I recently came to an agreement with the Golf Association of Paraguay to design a Par three lighted course within the confines of the country´s Olympic training facility. It´s like a University campus or small town with everything you need to live and train full time for all related Olympic sporting events. The project is being funded by the government and will serve two purposes. First and far most, a permanent training ground for all of Paraguay´s armatures that play competively representing their country! A complete training round will cover all distances between 100 and 230 with random 10-yard increments. Secondly, it will be open to the public during certain hours or days and especially at night. The public course will hit off mats and the holes will be played at a maximum of 130 yards and many near 100 yards for security reasons. Hopefully, this will help grow golf in a country of six eighteen-hole golf courses.
Currently there is a Driving Range and two large Bermuda putting greens. Four holes will be built into the current range area which is already lighted and will serve as target greens for the range but if you close the range you can have up to 13, par 3 holes. Nine holes will always be independent outside of the driving. The total land available was 25 acres more or less with the current driving range.
This is the preliminary routing!
Some of the ideas or justifications that went into this initial routing are as follows:
· Greens were grouped in three´s or two´s in order to minimize lighting square footage.
· The areas in green are the areas that will be under intense management and equates to about 12 acres. Emphasis will be on the greens and their surrounding producing all kinds of recovery shots. These will also be the only areas under automatic irrigation.
· The original idea was to do waste bunkers in the other 12 or 13 acres but waste bunkers in a tropical setting are difficult to get to fit right and I fear that good intention of creating something low maintenance could back fire. I have instead decided to seed these areas to common Bermuda and use quick couplers, hoses and portable sprinklers to get a base established and then no more irrigation. It rains frequently but you can go two months sometimes without rain but who cares. Greens will be tiff eagle and 419 in the surrounding and approaches cut short.
· Teeing zones will be large with up to forty to fifty yards differences. They will have subtle movement throughout the teeing zones to practice from different stances. Flat tees will still be available at the driving range.
· There will be few sand bunkers.
· We will use park sprinklers to control cost instead of Golf Course sprinklers.
· California greens construction-avg size 5,000 sq ft. At least one double green to be determined at a later date.
· One of the target greens in the driving range will be reversible and played in two directions.
· The second hole will cross a creek for the training teams but will have an alternative green for the public before the creek.
Shaper starts Monday!
Golf rounds may be on the decline and maybe has much to do with the time factor but practice is growing for the same reason.