City Lake is a decent, beginner-friendly nine-hole course. Come for the disc golf, stay for the scenery.
- This is your average, small park nine-hole course. It's clearly aimed for casual players, with no hole longer than 254 feet.
- For the lack of length, there's a decent amount of variety here. #1 has a crazy tree protecting the basket, with players being forced to go over or under large branch. Or you just throw around the tree altogether. It'll appear challenging for newbies, but is an easy two for more experienced players. After that, holes #2 - 4 remain in the woods, 5 - 7 are all open holes, and 8 & 9 are open tee shots to baskets on the edge of the woods.
- Relatively easy course to navigate. Tees are dirt, surrounded by wood frames. The transitions from #3 basket to #4 tee, and #4 basket to #5 tee were the only two that took more than two seconds to locate. An interesting feature of the open holes #5 - 7, is that there is a different type (and color) of grass to indicate the fairways and the transition between holes.
- This is a good place to bring extra discs to practice throwing. There's plenty of room to throw drives in the open field.
- This is a great, small town park overall. The feature of the park is the lake (more like a really large pond) itself. There's also a playground, picnic shelters, walking and biking trails. I was kind of surprised how empty the park was.
- There's a ton of extra, unused land, both wooded and open space. Makes you think something could be used in that area.

There are only a couple small problems with the course. It actually does a good job of achieving the goal of being a beginner, family-friendly course.
- #2 seems to have an awfully high 'lost disc' factor for a beginner course. There's a tree in front of the tee, so you're having to go around it. If you go to the right, you're throwing over the edge of water. Even if you go to the left, there are enough trees that a person could easily hit one, and have their disc ricochet into the water. You don't want the casual, one or two disc players losing one on the second hole.
- The layout on #4 is poor, mainly the lack of a true fairway. There are enough options, but none that will get the average player within sniffing distance of the basket.
- The only truly poor hole is #7. It's a short, straight, wide-open hole. It's the only hole on the course with no obstacle or real challenge.
- There aren't any tee signs, just hole numbers at each tee. Not that they are needed, seeing how each hole is visible from the tee.
- It seems this park has a lot of unused land. You drive past a lot of land before getting to the usable part of the park. It makes you wonder if something could be built in the rest of the park.

If a short, beginner course can exceed expectations, City Lake Park did it for me. For a course that was built as part of a high school project, it's a pretty good job.
- This course offers a little bit of everything: wooded & open holes, doglegs, elevation, water and even a raised basket. It should give first timers a good taste of the variety of holes they'll see on other disc golf courses.
- For a wide open hole, #6 is actually decent. It's an uphill, 227 foot shot, so it plays closer to the 275 - 300 foot range. For more advanced players, this is the type of course you'll only need to carry a disc, two or three, instead of your whole bag. That said, because of this hole, you'll need to make sure one of those discs is something you can throw further.
- There are some great scenic views here. After finishing #6, turn around and enjoy the downhill view of the lake, and the trees around it. I bet this is an amazing view in the fall as the leaves are changing colors. It's a poor man's version of the view you get at Walnut Creek in Charlottesville, VA and Lake's Edge in Reidsville. Not as good as those, but still quite impressive nonetheless.
- I've hinted at this in both my pros and cons, so it's time to address it. This could actually be a great place for an 18-hole course. Now, I don't know anything about it, so perhaps a local will correct me, and I'll update my review at that point. There's a ton of open land as you enter the park, and there's a bunch of wooded/hilly land to the right of #5 & 6 and 8 & 9. With all that good, unused land just sitting there, why not build another disc golf course? Keep the beginner nine hole loop, and add another challenging, advanced course to compliment Fox Chase. As I said, this is a great, well-kept local park, but when I played on a Sunday afternoon, it was virtually deserted. Why have all of that space, and all those resources go to waste?
- If you're going to Albemarle to play disc golf, you're going to Fox Chase. This might be a good course to visit as a warm-up or cool-down round. Other than that, if you don't live close by, or aren't planning on going fishing in the lake, there's no need to drive out of your way here.

I think that for a high school senior project this a good piece of work. The course is in a high profile area and will introduce people to the sport, they can't miss it. It will afford beginners and lesser skilled players a good venue to practice without losing plastic.

Hole 1's tee is a bit close to a shelter where lots of rug rats are running around. The tee shot takes you over a path near a path intersection and there is a good bit of foot traffic there for people doing the looped walking track and headed to the lake to fish. Hole 2's fairway is very swampy, a bit too close to the marshy end of the lake. 4's tee is difficult to find and plays in conflict with pedestrians. Hole 9 is a repeat of hole 8 to end the round.

I do not know the constraints that the park dept put on the designer. It appears to me that with minimal effort this course could really have been a great beginner to indermediate course. There appears to be a lot of land that could easily have been used. I think that with a bit of guidance from an experienced player or designer this could have been an awesome course. I was there just after mid day on a Saturday and there was nobody playing this course.

-Good warmup/midrange/putting practice course
-Clean and beautiful park

-No signage
-A few pads are slightly tough to spot without walking around a bit... they look like horseshoe pits and a few are level with the ground.
-First 4 holes are in a very populated area of the park (right beside the lake) and we had to wait for people a few times and threw over a guy sitting on a bench that's right in the throwing lane on 4.
-Next 3 holes are "boring"... 3 wide open, 200' holes.

This course was a senior project... explaining the lack of pads and why they didn't forge out holes in the woods. He just used what was available and made a simple little course.

Nice short holes to work on midrange and putting. Overall a really nice park with a lake view.

From hole to hole is not marked well at all. Need signs telling you where next tee box is. Spent a lot of time walking around looking for tee box. Would be nice if grass clippings were picked up after mowing.

Very pretty park with nice elevation and a lake. Maintained adequately with trash picked up and grass mowed. The gravel tees are huge and nicely even, all pointing in the right direction so good job there. The baskets are typical Innova Discatchers and numbered.

The first 4 holes meander around a wooded area beside the lake and are very straight forward with the exception of #4. #8 is a cute turnover shot, as is #5.

There's lovely land, elevation included, and a big lake. Unfortunately, the course utilizes none of this. It's basically 4 short holes crammed in a wooded section beside the lake (perilously close to anyone fishing nearby, which there were many today) followed by 5 open, field holes that are slightly longer and even more underwhelming.

Hole #4's tee is awkward to locate, it's close to the lake's edge, about 2 o'clock from #3's basket. There's no real fairway unless you play it as a right angle hyzer but that's available b/c of a sidewalk so you can either do that and endanger patrons or lumberjack straight through the sparse but no line containing woods.

The variety is really bad, all holes are in the 100-200' range basically and all more or less straight ahead. All the holes that don't feel like long putts or approaches are all short turnovers or annys. Not much imagination here, the designer is obviously not a bowler.

You even have a tediously long walk from #9 back to #1 or the parking lot.

This is a bittersweet course, not so much b/c it's 9 holes but b/c this park easily has the makings of another Fox Chase or at least a Stumpy Creek, even a Buckhorn if the lake gets utilized. But instead, they put 4 holes crammed in a space frequented by anglers and people using park shelters and 5 holes in the fields flanking the park road, and you're surrounded by beautiful, Fox Chase-esque woods and nature trails that look criminally unused.

You'd be better off playing multiple rounds at Fox Chase unless you've got little ones or complete n00bs tagging along, otherwise you ain't missing anything.

It isn't half a shame, sadly.