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Emmaus, PA

Camp Olympic Park

3.255(based on 4 reviews)
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8 1
PRC90
Experience: 8 years 20 played 18 reviews
2.50 star(s)

Constant Progress and a Maintainable layout spell a bright future for the course. 2+ years drive by

Reviewed: Updated: Played on:Dec 16, 2019 Played the course:5+ times

Pros:

Very quick to play, solo round can be done in under an hour if you hustle between holes.
Paver tee's where installed are pretty well done.
Baskets are modern and in good shape
Creative usage of obstacles and elevation to create a couple memorable/interesting holes.

Cons:

Not a lot of opportunities for scoring separation as most holes can very easily be scrambled out for par.
Some holes feel same-y or oversimplified: you may find yourself staring down the basket from the tee with little to stop you from parking it assuming you can reach it (and most of you probably can).

The use of hanging baskets has grown to be very gimmicky, when 1 or 2 holes has them its creative design when almost half of them have it loses it's luster.
Tee proximity to basket, in some cases an errant drive may come your way from another hole while on the tee if there are a lot of people playing.

Other Thoughts:

The redesign of Camp O has been fast and furious and the community has come together to make a neat little course that is both sustainable and enjoyable to play. The Paver pads where installed are a very welcome change and the baskets still catch as well as they used to (for the most part) and I hope to see continued progress on the remaining pads. The additions of the pallet benches are convenient and the commitment to have them on most holes is nice. I enjoy that the more memorable Par 3's from the old layout live on in the new layout and some of the new holes are genuinely fun or tricky (4 can be quite annoying despite being so short). The overall flow is pretty good you will not find yourself walking as far to get to your next tee and the time to play this course is generally pretty quick, making it a great candidate for the "on your lunch" or "after work 9 holes" since hole 9 drops you back at the lot.

On the downside the course has lost most of its teeth and competitive nature as the layout removed all the par 4's and the average difficulty on the new holes is a bit lower overall as most of the holes are single angle and/or single gap holes that seem relatively easy to conquer. This will be a con to some and a pro to others, but for me there plenty of courses that are similar difficulty and that are more memorable. The tee pads often are very close to other holes... if you are on hole 11 you could potentially get hit from a disc in 2 different directions which could easily be fixed by changing the design on hole 11 to move it away from the cross fire. The use of hanging baskets on this course has begun to make it feel very gimmicky especially when you see some of the monstrosities created to move these things. Sometimes less is more and I think early on when they rolled one or two of them out it added a neat flare that made it unique but when I was there last there are roughly around 5 baskets that have been permanently modified (some attached to apparatus crudely bolted to trees others swung out on some kind of welded together arm) and it adds a kind of weird "fun-house" vibe to the course that makes it harder to take it serious.

Overall Camp Olympics' redesign is a step in the right direction and it is worthy of being called an ok course by DGCR standards. I think the added infrastructure has brought a lot of value to the course and as the work finishes up it will be a nice place to play some disc golf and will be for years to come. I think refocusing the design aspects towards tweaking the layout to be more interesting and unique rather than messing with the basket features will help increase the playability and potentially difficulty of the course and make it one that's worth traveling a bit for.
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