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The very friendly Brookside Golf Course in Ashland, Ohio, offers students at Ashland University a great chance to unwind from their studies. Played mostly by the local community, this pleasant course is open to the public. The Clubhouse is small and inviting and offers snacks for players and some golf supplies. One of the main challenges on the Brookside Golf Course are brooks that cut across the fairway; I love this roofed bridge show in the photograph! Other challenges include variations in height (see photo below), surprisingly wet fairways and slow greens due to the unusual 2014 rains, all those beautiful trees along the fairway, and sand traps that are ordinarily easy to miss. The rains weren't really a problem for us, we just put on our wet weather gloves and continued along our way. Luckily for us the lightning and thunder was brief, the rains very light, and quickly disappeared. Most other players also continued. The above photo shows why many golfers walk this course which is like a park almost. After paying fees, golfers practice a fee putts then check in at the starter then play with few delays.
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When visitors arrive at Legends Golf Club in Clermont, Florida near to Orlando, the elaborate waterfalls framing the entry gate may seem intimidating, but after you're through with a game of golf, you'll understand that this golf club was well designed to create wonderful memories of challenging golf. Legends is open to the public and during the warm summer off-season they offer a $179 all the golf you can play card May 1- October 1 after 1pm, after 3pm get a $10 deal on cart. They have a deal on golf balls for use on the large outdoor driving range, too and a large putting green. The clubhouse is reassuring to visitors since it is quite small and staff very friendly and helpful. The small pro shop stocks visors, socks, clothing, and the usual golf supplies and snacks. A meal with your golf ticket for $12 is available, I think to keep wait staff well up to the task of serving large groups. I had chicken tenders, my husband a club sandwich. Food was tasty and arrived quickly including refills on soft drinks and seconds on beer. The tower advertising Legends Golf Course with the purple golfer is played on the back nine which is a bit tougher to play than the front nine. Legends Golf Course makes good use of the unusual for Florida hilly terrain. Close up of the tower. Below, the Legends #14 par 3 hole can be tricky to play, hit long because the ball is likely to roll down hill (see golf photograph below). This golf course is pretty favorable to women player's with the purple (normally red) tees playing an average of 108 for 5200 yards approximately. Most tees have wide open fairways and usually you can avoid any but occasional trouble. The rough is pretty rough now due to all the rain--over 8 inches, bring extra golf balls. The course ends with several back to back uphill holes so make sure you have enough energy to get through this fun course.
Clubhouse at Forest Lake Golf Club, Ocoee, Florida
We visited Forest Lake Golf Club and because it was rather warm out, we decided to skip out on our putting practice. This is a very bad idea. My husband and I were not the only golfers coming in with three and four putts a hole--putting this badly is a serious ouch for your score. So what can you do to help our your putting at Forest Lake Golf Club? One thing that will improve your putting on a golf course such as Forest Lake Golf Club is to make use of a golf range finding device. Each golf cart at Forest Lake Golf Club comes equipped with a ProShot Golf GPS device. Not only did it give the distance to the hole from your current location, but it also gave the distance to several spots on the green and other hazards such as sand traps. We still augmented the advice provided by the ProShot Golf GPS with our exact distance ranger finder. What both of these devices are supposed to do is get your approach shot as close to the hole as possible. That only works if your chipping is close to exact. So good chipping practice and club selection is in order. The photograph of one of the greens at the Forest Lake Golf Club shows some of the difficulties involved with golfing this course:
So how do you handle putting on such surfaces:
When our group started paying close attention to our putting, our putt count went down. One reason that my husband and I report our scores as the number of strokes / the number of putts is to remind ourselves how much our score would go down if we dropped out putt count for the eighteen holes to below 36. The photograph to the left shows one more reason why putting at Forest Lake Golf Course is difficult--complicated approaches insure that your chipping can put you into difficulties such as blocked by a tree, by a bunker, rolling into a lake, or sandy area on the lake fringes, sand hazards, and woods. Overall, Lake Forest Golf Club is sure to test your skills as a golfer. Well, I had my first ever golf lesson at Twin River's Golf Course in Orlando, Florida with Golf Pro Mitch. My husband and I have played for fifteen years, just learning by doing. One of our biggest frustrations is our short game. So we asked Mitch for a joint 1/2 lesson. The cost was $30 for a half hour, then half price for the second person, me. So what does one do in a chipping lesson? Well, we took our clubs in a cart over to the driving range and practice green area. Mitch brought his own pitching wedge, a bucket of golf balls and set up a flag on the green. His first question was what did you want to learn? My husband answered that he wanted to be able to chip over a trap, land on the green and stop. There are many varieties of chips and pitches that one does during the game of golf, but Twin River's Golf Club has many holes in which there is a sand trap right in front of the green or surrounding the front of the green with only a narrow neck on which to bounce up. The photograph here shows a chip used to get under low hanging growth, not one we wanted to explore at the moment. So Mitch said, "Show me what you do." With a pile of golf balls in front of us, my husband and I each chipped onto the green near the flag. After we did so, Mitch focused on what my husband was doing and explaining what parts of the chip were not quite right. He explained how the stroke should be continuous from reaching back all the way through connecting with the ball on toward the flag. He explained that distance was subject to how far back you reached, not slowing the down stroke and not shortening up the follow through. So what did we learn? The number one thing we learned in our chipping lesson is that every person has their own unique weaknesses. The second thing we learned was that being told how to do things better, is not the same thing as doing them better. I started chipping up pretty close to the flag, but as I worked to modify what I was doing, I started committing the number one mistake in chipping: I didn't look at the ball! The photograph here shows the way turf can hide a ball--balls deeper in the turf are likely to slow down your shot. My yellow golf ball I use often is easier to spot in the bright sunny weather in Florida. How did our lesson differ: My husband found he wasn't rotating his hips through his chipping stroke. And that he was trying to use his wrists rather than the club angle to create the loft. I found that I wasn't standing near enough to the ball and that I was rolling my wrists back rather than lifting them up, to do Phil Mickelson's hinge and hold technique he talks about in his book that I discussed in my review of the Secrets of the Short Game. Unlike my husband that was accelerating through his shot, I tended to also slow down through the shot as the ball connected. Was the lesson worth it? You bet. Both my husband and I learned what to pay attention to in our stroke, something we couldn't necessarily diagnose for ourselves. A number of things can go wrong with your putt that make you think, why did I do that? And the biggest reason it happens is because you lose concentration and don't take your putts seriously. 1. Your putter can hit the grass, bumping off to one side or the other or preventing the follow through to the golf ball.
Cure: Make sure you are holding the putter in a fixed position during your practice putt, then do your putt. 2. Your golf ball can hit the rim of the cup and go off to the side. Cure: Well, this might not be your fault, but sometimes in the early morning after the cup is installed, a lip can be present around the hole from the installation. Step on the hole when you take the flag out. 3. Your golf ball goes too far. Cure: Practice on the putting green before you go out. Practice how far your ball will go with a quarter, half, full stroke. Make sure that you do it for uphill and for downhill. 4. Your golf ball veers off at the end mysteriously on short putts. Cure: Follow through to the hole. On short putts, it often feels like you should just tap at the ball, following through to the hole will make it go in the direction you intend. There's other tips, but if we all practice like Tiger Woods, we get better. His thirty foot putt today at the BMW Championship in the FEDEX Cup looked hot. Read more here: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1327058-bmw-championship-2012-tiger-woods-and-rory-mcilroy-make-playoffs-relevant |
Sheri Fresonke HarperSheri loves to golf, travel and to write. Follow Sheri Fresonke Harper on Quora
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