Pros:
- Oakwood Community Park in Delafield provides a solidly designed park-style course on a small but awesome piece of land for disc golf. Kudos to Mike Harrington for crafting an excellent nine-hole course that uses open field, small clusters of trees, and a fair-sized hill. The course begins innocently enough with a flat and open hole, works its way up the hill, and then spends the rest of the time moving from open areas to semi-wooded areas, while circling around the hill.
- Amenities are pretty darn good. The tee areas, while not concrete, are still in good condition and should hold up reasonably well. Two sets of tees provide both an easy beginner layout and a slightly more difficult intermediate course. The beginner layout is pure deuce-or-die, but the longer tees provide a bit more challenge. Experienced discers should still score well from the longs, but there's enough opportunity for the course to beat you up a bit in places. The amenities are rounded out with trashcans, port-a-john, and detailed hand-drawn signs (I assume these are temporary...regardless, they are sufficient for navigation as is).
- The variety of holes and shots here is where the course design really shines. Mike H. has certainly seen enough courses to have a keen eye for design. Couple that with his landscaping expertise, and this course comes out looking nice and playing nice. Open bombers, short uphills, slight downhills to green tucked into trees (replete with manicured green areas on #3 and #5), short downhill shots through trees (#'s 6 and 7), and long downhill bombers (#9) help keep this course from being one dimensional. #7 offers two routes through the trees. Throughout, the flow is intuitive and straight-forward.
- The course and surrounding area is idyllic rural Wisco farmland. Not necessarily the greatest views in the world, but quaint and homey. The red barn and chickens that are in view from #4's fairway and basket add to the charm.
Cons:
- None. Really. This is as impressive of a public 9-hole course as I've seen. The property, while certainly good (or even above average) for a park-style 9-hole disc golf course, isn't quite grand enough to really elevate this course to top-notch ratings. However, that does not discount the fact that a lot of superlative design and implementation aspects are at work here.
- I guess the lack of concrete tees could be another con, but that's really stretching it. The crushed gravel was installed correctly and should prove sufficient for most.
Other Thoughts:
- I really had a blast playing this course. #'s 2, 3, 6, 7, and 9 all had me wanting to loop around again and again to play. I played both layouts and enjoyed both sets of tees immensely. Ace runs and deuces from short, while the longs added a bit of challenge for my level of player (experienced, but not necessarily good).
- Hit this course up if you're in the area. It might not quite be a world-beater, but if I were a Professor of Disc Golf, I'd have my students studying up on Oakwood Community as a template of safe, sustainable, well-executed design and course installation. As such, this is the first 9-hole course I've rated at 3-disc (out of a 4-disc scale for courses less than 18 holes).