At what point do you criticize a course?

Almost all courses are judged on their greens first and foremost. Most people don’t play the ball down in the fairway/rough anyway and you can put your ball on a tee on your first shot of each hole.

The greens and surrounds truly are where the bulk of maintenance should be done.

Architects go wild with bunkering, but long term maintenance of each bunker can be $10,000 per year. Put 1 in each fairway and 2 by each green and you are at 54 bunkers. That’s a lot of money.

I think bunkers often are too complex as far as shape to be easily maintained. Round shapes that don’t washout do better. I’m an ok bunker player, but I think most redesigns fill some bunkers in to save on maintenance budget.

Greens and tee boxes. Both can go to shite in the blink of an eye.

RTJ Capital Hill is where I’m a member and has a lot of rounds played on it. Greens are consistently great, tee boxes are. They rotate those tee locations and seed the daylights out of them to keep them top notch.

A few miles up the road is prattville county club. Tee boxes are like roadkill. There wasn’t a par 3 tee that wasn’t just dirt. Greens were overgrown and patchy. Fraction of the rounds played on it.

Cost to join, if I remember correctly $200 more for RTJ, although a $25 cart fee is charged every round.

Easy decision.

Course 1 - Perfectly manicured greens
YES
decent tee boxes, YES
fairways and bunkers. YES

However, the cart paths were in terrible shape, I walk almost always
the beverage cart was barely seen
(Does not affect me)
and it was a slow round because they don't have a marshall ensuring fast pace of play, let's say 5 hour round
(Only this would be bad for me)

What course was this?

My order of criticism 1-3 need to be decent if I’m paying >$60/round. If they are in poor condition, I’ll either look for twilight deal or simply don’t play.

1. Greens
2. Non-level tee boxes
3. Fairways
4. Bunkers

A lot of the BR local courses I play have the issues but the one that get me the most is nobody is fixing divots. One course looks like some hit a bucket of balls to just about every green and did not fix their divots.

According to most threads around here, every course is either

A. In good shape, but too expensive
B. In terrible shape.
C. (the rare well conditioned affordable course) Far too slow and it ruined the round.

quote:

---

At what point do you criticize a course?

---

Seems like the answer is always

Usually after a 3 putt

I think it's fair to criticize a course if you are pay a premium price to play there and the conditions are not commensurate with the price and/or what is expected based on the historical quality of the club/course.

If you pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to be a member of a private country club and the conditions deteriorate but your cost to be a member obviously doesn't go down, you have a right to gripe.

If you exclusively play public courses and you don't research beforehand the conditions or typical quality of the course, that's on you. The only time I think criticism is warranted in this situation are those places that have just aerified and don't tell you beforehand and charge you the same full rate as normal. Those people are scum of the earth.

Also, I couldn't give two shits about beverage carts, clubhouses, food, etc. I go to a golf course to play golf. Just have some water out there and that's enough. I'd rather a club put all their captial into improving/maintaining the quality of the golf course than anything related to food/bev.