Pros:
-- Nice new baskets (Innova DiscCatchers). Most holes have two baskets in the ground. This is a HUGE plus.
-- Excellent concrete tee pads, two per hole.
-- Good (not quite excellent) land: Woods, water and small elevation.
-- Arrows on the basket posts point toward the next tee.
-- Fairways on the woods hole (roughly half of the course), are totally cleared and a uniform 10 feet wide. A lot of work went into making this happen.
-- Restroom and water available at parking lot (near No. 1 tee).
-- Two water carries from the blue tees and several other holes where the water is absolutely in play.
-- No. 18 is probably the best hole (267/361 feet). It's a gentle right turn through the woods most of the way to the basket, which sits at the edge of the woods with a pond 30 feet behind it. The ground slopes down toward the water starting about 15-20 feet behind the basket.
Cons:
-- No map on site, and not much is marked. Tee pads are obvious, but there are no tee signs. The number is often painted on the tee pad, and the posts are red and blue to distinguish the two layouts.
-- Long walks. What used to be a LONG walk from the parking lot to No. 1 was eliminated by adding three holes (1 now tees south from the south end of the parking lot). However, 1-2 (under the road), 3-4, 13-14 and 19-20 are long walks. When you finish 21, you are probably 500 feet from the parking lot.
-- The aforementioned arrows pointing to the next tee should not be the sole navigation aid for a hole. The cleared paths/fairways in the woods help, but not nearly enough. Add in nothing being marked, and no hole layout and you could end up walking more looking for hole and baskets than you walk from tee to basket as you play. In the four years the course has been open, some worn paths are starting to appear that give you some guidance, but the holes in the woods often have divergent paths, and you're left guessing which path to take.
-- The map on dgcoursereview says Gold layout (not sure what that means) and has no distances. Distances listed here are wildly inaccurate in some cases. Holes mostly appear to be shorter than listed. As an example, 8 red is listed at 204 feet but is less than 100 feet and 16 is listed at 161 feet but is less than 130 feet. Those distances are for the shorter baskets.
-- Those two extremely short holes from the red tees are examples of what sometimes feels like the red holes being afterthoughts. No. 8 red is basically 30-35 percent of the length of the No. 8 blue tee and takes the water completely out of play. What you are left with from the red tee is a 90-foot straight throw with NO obstacles.
-- No benches at the tees.
Other Thoughts:
-- The map on this site shows County Road 279 (Melissa Road at U.S. 75) continuing west and crossing the East Fork of the Trinity River and coming right into the park. Don't believe it. The road stops at the water and picks back up on the other side. However, a bridge/road is under construction to make that connection. In fact, you walk under that roadway getting from 9 to 10.
-- For a while there were two B.B. Owen disc golf course in North Texas. The one in Dallas (about 30 miles south of this course) has been around since 1995, so why did someone use the same name for this course? Apparently I wasn't the only one to comment on this; hence the name change to The Woods @ Trinity.
-- The land here is good, and most of the holes are enjoyable. The first time I played it, the navigation was so bad that it felt more like work than fun to play a round here. While there is work to do, each tee having a red or blue post and the numbers painted on the tee pads helps. The added holes cut down on the worst of the long walks and give you more golf. Taking all of that into account, I raised my rating from 2.0 to 3.0. The addition of a second basket on most holes raises my rating to 3.5. With decent tee signs (I hear they are in the works) and a map on site, this could easily be a 4.0 course.