John's Island Park's DGC is a simple, straightforward affair. The light tree cover is used in a variety of ways, providing a low ceiling on 1 and tight windows on 3 and 6. Water comes into play on a few holes, bordering both fairways and pins, factoring in enough to matter but not so much as to create unreasonable risk. 1's hillside pin adds a bit of rollaway potential and further spices up the hole a bit. 3 forces landing zone consideration with its considerable bottleneck. All of these design elements are simple, but executed well enough to create shot variety and engagement relative to a casual round.

The park seems extremely well-tended, navigation is intuitive, and the concrete tees are great.

There's a tendency to automatically call any short rec course a good beginner course, but John's Island DGC really is that. The short hole lengths are kind to beginners, the rough is virtually nonexistent, and there's enough variety of lines and obstacles to expose newbies to ideas of both shot-shaping and risk/reward. I've taken my uncle, who is not a disc golfer, to play a few courses with me, and this is the first course he truly enjoyed: the lines and obstacles were interesting to him, and the distances were well within his comfort zone. I think this is a great course for beginners.

John's Island DGC is super short and super basic. Holes like 2 are as throwaway as can be, with simply a tee at one end of a small field and a basket at the other. Many other holes have basic line shapes or a few trees in the fairway, but are too short and too open to provide any real threat. The challenge factor here is quite low for any regular player.

Hole 3 plays directly alongside a tennis court and tempts the serious player to throw over it, creating some potential for conflict with other park goers. Ruling out that route, it's an ill-designed tunnel shot.

John's Island DGC was quite fun for what it is. Short courses like this frustrate when they're unkempt, hard to navigate, have unrealistic hole design, or factors that swallow discs. John's Island avoids all of these pitfalls while having enough design consideration to expose the beginner to various aspects of the game, so it's a win in my book. My low rating is simply a product of where it stands in my experience relative the the wide spectrum of courses I've played: against the field, it just doesn't stack up, but that doesn't mean it's not worth a visit for a quick, low-key round!