Found myself playing the Links at Hawks Prairie this past Saturday (12/13/14) for a decent early morning round. I was planning on playing elsewhere, and that place was a bit crowded so I decided to tr... Continue »

Found myself playing the Links at Hawks Prairie this past Saturday (12/13/14) for a decent early morning round. I was planning on playing elsewhere, and that place was a bit crowded so I decided to try to walk on at Hawks Prairie, assuming I would get out easily as there are two courses here. Sure enough, I walked right on to the tee box after paying my green fee and played as a single, behind a couple of twosomes that were playing relatively quickly. Conditions were reasonable, a bit wet as everything is here this time of year, greens were soft and slow, but still relatively true. Tee boxes and traps were ok, rough was fine, fairways a little bit sloppy.

The real downer of the day was that they had a tip and tuck type tournament going on that day, so every pin was cut within about a club length or so of the fringe, and this was on greens that aren't exactly small. Also, many of these were cut right in the middle of a slope, really quite unfairly. I can see how a course would do this for a special occasion, but there was no mention of it made to me in the pro shop as I paid my fee. If I had known this course was set up this way, I'd have asked to play the other one. Now, I'm not too angry about it as I would have known if I'd checked ahead of time, and I really just showed up on a whim, but it was disappointing nonetheless, as it has been some time since I've played here, and I really wanted to enjoy the round.