Pros:
Haut Gap is a very nice, beginner friendly course. It definitely meets its goal of being geared towards the middle school students.
- This is a simple, straight ahead design, with nothing flashy. There's a solid mix of open holes (#2 - 4), wooded and doglegs. The course offers some ace runs, as long as holes that require good accuracy to avoid hitting trees.
- Course has a nice, easy flow to it. Thanks to good design, there are nine holes in a small piece of land, without a feel of them playing on top of each other. The lone exception is the down and back layout for #3 & 4.
- Course is easy to navigate. There are good tee signs, that show the hole layouts, along with the direction of the next hole. The course has nice big tee pads. Baskets are in pretty good shape as well.
- Good course for a quick round. You can easily play nine holes in less than half an hour, or play through twice in 45 minutes.
- Very good course for beginners. The biggest obstacles are the trees, especially on a couple of the wooded holes. #6 & 7 come to mind as the examples. The only chances of losing a disc are by throwing over the fence that runs along the right side of #6 & 8.
Cons:
There's very little to find wrong with this course. It does a great job of reaching all of its goals. There are only a couple of nitpicking things to mention here.
- Course isn't going to appeal to better players. It's a little too easy and straight forward for more experienced throwers.
- Some of the wooded holes need to be cleared a little better. There's still some stumps and underbrush on #1, 6 & 7. You've got to keep one eye on the ground as not to trip on a stump or root.
- There seemed to be a little more room to create another challenging hole or two. Holes #2 - 4 are all wide open and straight, all around 200 feet. More experienced players will feel like you should get deuces on all three holes, or you've thrown away strokes.
- The course, obviously, is closed during school hours. So you can only play on nights, weekends or summer.
Other Thoughts:
This is a great course for the middle school students. Any school course, especially one like this that is designed well, can only be a positive for the growth of the game.
- This is a simple course, but it's a job very well done.
- It's only a couple minutes from Trophy Lakes, as well as the Johns Island course, so it's a good warm-up course, or a good place to play several nine-holers.
- There was no true signature hole, nor was there a true bad hole. It's a good sampling of different hole layouts for the students at the school.
- I'm giving this course a 1.5 rating, but that's not an indictment of anything wrong here. In fact, this is about as good of a 1.5 rated course as you're going to see. My ratings are heavily based on a course's overall quality, and difficulty/challenge is the biggest factor in that rating. The course more than meets its goal of being a good, beginner course aimed at the middle school students.