ballyneal, where do players actually

[Garland Bayley]

tee off from?

If this question is ignorant of the true way ballyneal is organized pleas let me know and I will shut it down.

If there are no fixed teeing areas, how far from the green do people actually tee off from? How far will women walk before deciding to put a peg in the ground?

[Bart Bradley]

Dude:

There are teeing grounds but no tee markers....the caddies will show you the options and you pick your distance!

Bart

[Garland Bayley]

Dude:

There are teeing grounds but no tee markers....the caddies will show you the options and you pick your distance!

Bart

Good. That is what I thought. How far do people travel to stick their peg in the ground?

[Peter_Herreid]

There are no formal tee markers, although each hole has multiple formal and innumerable "informal" teeing grounds.  Since there are no course ratings, there is no limitation to the various combinations and yardages that might be played in a given round, and over a number of rounds.

Many of these teeing grounds are widely disparate in either yardage, angle, fairway exposure, etc and it took some time for my fairly rigid way of thinking to adapt to some of this flexibility--by the 3rd or 4th round the benefits to such an approach at Ballyneal were obvious.  I don't believe the same approach would have any usefulness at West Seattle, for example!

In our rounds, either one of the hosts picked the markers to give us a wide variety of experiences over the rounds, or we let Dell Sims pick a tee box that would play to his strengths, or we simply watched in awe as Matt Schulte teed off from a road, a yucca plant, the edge of the previous green, the roof of the Turtle Bar, the rest shack, or wherever else he came up with...

I suspect that one way might be to let the winner of the previous hole pick the teeing ground, and off you go...

[Bart Bradley]

It varies..as you can imagine...sometimes you walk forward, sometimes backward and sometimes almost not at all...it depends on the wind and how far you want to play...

Bart

[Garland Bayley]

My interest is in whether people will travel very far to access an area Tom provided, or will they strongly tend to start near the last green.
I am especially interested in what the ladies do.

[Ben Sims]

What strengths were those Peter?  High slice and low hook followed by bump and run everything? I hit three good shots out of 4 rounds last weekend.  

Garland,

The walking from green to tee is very short.  I would say that the furthest I remember walking from green to tee was 50 yards.  That was 13 green to 14 we when we decided to play it short.  The cool thing about Ballyneal is that I have no idea what yardage I played in total for any of the rounds.  I think the first round was almost all tips and was in the 7100 range.  The last round could've been as short as 6100.  

Ladies would be walking forward on most tees, they're next to the last green.  The tips aren't WAY backwards like some of those at Stone Eagle (9 tee back over 8 green).  It's hard to explain.  You need to see it.

 

[Adam Clayman]

Most all forward teeing grounds are at the start of the fairway. Some even farther into the fairway.

For instance, Sara, who works for the R team, teed off on the most forward of flaytish areas on #8. It's about 20 yards ahead of the little maintenance road where the fairway starts in earnest. She the proceeded to carry the Sahara bunker. Im not sure exactly how far that is to carry, but from the tips, it's purported to be 346. Done twice, by men, that I have heard of.

The longest green to tee walk is either on 17 or 18. 17's is noticeable if one knew the original plan was for the 16th green to be to the left of where it lays now. One interesting note; The 16th green's location moved three times in one day. At least thats the lore. Another of fine improvements made to the routing was on the sixth teeing ground. Original slated to be a par 5 from a top the dune. But the walk up that dune would've made the whole walk much more arduous.

The best is the back tee on #5 a mere 3 paces off of fourth green. One could do the same on the 14th hole avoiding the slight climb to the formal teeing ground. This angle also allows for a sharper angle to the dogleg and gives the golfer a visual of the right side of the fairway. Something Tom blinds the golfer to from the formal teeing ground. It's always amazing how no one notices, or suspects, there's room to the right. It's practically Tom's signature that he likes to blind the player to ample room. The Key... the classic mowing pattern should clue the golfer into how they can only see half the fairway.

[Kalen Braley]

The walks at Ballyneal or lack therof to put it better were absolutly terrific.

The only longish walk is from the 18th green back to the clubhouse, or 1st tee again!! 

[Jim Colton]

The lack of tee markers at Ballyneal is a brilliant move.  Many of the guys played up to 7 rounds on the same course over three days, and it was always new and exciting.  Tom did a great job of changing the angle along with the distance.

The bigger question is why wouldn't it work elsewhere?

[Pete Lavallee]

The bigger question is why wouldn't it work elsewhere?

Maybe because golfers would be unable to post their scores without an accurate course rating and slope?

[Garland Bayley]

The bigger question is why wouldn't it work elsewhere?

Maybe because golfers would be unable to post their scores without an accurate course rating and slope?

Come on Pete! You're an engineer! You can do better than that!

...I would love to see a course designed with no specific tee markers, it would make play very interesting.

How about a GPS score card. You simply click it at the place you tee off. Also store scores in its memory. Then when returning to the clubhouse, plug the device into a station, and a scorecard is printed complete with custom course rating and slop. Furthermore, the station could be used to post the score.

Tom Huckaby wrote this was a great idea on the thread it appeared on! I ungraciously fell into kidding mode and never thanked him. Such is the life of a socially challenged engineer.