finish. As opposed to Renaissance, the OB was consistently and uniformly marked with small orange stakes only, and the concrete tee pads were brand new and perfect. The pin location on top of boulders on hole#3 was memorable, as was the original cedar alley which formed hole#9, a quintessential chute hole. The par four twelfth hole was imo one of the signature holes of the entire tournament, as the water levels in "Lake Schleppy" rose throughout the day from the accumulated plastic. This did not look to be an easy course, and Michael Johansen's nearly perfect round was just the result of a player who made excellent practice leading up to the Worlds event, and got into a zone and simply executed. Again, I feel that a 3.81 rating over at DGcoursereview.com is underrating it.
