2-1-21: This will probably be my last posting here. Now that I've retired from HCC, I no longer have an active connection with the course. I'm glad I was able to help bring disc golf to the Holyoke community over two decades ago (Where the heck did all that time go?), and I hope the course continues to be maintained so it can continue to attract players of all abilities far into the future.
6-27-19:
It looks like Hole 3 is salvageable. I looked at it from the tee today and it wasn't as bad as I thought. It needs some trimming (which will happen in the coming months), but if you stay to the left it's currently playable. So the new front 9 is now complete! Here's a chart of the hole lengths:
As you can see, the front 9 is actually longer than the back 9, even though it seems to have shorter holes overall. That's due mostly to the length of holes 8 and 9. Even with the greater length, the front 9 should seem shorter because of how open it is.
6-26-19: Well, that was quick! The new tee markers and arrows have been installed. There are still a few issues. The fairway for Hole 3 is unplayable. Our venerable friend Mike Morin has moved away, so there's been no regular course maintenance in years. Hole 3's fairway is now a forest. So I might have to re-think its tee placement if removing the growth proves to be impossible. The new Hole 7's basket position has also become extremely overgrown, but that won't be nearly as difficult to clean up. So outside of Hole 3, the new front nine is playable.
6-24-19: Thanks to help from Chris Tucker, the front 9 redesign is just about complete. The baskets for holes 4, 5, 7 and 9 have been repositioned. Some of the tee markers apparently were stolen (Does someone need bricks that desperately?), so I'll eventually replace them. I also have to redo the arrows pointing to the next holes, as well as relabel the baskets. So hopefully I'll have all that done within the first few weeks of July. I'm sure many long-time players of the course will be delighted to hear that the epic 536-foot-long hole from the first course design has returned as hole nine. The original hole 4 (with its picturesque birdie opportunity) has been resurrected as hole 7. Hole 5 is entirely new and I really like it, short but challenging. The former hole 6 (in the park at the front of the campus) has been flipped and is now hole 4. The layout is now more family-friendly, more in line with my original intent.
3-15-18: Stay tuned for updates to the course layout.
11-23-14:
We've had reports that a neighbor abutting hole 7 has become very
agressive with players when they're on that fairway. Our campus
police and the Holyoke police are looking into the matter. But
until it's resolved, players might want to bypass that hole.
05-04-14:
Mike Morin has worked out the details with, the athletic director, the
grounds crew and me. He'll be assisting with the clean-up and
maintenance of the current course. Right now it's looking pretty
good, except for hole 7. The college is working on clearing the
brush dump there. Other than that, the course is now quite
playable after this past hard winter.
02-21-14: Well, it's
been a long time. The course has steadily deteriorated from lack
of maintenance. I can no longer do the work, and the grounds crew
has been limited in what they can offer. A neighbor decided to
dump piles of brush onto Hole 7's fairway. Nature has begun
reclaiming other fairways. But more importantly, I haven't seen
many people playing the course over the past year-and-a-half. I
used to see families lined up to play the original front 9 years
ago. But those families no longer come around. And it's
probably for the same reason that I stopped playing the course: it's
become too difficult for beginning-to-average players. As my own
skill level increased and I wanted to bring more strong players to the
course, I lost sight of the reason I created the course to begin with
-- to give the community a welcoming introduction to disc golf.
So I'm once again re-thinking the layout of the course, trying to find
a way to bring the community back into the sport. I'm going to
concentrate on the front of the campus, a challenge with all the
parking lots and baseball fields. And I'll try to keep holes out
of thick woods this time. But that won't happen for a
while. I'll need to re-walk the campus. And with nearly two
feet of snow currently on the ground, that will have to wait till
spring.
10-10-12: Hole 12 has been
problematic from the start, not so much for the toughness of the hole
as for the fact that the fairway began being used as the college's
brush dump. The dump has continued to expand and now encroaches
far enough that players lose their discs in it. And the expansion
will only continue. Plus, the stump that the basket had sat in
since the original installation (for then hole 14 in 2007) has rotted
out and the basket had become unstable. So Kevin, our course
installer, met me up there and he was able to push the basket over with
one hand. So we made a quick redesign of hole 12. It's
actually now a reverse of the original hole 15. Because of that
change, the tee for 13 had to be moved. It now sits next to the
stump where 12's basket was. I like the fact that there are no
longer three consecutive holes crossing pavement, and the parking lot is now taken out-of-play. I also like the
fact that 12 is now challenging without being punishing. There's
still a bit of work to do, but the holes should be ready for play in a
few weeks.
08-25-12: I got a
call from the athletics director. He wasn't happy. A random player was
throwing wild off the tee during a soccer match. He whacked a few cars
in the parking lot (according to the director) and nearly hit some
spectators.
Even though I told him that there are occasionally stupid players out
there, he insisted that I re-think hole 1. So I've shifted the tee
position to the far right, just forward of where it originally was back
in 2007. That will take the parking lot out of play. There's not much I
can do about spectators standing around the fairway, except to remind
players that the campus hosts lots of events and disc golf isn't the
only one. If a fairway isn't safely playable, simply move on to the
next tee.
08-05-12: I've compiled some statistics from the recent
singles tourney, with 80 shots thrown over all divisions in both
rounds. Because of the extreme conditions (the heat and
humidity), I expected an increase in scores during round 2, but that
didn't happen. And none of the holes favored a particular
division. (In other words, Pros didn't do noticeably better on
any particular holes than Ams).
The toughest hole in the tourney was #10, with a whopping 59 bogies (or
greater). That was followed closely by hole 12 with 52
bogies. Hole 15 had the least number of bogies (16). The
most-birdied hole was 9 with 23. The least-birdied
(understandably) was hole 10 with zero. The second-most birdied
holes with 17 of them each were 1 (which surprised me) and 11 (which
did not). Hole 3 had the most pars (59) but only 2 birdies and
the second-most bogies (19). The second most-parred hole was 15
with 58. I was surprised it gave up only 6 birdies. The
least number of pars, unsurprisingly, was on hole 10.
Overall, the front nine saw 38 pars, 9 birdies and 33 bogies. The
back 9 had 37 pars, 7 birdies and 36 bogies. So the back 9 plays
just slightly tougher than the front. But in general the course
is proving to be a real challenge -- and this is after an enormous
amount of clearing for the tourney and better footing with the FlyPads
on the back 9.
Some other interesting factoids:
-- All six of the birdies on hole 13 occurred in the first round.
-- Hole 4 surprised me by producing a whopping 43 bogies and just one birdie.
-- Picturesque hole 5 saw 39 pars, 39 bogies and just 2 birdies. The pin placement might have something to do with that.
-- Even though the course produces more pars than any other score, it's
by a very slim majority, nearly the same as the number of bogies it
produces. Meanwhile, birdies number one-fifth that amount.
While I'm not advocating a birdie-happy course, I think some more work
needs to be done to make the course a bit more fair to the average
player.
~~~~~
08-02-12: The new tee pads for the back 9 are in, thanks to a generous grant from the New England Flying Disc Association. This has been something players have been clamoring for, and I'm glad we've made headway. Hopefully we'll be able to complete the course next year.
Also, poison ivy is currently rampant over most of the back 9. Please use caution when playing.
02-10-12: The college has gotten complaints from neighbors who said that disc golfers were entering their backyards. I assume that problem would have occurred on hole 7. Please use caution when playing that fairway, especially by the dogleg. I'm looking into re-routing that fairway to eliminate the issue.
From the Winter Winds '12 tourney, here's an extrapolation of how the new holes played. Remember that this is in doubles play, with seventeen teams playing two rounds. The distribution of scores was fairly even across all divisions. In other words, no one division had more birdies or bogies on any particular hole than any other division. The most birdies, predictably, were on hole 6, 9 and 18, with 3 and 15 in close second. The toughest hole on the course (even after modifications) is still hole 12 with no birdies and 15 bogies. Hole 10 proved the next toughest with just one birdie and the same number of bogies. Even so, the majority of scores on all the holes were pars, which indicates that it's a fair course -- in doubles play. It will be interesting to compare scores for a singles round.
The new course had its inaugural run on October 29th (ending in a blizzard). General feedback was very favorable. Here's a look at the current layout:
And here's how the new hole lengths are playing out. The course is about 300 feet shorter overall.
