I had the opportunity over the weekend to play Stonelick Hills located east of Cincinnati. I am considering having an outing there and wanted to play the course before I pulled the trigger. It has been rated as one of the best public courses in the state since opening three years ago.
Disclaimer: thoughts reflected below are provided by a rank architecture novice under no warranty and do not reflect the views of Major League Baseball.
Overall impression: A good course with a lot of surprising and unusual hole designs. Note that “surprising and unusual” are not synonyms for “bad and annoying”. The flow and pace of the course is affected negatively by the distances between holes and the difficulty for walkers. I very much enjoyed the course with it’s wide variety of holes.
A couple of summers ago they lost six greens but I did not see any residual damage. They had obviously cleared out a lot of trees and I saw fans near a couple of greens. The course was in very good condition with the exception of hole #10. It was closed due to construction. I don’t know exactly what they were doing but large chunks of the fairway were being resodded.
Misc thoughts in no particular order.
Hole #2 --
http://www.stonelickhills.com/tour2.phpSomeone asked me about the tree on this hole that is on the right side of the fairway. The tree is a 50+ foot tall sycamore and sits about 100 yards from the green. I have no doubt that this tree will give fits to anyone who hits the right/center of the fairway. You could hit a great drive with a short/mid iron into the green and still be blocked out of the green. The only shot option is a low runner under the tree from the right/middle of the fairway. Drives on the left side will have a clear shot to the green.
This hole also features a sunken green. The green is about 3 or 4 feet below the grade of the fairway. I had never seen anything like this before and have to say I really liked it. I will help people hitting low runners under the tree in the fairway and it makes chipping from short of the green interesting.
Hole #6
http://www.stonelickhills.com/tour6.phpI hit my tee shot short and a little right on this hole and expected to be in a greenside bunker. However, when I got up to the green I found grass where I expected a bunker to be. Again, this was another situation where I had in my head what I was going to encounter I actually found something else.
Hole #8
http://www.stonelickhills.com/tour8.phpA nice enough hole but the greenside bunker with the tree in it really bugs me. Bunkers are penal enough but to have a longish bunker shot with a tree in your way will make an up and down next to impossible.
Walking
http://www.pbase.com/jpflumjr/image/76219830Damn – this course is very difficult to walk. The distances from greens to tees are immense. There is probably not a single walk under 100 yards and several are easily 200 yards plus. One stretch that is particularly frustrating is holes 4-6. You walk off the green for hole #4 and have to walk back almost the entire length of the hole to get to the 5th tee. Then, from the 5th green, you have a 300+ yard walk up and down some serious hills to get to the 6th tee. In many cases once you leave the green you have to go back down the fairway in the opposite direction to get to the next tee. Very annoying. This really disrupts the flow of the course.