At our course women and couples play a fairly high number of the total rounds. The women’s league is easily the most popular of any course in our area. One night a week the women take up the entire course, we have a couple of women only tournaments a year and there are flights for women in just about all other tournaments. This thread caused me to think why women like our course. We also easily have the most popular junior golf program of all courses in our area with over 300 kids playing weekly golf events during the season. We put a lot of effort into the junior golf program to make that work, especially in course set up and scheduling, so let’s ignore that for this discussion.
I don’t play with women very often, never thought our course, based purely on yardage or distance, was especially friendly to women, or that the design and routing of the forward tees was very out of the ordinary. The forward tees are 5,172 yards, play to a par of 74 for women and 72 for men. The other “regular” tees are 6,028, 6,464, and 6,807 on the card. However, we have and maintain tees so that we can set up the course from about 4,800 to 7,000 yards. In my mind, this is just how the course has evolved over the years to provide the most enjoyable golf to the greatest number of golfers we can. We’re just a good affordable golf course in a great landscape.
So, from a design and set up point of view, why do women like it? My conclusions this thread prompted me to think about:
· [/font]Although long for women, we have a higher par on the two longest holes, par 4’s for men, par 5’s for women.
· [/font]There is one par three with a 100+/- forced carry over water from the regular forward tee. The hole has a generous bailout fairway around the trouble and even an alternate forward tee for this fairway not over water.
· [/font]All holes have open fronts and allow “run up” shots. There are 3 elevated greens where a ‘run up” isn’t the best approach for all golfers, but ample room to miss short. Most of the fall offs are to the sides or behind the greens.
· [/font]There are just three forward tees where women riding or walking together go to separate tees from the men. On two of these the women can play simultaneously with the men, both shorter walks from the previous greens.
· [/font]Overall, the forward tees integrate well with the routing of the course. Men and women playing together do, in fact, play together. Only a couple of times do the longer and shorter golfers split up and go to different tees. Makes no difference riding or walking, all golfers play the same course. The back tees are the longest walk, the forward tees the shortest, but there isn’t much difference between all the tees in terms of the distance and difficulty of the walk.
If one wants to find the best route through a natural landscape, follow the game trails. That’s more or less how our course has evolved. Tees, features, and changes have evolved where golfers want to play. Cart (and maintenance) paths are ugly, but a necessary evil if a course has carts because you try to concentrate the wear and tear in specific places that have the least impact on the golf and aesthetics. If cart paths are not where golfers want to play, then one must force their use or put up the consequences. Placing, constructing, and hiding cart paths must be one of the hardest and most expensive aspects of designing a course. Mostly, ours are where the golfers want to play and, yes, they’re ugly.
To some extent, a similar process has guided the evolution of our forward tees. No brilliant golf design, we just put them where golfers want to play. Seems to work fairly well for the women, kids, mixed groups, and older folks. Could our course be improved? Emphatically, yes. Should we? Well, that’s a much more complicated question and essentially what we talk about here.