Wow, what a great experience it was to play Cuscowilla for three days. Crenshaw & Coore's Talking Stick North in Scottsdale was a lesson in how to deal with a dead flat site. Their Cuscowilla is a lesson in how to build a minimalistic course on a beautiful, rolling site with some exciting forced carries (maybe a bit lengthy for many players!
) but great bunkering, excellent greens.
We played the middle tees at 6400 yds par 70, all I could handle! The forced carries would have been well over 220 yards from the back tees.
The mix of holes is dramatic - two very strategic short par 4's (#5 and #12), a backbreaking par 5 (620 yd #14, the final 200 yards straight uphill and blind), six big par 4's (#6, #9, #10, #13, #15, #18, the last hole on each nine played as par 5's for a mixed tees par 72 course). The par 3's have great variety: #11 a short pitch over an inlet of Lake Oconee, #8 - 236 yards downhill that plays much shorter and plays sharply left to right.
The greens complexes throughout are large, quite varied (some bunkered tightly, some no bunkers at all), fast, with tight and firm approaches so that a great variety of short game shots can be played. As an example, on#4, a mid length cape hole, I was about 40 yards short left after a hooked tee shot. I was above the green which has a pronounced knob in the center of the green with the pin cut behind it. The fairway approach was so firm and cut so tightly that I dithered about how to hit this shot and finally putted! The ball broke down the slope, skirted the knob, and finished 8' right of the pin. It is so much fun to play shots like this and you don't have many such opportunities to play shots like these on most American courses.
The golf package there is a super bargain - $175 pp includes shared room in very nice 3-BR golf villas, breakfast, golf and caddy! The caddies were a mixed lot but a couple over three days were very good.
All in all I rate Cuscowilla a first class experience. There has been some discussion about a Southeast informal GCA event, and Cuscowilla would be a great host. Mike Young is building a new course in Madison GA, close by, which should be interesting. The other courses in the area, all at Reynolds Plantation, looked a lot more manufactured than Cuscowilla, which lays over that great terrain like a blanket, nothing built up and nothing that looks artificial in the slightest.
Tom Doak has designed a new course next door to Cuscowilla, The Harmony Club, which will be an extremely private club laid out on lake front terrain similar to Cuscowilla.