I thought I would share my first impressions of QuickSands. —ChristianWe played it a couple of weeks ago with a couple of pals under "heat dome" conditions, late in the day, just as temps were starting to drop from that day’s high of 100°. The course was just a couple of months old.
QuickSands occupies a gently-sloped cavity, carved out of the back of the plateau where the main course plays. A sloping walkway takes you down from the driving range into the bowl. The entire course unfolds before you: 14 short holes (the longest played maybe 145 for us) criss-crossing a sandy bowl in an appealing möbius strip of undulated, continuous short grass, punctuated by expansive, shallow bunkers.
The view from the walkway, headed down into the QuickSands. The commotion of the clubhouse and parking lot is nicely masked by the change in elevation.The greens are often tucked behind or along the grass-fringed sand, but are primarily guarded by undulations in the extreme, requiring an amplified version of the strategic decisions often called for on the regulation course. On a typical QuickSand hole, a precise dart from 110 yards out might hold, but the odds are better playing to the pin via indirect routes, often along the ground.
Part of the fun is the names of the holes that often suggest how to play the hole or how shots run out:
“Crater" is a blind uphill carry over a cross bunker to a rather narrow green that abuts wire-fence OB. As long as you can attenuate to the half-shot, the crater green gathers everything to the pin.
“Corkscrew" suggests you can opt out of a forced carry to a number of narrow, vertiginous pin positions and rather run the ball through the two-tiered velodrome contour at the extreme left.
Beautiful bunkering and massive contours on QuickSands no. 6: "Corkscrew."
"Corkscrew" from the teeing area. Your author punched it way left—not with enough power to stay up on the higher "thread" of the screw—and it settled right on schedule, one tier below the pin.“Left Bank” and “Right Wing” point out angles in that require landing outside the green itself.
Overall the course feels pleasantly engineered: approaching the vibe of arcade mini-golf in a untamed setting. Everything is in front of you: reading the surrounds or the greens isn’t a challenge. Ignoring conventional impulses and following those contours is.
That feeling of scale and legibility means the course is anything but dramatic. No balls were lost in our round as the catching fields of high grass are usually quite small. You’d never mistake it for The Preserve at Bandon Dunes: there’s no lost-ball search that might terminate in a fatal fall.
First attempts at babying the pin location resulted in roll outs down to where the author is standing. With no one behind us, we played second, and then third balls way way left of the direct line, carrying a knoll of high grasses, in order to get one close on QuickSands no. 13.Maybe the arcade vibe was due to the array of hidden all-weather speakers that pumped out satellite radio. The day we played it, the course was set up with “Sirius XM 90’s on 9.” No sign of a jukebox which, under the right circumstances, might really impact a skins game here.
The walk can be refreshingly unencumbered. There are probably too many forced carries from the tees we played to take only a putter, but it plays fun and fair with one club. (I played it with a wedge.) Like the arcades of my youth, I wanted to immediately walk it again, and try my hand at these clever entertainments a second time, hoping for yet more thrilling results.